In Hollywood history, there are few stranger rumours than one which has swirled around Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick for decades following their seminal collaboration on 1980’s The Shining.
Kubrick was always a director who lent himself to mystery and mythologising, what with his penchant for being a demanding, meticulous filmmaker. Couple that with the fact he was rarely seen in public for decades at a time, and stories of the eccentric, reclusive genius behind movies like Dr Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Eyes Wide Shut became their own cottage industry.
Over the years, while it was generally accepted that Kubrick wasn’t like most directors, the man himself admitted to getting pretty peeved about some of the outlandish rumours that attached themselves to him. For instance, in 1987, he pushed back against the notion that he was reclusive, instead arguing that he invited friends and industry types to his palatial home in Hertfordshire all the time.
The Full Metal Jacket helmer also took issue with the absurd whispers that he always wore a football helmet in the car, limited his driver to 30 miles per hour, and hired a helicopter to spray his garden with pest-killer to get rid of mosquitoes. “I lead a relatively normal life, I think,” the bemused auteur insisted, “But this stuff has been written and rewritten so often it takes on a life of its own”.
Speaking of, have you heard the rumours that Nicholson was forced to eat nothing but cheese sandwiches for two weeks while shooting The Shining? If not, the story is truly as simple as it sounds. Kubrick was known for utilising some, shall we say, unique methods to draw emotional performances out of his stars, and to do this with Nicholson, he supposedly ordered catering to only feed the man cheese sandwiches because it was his least favourite food.
In Kubrick’s eyes, forcing Nicholson to eat something he despised every single day would make him so furious and despondent that it would play into his performance as a man losing his mind.
It sounds absurd, yes, but understand this: it’s long been common knowledge that Shelley Duvall suffered pretty badly on the set of The Shining thanks to Kubrick needing her character to be in a state of constant panic and fear at all times while insisting on shooting huge numbers of takes.
This led to extreme physical and emotional exhaustion, which Duvall corroborated in multiple interviews, once telling The Hollywood Reporter that she would listen to sad music before takes to get herself in the right headspace. But, she confessed, “After a while, your body rebels. It says, ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day’. And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry.”
While Duvall has confirmed that some of Kubrick’s emotional tactics were questionable, she has also insisted she didn’t hold it against him. Still, these truthful experiences on the set may have gotten mixed in with the weird stuff that played on his reputation, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. For example, it’s often reported that the scene which pushed Duvall to breaking point, in which Nicholson threatens her with a baseball bat, was shot a mind-boggling 127 times. It’s even in the Guinness Book of World Records. However, according to Lee Unkrich, who penned a making-of book about the film in 2023, this is a massive exaggeration.
“Kubrick sometimes did a lot of takes, sure,” Unkrich told IndieWire, “But that wasn’t the norm. I mean, I have all shot logs for the entire movie. So, I know how many takes were done on every shot”. Indeed, these logs reveal that no shot went more than 15 takes, aside from the long dolly shot at the beginning of the film that welcomes the Torrance family to the Overlook Hotel. Unkrich is adamant that the bat scene requiring 127 gruelling takes is “completely not true”, and he imagines it was misremembered by actors and crew members who couldn’t separate Kubrick’s rehearsals from his actual takes. “Kubrick would rehearse a lot,” he confirmed, “He would continue to shape the dialogue through the rehearsing”.
The most bizarre rumour associated with the film, though, is undoubtedly Kubrick’s force-feeding of cheese sandwiches to a man with a pathological hatred of the pairing of cheese and bread. The Chinatown star has never publicly commented on it, but the rumour has held strong for decades. Here’s the thing, though: it’s probably bunk.
“I’ve been researching this movie so long that I’ve seen these incorrect or exaggerated stories appear, and then I’ve watched them become more and more exaggerated over the years,” Unkrich explained with a sigh. To him, the worst offender is the cheese sandwich malarkey, which, while undoubtedly amusing, isn’t true in the least. In fact, he dubbed it “Ridiculous”. So, there you have it: was Jack Nicholson really terrorised by cheese sandwiches while making The Shining? Unfortunately, it’s pretty unlikely.
