8 Movie Set Tantrums That Put People's Lives In Danger

3. Stanley Kubrick Tormented Shelley Duvall On Purpose Filming The Shining

Everyone knows that Kubrick was a perfectionist, but perhaps that's too mild a word for the way the eccentric director operated. Can filming Sydney Pollack stand from a chair and walk to a door with no dialogue for two days really be termed 'perfectionist' or is 'obsessive' a more appropriate word? This obsessiveness hit the cast and crew of The Shining hardest. They, like those involved in Coppola's Apocalypse Now shoot, were meant to film for weeks but ended up staying on the set for a whole year due to the director's insistence on ensuring every scene was exactly right. This meant that the actors had to perform take after take, and Shelley Duvall didn't respond well to Kubrick's treatment of her. Duvall's baseball bat standoff with Jack Nicholson reportedly took 127, holding the record for the most takes of a single scene with dialogue. By the end of filming Duvall had grown ill, her hair had started to fall out and she was increasingly skittish due to the hostile environment her director had created around her. Kubrick wanted his star to genuinely feel uncomfortable and isolated like her character, so he really subjected her to the torments that he knew would have the desired effect. Well... It came with a price, but it certainly worked.