For decades, the celebrated male film directors who “provoke” and abuse actors, supposedly in service of their art, have been given the benefit of the doubt over the women who suffer on their film sets.
Shelley Duvall won Best Actress at Cannes in 1977 for her part in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but her performance as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, three years later, was criticized so harshly that it would ultimately overshadow everything else she accomplished in her career — even as the film has been used to bolster the claim that Kubrick is one of cinema’s greatest artists. Duvall, playing opposite Jack Nicholson as a woman tormented by her husband’s mounting, murderous rage, was nominated for worst performance at that year’s Razzies; Stephen King, who wrote the original novel, once said, “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”
But as she explained in her own words, Duvall’s acting wasn’t a mistake, but rather a performance precisely engineered by Kubrick, who intentionally created a horrific environment for her:
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable. … I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. … After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.”
Nicholson has corroborated this description, calling Duvall’s task on set “the toughest job [of] any actor that I’ve seen.” There is even visual proof of that torment in the documentary Making “The Shining,” which was directed by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian and shows the director asking others on set not to show Duvall sympathy. Yet, despite this clear evidence of verbal and emotional abuse, Stanley Kubrick’s reputation as an “auteur” has remained mostly untouched.
In fact, the Duvall incident — and the way in which Kubrick controlled his set — has been wrapped into the mythic aura surrounding him and his film, casually inserted into lists like “25 Things You Might Not Know About The Shining,” alongside trivia like its record-breaking number of takes. Director Saul Metzstein once said of Kubrick that “his films are amazing, and there’s something in them which you couldn’t get unless you were being unbelievably particular and methodical. You need some sort of obsessiveness to make that stuff.” Not only is Kubrick considered one of the most influential directors of all time, but The Shining, specifically, was named the 46th best-directed film ever by the Directors Guild of America.
The implication of all this acclaim is that there was a “method” to Kubrick tormenting Duvall, and that even if it hurt her, the ends justified the means. From von Trier, who once said that watching Nicole Kidman wear a dog collar with a bell on it while shooting Dogville gave him “personal pleasure,” to Hitchcock, who sexually harassed Tippi Hedren while making a film about sexual violence, a man directing can rationalize almost any behavior toward women if what emerges as a final product is something beautiful in the eyes of other men.
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