Stanley Kubrick showed that perfectionism pays off

By Meg Honigmann

To call Stanley Kubrick a perfectionist is putting it mildly. In “The Shining” (1980), Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, spends his days supposedly typing his novel in the isolated Overlook Hotel but actually descending into madness. Kubrick recorded the sound of a typist hammering out the words “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, because he thought the sound each key made on a typewriter was slightly different and he wanted complete accuracy. To make sure that the line was as effective in foreign versions, Kubrick painstakingly translated it into idiomatic German, French, Spanish and Italian and re-shot the scene, placing the translations in the typewriter for Jack’s wife Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall) to find. The Spanish phrase “No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano” (No matter how early you get up, you can’t make the sun rise any sooner) captures the tone of crepuscular horror perfectly.