Take 127

There is a scene in The Shining (1980) in which Wendy Torrance, played by Shelley Duvall, backs up the stairs of the Overlook Hotel swinging a baseball bat at her husband, who is advancing on her with menace and jokes. It is said to have been shot 127 times. Guinness World Records lists it as the most retakes for a scene with dialogue. The figure comes from production lore rather than a published log, but nobody who was there has suggested it was a handful.

Stanley Kubrick was famous for this. Actors on his films describe doing the same small action dozens of times, sometimes without being told what was wrong. His defenders say he was looking for the moment when the actor stopped performing and simply did the thing, worn down past self-consciousness into something truer. His critics say he was often working out what he wanted by watching actors fail to give it to him.

The cost on The Shining fell heavily on Duvall. The shoot ran for many months, the role required her to be in a state of terror day after day, and footage from the making-of documentary shot by Kubrick's daughter Vivian shows him being sharp and dismissive with her. For years the story was told simply: a cruel director broke an actress. The reassessments since have complicated it. Duvall herself gave mixed accounts in later interviews, describing the experience as painful and exhausting but also as one she learned a great deal from, and saying Kubrick could be warm. Both things can be true. A brilliant performance can come out of a process nobody should want to repeat.

Charlie Chaplin is the useful counterweight. City Lights (1931) took years to make, partly because Chaplin, who wrote, directed, produced and starred, worked out much of it on film. The difficult scene was the first meeting between the Tramp and the blind flower girl. Without dialogue, the audience has to understand that she believes this penniless man is rich. Chaplin shot and reshot it, trying different business, until he found the solution: she hears the door of an expensive car slam as he crosses the street towards her, and assumes he stepped out of it. The figure usually given is 342 takes. It should be held loosely, but the scale of the effort is not disputed.

What makes Chaplin's case different is that the repetition was a search for an idea. He was not grinding an actor down to get a feeling out of her; he was thinking with a camera, as a writer thinks with drafts. Virginia Cherrill, who played the girl, had a difficult time on the film, and Chaplin at one point dismissed her and then brought her back. But the takes were not mainly about her.

Alfred Hitchcock had a different reputation and a favourite joke about it. He never said actors were cattle, he would explain; what he said was that actors should be treated like cattle. He told versions of this for years. The joke was a pose, but the method behind it was real: Hitchcock planned his films so thoroughly in storyboards that the shooting, as he liked to say, was the dull part. He did not need many takes because he did not need to find the film on the floor.

At the far end from Kubrick stands Clint Eastwood, famous for printing the first or second take and moving on. His actors describe the effect: you arrive prepared, because there may be no second chance, and the scene has the slight roughness of something happening for the first time. Some find it liberating. Others would have liked one more go.

So which is right? Neither, as a rule. Many takes can wear a performance down until the actor stops performing, or wear it out until there is nothing left. Few takes can catch a scene fresh, or catch it under-rehearsed. The question is not how many takes a director shoots but what he is looking for, and whether he knows. Chaplin was looking for an idea. Hitchcock already had his. Kubrick was sometimes looking for something only he could see, and the actors paid for the search.