The climatic maze scene in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING was terrifying to shoot because of the fire

One of the things they do Stanley Kubrick’S The brilliant so great and haunting was the amazing camera work. The way the camera flowed smoothly through that gigantic hotel was incredible. It was all thanks to Garret Brownthe inventor of the Steadicam, hired by Kubrick to make the film.

Pixar director Lee Unkrich has spent the last 12 years putting together a 2,200-page book titled The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, which will offer the most detailed account ever of the making of Kubrick’s film. Unkrich has been obsessed with the movie since he was 12 and while promoting the book, he shared some interesting details and stories and one is from Brown.

Brown had previously worked with Sylvester Stallone ON Rockyespecially the iconic scene of Rocky climbing the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That was just the beginning of the Steadicam, but it’s by Kubrick The brilliant which allowed it to show its full potential as it impressively captured the corridors of the Overlook Hotel with liquid fluidity.

Brown explained what Kubrick was trying to do before they used the Steadicam by saying in an interview:

“Stanley had a Citroën 2CV stripped down – he’d taken the engine and bodywork and everything out, so all you had was a seat and a steering wheel and a little platform in the back for the camera because the suspension is so incredibly sloppy, he hoped that if you pushed him down the corridors, he would enable the camera, but the results were disastrous.

One of the stories that was shared was about filming the climactic maze scene at the end of the movie and how terrifying it was for Steadicam operator Garrett Brown to shoot because of all the fire hazards they were shooting! The whole set could have easily gone up in flames! Brown went on to explain:

“There was really no choice but the Steadicam to navigate those huge spaces. [But] sometimes it got absurd in the labyrinth. If a viewer knew what we were doing, he would be amazed. I was trudging through eight-inch-deep milk salt with Styrofoam over thousand-watt lights on completely dry pine needles. We were all terrified of fire the entire time, munching on my ever-decaying boots from the hundred-degree Fahrenheit salt. And it was petroleum smoke, now illegal, but then legal. And we breathed it for three months to create that fog. And then you look at the final shot, and gosh, it looks amazing.

It all sounds like an absolutely crazy experience! But, yeah, despite all the crazy fire hazards, and under threat of death, that scene sure turned out to be unbelievable!

Source: variety