Extreme Directors: Part 1

By: Keith Mitchell w/ChestPoundFilms

Film is a very collaborative process. You’re dealing with many creative minds all coming together to create a single piece of work, a finished project that reflects the ideas and creativity of everyone behind it. The director’s job is to guide those ideas, manage them, all in pursuit of the greater vision. It’s a tough role to play, and sometimes the amount of power can lead to some extreme behavior.

After all “with great power comes great responsibility.” So kicking off the New Year we at Chest Pound Films give you a multi-piece series of EXTREME DIRECTING, examining the crazy lengths directors have taken to finish their movies.

The Obsessions of Hitchcock

Hitchcock was notorious for his chilling tales, and twisted endings. A thriller genius, but he was also known for his obsessions, and often strived for more than the usual when it came to his female leads.

Sometimes this would lead to odd behaviors or requests that were really just ways to exert his authority on set, rather than for the sake of “perfect art”. One account, during the filming of The 39 Steps (1935) claims Hitchcock had stars, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed to each other for several hours on their first day meeting on set.

To be fair, they were doing rehearsals which involved handcuffs, but Hitchcock later pretended to lose the key, forcing them to spend the rest of the shoot attached to each other. Wasted time wasn’t tolerated either. Hitchcock was said to have smashed the bulb of a studio lamp because two actors found themselves in a laughing fit during a take.

But Tippi Hedren, the star of the film, The Birds (1963) had the worst of it. At the time, Hedren was a virgin to the glam and life of a Hollywood star. She had never acted before. Hitchcock discovered her as a model in a commercial. He approached her for the role of the film, after many declined offers from other well known names to find his blonde in distress.

Moments prior to the shooting of this famous attic scene, Hedren was informed the mechanical prop birds would not be used, despite what she was led to believe. In fact, LIVE birds were used, and repeatedly thrown at her during the scene.

In her words:

“But everybody had lied to me, and on the Monday morning, as we were going to start the scene, the assistant director came in and looked at the floor and the walls and the ceiling, then blurted out: “The mechanical birds don’t work, so we have to use real ones,” and then he ran out.

When I got to the set I found out there had never been any intention to use mechanical birds because a cage had been built around the door where I was supposed to come in, and there were boxes of ravens, gulls and pigeons that bird trainers wearing gauntlets up to their shoulders hurled at me, one after the other, for a week.

There were breaks, but Hitchcock didn’t stay around. He went off into his office and as the days went by it just got worse.”

Hedren also had real birds strapped to her with an elastic band. The stress and panic during the scene was her genuine reaction, and after being clawed and bruised from the birds, she collapsed into tears. She was taken off set and placed into a doctor’s care for a week. A week which Hitchcock complained about, since it was throwing things off schedule…

Hedren also claimed that Hitchcock had made several unwelcomed sexual advances on her. Eventually things got really obsessive. There were numerous love letters and even an employed graphologist to examine the handwriting of any returned letters. It was even said that Hitchcock had hired someone to keep an eye on Hedren.

Sadly, Hedren was bound to Hitchcock by contract, meaning other opportunities for work had to be passed through him. She found that after rejecting Hitchcock, her career began drying up. In her words, “He ruined my career but he didn’t ruin my life.”

Kubrick the Perfectionist

We’ve talked about The Shining several times in this blog by now, but never the talented man behind the lens, Stanley Kubrick.

For awhile, Kubrick had been itching to get his hands on a good horror story. He had been considered to direct The Exorcist, but ultimately declined because he couldn’t produce the film also. Kubrick wanted “to make the world’s scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience.”

So then along came The Shining, a tale of a man who falls into insanity after being cooped in with his family inside a haunted hotel all winter. Kubrick was fascinated with the blurring of psychological and supernatural events of the story. So when the decision was made for him to direct it, the beginning of the tale about an obsessive director began.

The film took Kubrick five years to complete, with one year of actual shooting. Author of the book, Stephen King, wrote a screenplay for the film but Kubrick didn’t bother to read it. Instead, he worked with Diane Johnson and they finished the screenplay eleven weeks later.

On set, Kubrick was known for his extreme directing, especially for Shelley Duvall who plays Wendy Torrance.

Kubrick intentionally made the cast hostile towards her, and made it his goal to keep Shelley in a very tension filled setting for a better performance. With the constant screaming and demands, Shelley became so stressed she fell ill and her hair began to literally fall out. The anxiety you see on her face during the baseball bat scene is real! This scene took Shelley 127 takes to film, breaking the record for the “most retakes of a single movie scene with spoken dialogue.”

Dan Lloyd a.k.a. Danny Torrance, had an entirely different experience on set however. He had no idea they were filming a horror film. All the shots and sequences had the scary bits edited out whenever he saw any footage. It wasn’t until several years later, when he watched the full film that he realized.

But perfectionism isn’t a bad thing. (I’m myself a victim of it.) It’s only natural for certain people to want things done a certain way or to be very meticulous about things. Besides, it wasn’t like Kubrick went as far as to have every page of the manuscript “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” typed manually right? …Or did he?

Happy New Year Everyone! Coming Soon Part 2!