There's a fascinating documentary on the Making of the Shining which you can see here.
There are a lot interesting things happening in the film which was made by Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian (when she was 17). First is the way that she inserts herself into the production of the film by coming into Jack's dressing room, and then in the way she lets her camera move in and out of the film itself with some very nice editing.
Then, there's the fascination of seeing the way Jack and Stanley and Shelley all interact with one another; sometimes professionally, while other times quite emotionally. Stanley's films are so famously cold, intellectual and remote, that it's interesting just to see him on the set, typing up the latest revisions, working with the crew, setting up his shots, and managing the actors (with whom he's often sharp tongued and uncompromising as he pushes and manipulates them into giving him just exactly the performance he wants).
After all these years of watching his films, I enjoyed just watching the man himself. Even his speaking voice wasn't quite what I expected.
Nicholson alludes to this at around the 23 minute mark, and in the documentary you can really see that Kubrick was a conceptual thinker (rather than an experimental one) knowing exactly what he wanted from the beginning and working to achieve that vision. You don't get the sense that he's figuring out the movie as he goes, or that there was a lot of improvisation (and you can see Nicholson and Duvall trying to come to terms with this in very different ways).
It also seems to me that he thought of all of his movies as dramas pure and simple. In Kubrick's hands, the supernatural and horror elements in a movie like The Shining are just the rhetorical tropes deployed in order to give the film its emotional impact. The film is really a comment on family relationships and responsibilities, and how when we feel isolated and remote from one another, our world's fall apart very quickly. Everything else is just a metaphor, or at least used metaphorically, and it's particularly interesting how Kubrick feels no need to explain the ghosts, the links between past and present, or the true nature of the hauntings. Very little, in fact, is explained and that's becasue it's not important.
The words, as he tells Duvall, aren't important if you have the right attitude. "You're worrying about the wrong things."
[Via Andrew Sullivan]
