4. The Shining Stanley Kubrick Vs. Shelley Duvall & Scatman Crothers
It's widely known that Stanley Kubrick rode a fine line between genius and insanity. When it came to working with actors, Kubrick held nothing back in trying to get the performance he wanted out of them. This was never more evident than his treatment of Shelley Duvall on The Shining. Duvall, who played the tormented wife of an alcoholic writer, found that the torment didn't stop when the cameras weren't rolling. Kubrick constantly lost his temper with her, sometimes claiming she was a waste of time for everyone on set. He demanded so many takes from her, that Duvall claims she needed to increase her water intake just so she would have tears to shed. What made it worse was that Kubrick specifically instructed the crew to not show any sympathy for Duvall, essentially leaving her shaken and alone for the entire approximate 200-day shooting period. It's almost hard to call this a feud because as far as Kubrick was concerned, he was just doing his job. It didn't even bother him that the stress he was placing on her actually caused some of her hair to fall out. The Guinness Book of World Records claims that Kubrick required Duvall to do a record 127 takes of one particular shot, but this has been refuted by steadicam operator Garrett Brown. But "The Shining" does in fact hold the record for most takes for a single shot, and that was a scene featuring Scatman Crothers. That scene required 148 takes from the 70-year-old actor, who reportedly broke down and begged "What do you want, Mr. Kubrick?!"