Why Shelley Duvall Almost Quit The Shining

"From May until October, I was really in and out of ill health," Shelley Duvall reveals to Vivian Kubrick in Making The Shining. As she recounts the taxing experience of being uprooted from home for so long (The Shining was shot entirely in England), the documentary cuts to on-set footage of Duvall lying on the floor while production assistants rush to bring her blankets and water. Reflecting on this scene in 2011, Duvall remembered it as "a really bad anxiety attack" brought on by the long days with rare breaks. "We were shooting long days, sometimes 15-16 hours," she said, "and it really does take a lot out of you."

As those long days turned into long weeks and long months, it's easy to see how Duvall and the rest of The Shining's cast and crew may have felt like their stay at the Overlook would never end. To make matters worse, the script was constantly shapeshifting as they shot it, as another scene in the documentary reveals. During a visit to the set, Stanley Kubrick's mother is astonished by Jack Nicholson's revelation that he and Duvall receive freshly rewritten pages each day, with a system of color coding to keep the myriad versions straight. "Aren't you exaggerating a little bit?" she asks, to which Nicholson and Kubrick replay in amused unison, "No!"