Clint Eastwood Mocked Kubrick's Directing: "What the Hell"
Clint Eastwood and Stanley Kubrick were both legendary directors. That's about where the similarities end.
Kubrick was the obsessive perfectionist — famous for spending years on a script, demanding dozens of takes, and pushing cast and crew to the edge in pursuit of cinematic precision. Eastwood? The exact opposite. Fast, lean, no-nonsense. Two takes max, and the shoot's wrapped before lunch.
Their careers overlapped for decades, but they couldn't have approached filmmaking more differently. While Kubrick spent four years between A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, Eastwood cranked out High Plains Drifter, Breezy, The Eiger Sanction, and acted in three more films in the same span.
By the time The Shining hit theaters in 1980, Kubrick had made two films in nine years. Eastwood? He'd already directed The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, and Bronco Billy — all while maintaining a steady acting career.
And when Eastwood finally sat down to watch The Shining, he wasn't impressed.
"I never saw so many good actors, really good performers you've seen in many, many films, all these people who are old pros, come off so stiff," he told interviewer Paul Nelson. "I have to assume that they were just beaten down by the whole overall thing."
What bothered him most wasn't Jack Nicholson's performance — it was Kubrick's notorious obsession with retakes. Eastwood couldn't wrap his head around reports that some scenes had been shot 50+ times.
To him, that wasn't art — it was burnout. He even floated a theory that Kubrick dragged production out just to pad his paycheck.
"I think he was on overage there, on salary, and he was probably figuring, 'Well, what the hell, I'm making a fortune on this one,'" Eastwood said. "Probably, if you went back and assembled the film with all the first and second takes, the actors would be tremendous. They'd probably all have a lot more energy."
It was pure Eastwood logic: get in, get the shot, get out. Watching Kubrick's method was like watching someone try to paint a barn with a toothbrush — admirable in theory, exhausting in practice.
In the end, The Shining became a horror classic. But Eastwood never changed his mind. To him, the scariest part was how long it took to shoot.