8 Directors Who Did Crazy Things To Get Their Movies Made
1. Stanley Kubrick Pushed Shelley Duvall So Hard Her Hair Fell Out
Stanley Kubrick is considered one of the best film directors in the history of film, but he didn't get that reputation for nothing. Kubrick was also known for being insanely persistent and methodical, and no-where was this more apparent than while shooting The Shining
A prime example it's reported by actress Shelley Duvall (who played Wendy Torrance) that the famous "Here's Johnny!" scene took three days to film and used around sixty doors, with each door being replaced as Jack Nicholson smashed it open with an axe.
Though fairly extreme, that's not the crazy part. What's crazy is the inhumane lengths to which Kubrick was willing to push his actors, specifically Shelley Duvall. According to Vivian Kubruck Stanley Kubrick's daughter who worked with him on many of his films Stanley wanted to create an extremely hostile environment for Duvall on-set, in the hopes of making her feel hopeless like her character. In the film's 'making of' documentary, Kubrick is heard telling his daughter: Don't sympathize with Shelley." Aside from forcing her to shoot the same scenes over and over and over for hours at a time, Kubrick's treatment of Duvall was so extreme and so stressful that her hair began to fall out, and she became dangerously ill towards the end of shooting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35RwbQhMVUE