Stanley Kubrick did 127 takes for the baseball bat scene in the Shining, which is suöposedly still a record.
I am trying to get a picture of what this means, logistically. Is this a huge deal for anybody else besides the actors? How about the rest of the crew?
It doesn’t seem like 127 takes would necessarily be hard to match, especially if you can allow yourself to shoot an indie film with a DV camera. But I suppose the record is for high-budget studio movies?
I’ve only worked one film set and it wasn’t a big budget thing, so I can’t say how applicable this is to major productions.
Generally, setting up the lighting and sound and everything takes the grand majority of time spent filming. You’ll spend 15m to an hour setting everything up, just to have the actors come out and do a minute or two of work, comprising a couple of shots. Between each shot, you need to reset everything, but that generally doesn’t take as long (unless the actor’s scene was to make a mess).
Since everything in the “bat scene” is static - no messes, no food being eaten, or anything - it should be a quick reset. But, the crew will still need to be there. And I’d still expect at least 10 minutes per take + reset. So 127 takes is well…not a small amount of time. One also presumes that, through this, there were several cases of Shelley Duvall getting frustrated and Kubrick berating her, which everyone would have had to stand there and watch.
Usually, filming a movie takes a couple of weeks (as I understand it). If you spend a couple of days just doing one scene then the whole job becomes a lot longer than everyone was expecting. For a minority, who would have a hard time getting a new gig after this one, that might have been a good thing. But I suspect that for most of the people working the set, it would have been pretty grueling.
Working on a Jackie Chan set, on the other hand, I have to imagine that you’d pretty quickly come to accept that repetition is the name of the game and you’d just get into the groove.
That’s for a scene, not for a shot.
Well if someone can figure out how many shots there are in the scene, we can do the division and figure out the average. I suspect it’s a contender.
Yep.
As for the baseball bat thing from The Shining, that’s a scene too, right, and not a specific shot? Nicholson following Duvall up the stairs, “you’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over,” and all that?
IIRC the camera follows 'em both up the stairs (dolly? SteadyCam?) as well, so not a static shot.
In Final Cut, the author described having to watch Michael Cimino’s fifty-odd takes of Kris Kristofferson brandishing a whip for Heaven’s Gate. He noted that they all tended to blur together, and whatever subtle nuances there may have been between takes were simply lost.
I would think any more than ten takes and everyone starts to get antsy. Of the sets I’ve been on, five to eight takes is about average, for each angle, so the scene may be re-performed thirty or forty times by the end of the day. As long as it feels like its progressing. Being trapped on a set for days re-performing the same few lines over and over for a hundred takes or more would be torture.
As per TVTropes: “During the scene where Kirk tricks Khan by using the Prefix Code to lower Reliant’s shields, William Shatner kept delivering the line “Here it comes” in a sing-songy, mocking manner. Meyer felt that Kirk would NOT do this, as that’s pretty blatantly telegraphing your intentions to your enemy. In the end, Meyer hit on a plan — he had Shatner do several takes of the line. On the last take, Shatner, finally sick of the multiple attempts, thought to just phone it in and delivered a blank, emotionless reading of the line, hoping that Meyer would get the hint and move on. Meyer indeed moved on after that take – the exact reading he wanted for the line, and the reading that was included in the finished cut. In fact, Meyer often used this tactic when dealing with Shatner.”
In some circumstances, that was what Kubrick was doing - wearing the actor out.
Sometimes everyone is aware of what they’re going for and it just takes a lot of takes to get there.
In Spider-Man there was the scene in the cafeteria where Mary Jane slips and spills her tray and Peter grabs the tray and catches all the food on it. That was not faked. Tobey Maguire actually maneuvered the tray around to catch all the food. The only trick involved was there was adhesive on the tray so the food wouldn’t bounce off again. The single shot took 156 takes.
In the silent days, Charlie Chaplin was the king of multiple takes; it was fairly routine for Chaplin to do upwards of a hundred takes of a shot to get the precise timing he was looking for. Other times, he’d reshoot the same scene because he wasn’t sure what to shoot next. Crew members back in the day used to say that while Chaplin didn’t pay well, you at least knew you’d be working a long time.
PBS had a special on Chaplin’s directing a few years ago. He did lots and lots of takes, but was very improvisational and would often change things along the way (before talkies, there was no dialogue to rewrite; it was all about movement and expression). He would also sometimes get an idea and have an entirely new set built within hours. Very seat-of-your-pants moviemaking.
Kubrick supposedly reduced Scatman Crothers to tears with his endless retakes on the set of The Shining. Keir Dullea said Kubrick didn’t do a lot of re-takes while shooting 2001, though: I met Keir Dullea tonight! - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Chaplin did 342 takes of the first encounter with the blind flower girl in City Lights. It’s just a few shots.
From the :58 second mark to the 1:55 mark of this clip is just one shot (not included a title card insertion of dialog).
But it’s not quite an apples-to-apples - Chaplin sort of ‘wrote’ on film and worked out the events of a scene as he shot.
edit - ninja’d because I went and got links. shakes fist
At the other end of the continuum, there’s Jackie Chan’s famous fall onto a bed of (real, actual burning) hot coals in Drunken Master II. Having done this lunatic stunt once, he looked at the playback, decided the “rhythm was wrong” … and did it again, severely burning himself in the process.
It was probably a Steadicam, as Kubrick’s *The Shining *famously was one of the first major films to make heavy use of it (the scenes of Danny riding his tricycle thru the hotel and the chase thru the snow at the end).
By coincidence, there was a photo of the crew and actors making this shot in my twitter feed today (source: @Historical Pics) and the camera appears to be on a dolly.
I found it here also.