Interview with Scriptwriter Diane Johnson from 1978
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Shining
countdown-to-zero — 9 years ago(November 04, 2016 01:32 AM)
Interesting interview with the film's Co-scriptwriter Diane Johnson, published in the New York Times in November, 1978, while the film was in production:
"Kubrick films 'The Shining' in secrecy in English studio"
HTTP://partners.nytimes.com/library/film/110678kubrick-shining.html -
countdown-to-zero — 9 years ago(November 07, 2016 05:28 AM)
Perhaps the most revealing paragraph from the article linked to above, the details of which were later confirmed both by others, including interviews with Kubrick, and, obviously, by the film itself, is the following one:
"Almost all the substantive decisions were made before we wrote the script," says Miss Johnson, who had first met Mr Kubrick in 1976, when he was thinking of optioning her edgily ominous and comic novel, 'The Shadow Knows'. "We talked for one month before we wrote anything at all. Stanley uses the Socratic method. 'Is the husband a nice man?' 'Does his wife love him?' 'What kind of clothes would she wear?' In an attempt to understand the essential seriousness of the genre, we discussed 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Jane Eyre'. How Poe ended his stories. We read Freud a lot. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud says specific things about why eyes are scary and why inanimate objects like puppets are scary in their animate shapes. We talked about the role of memory and wish in making you afraid, and we read Bruno Bettelheim's book about fairy tales, 'The Uses Of Enchantment.'
The film, in addition to its psychoanalytic underpinnings, as a symptom of the spectral, has numerous direct and indirect references and quotations from some of the principal Gothic fairy tales examined by Bettelheim, as of which are, in their original forms, extremely disturbing tales featuring murder and cannibalism. The film's repeated references to bears, wolves, pigs, food, cannibalism, old hags/crazy women, draw parallels with such tales as Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Three Little Pigs, and The Story Of The Three Bears. -
Cognoscente — 1 year ago(July 22, 2024 06:25 AM)
An assistant editor speaks:
https://popcultmaster.com/2017/12/29/the-definitive-house-of-horrors/