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The Story Behind Stanley Kubrick Letting Twister Director Jan De Bont Use A Clip From The Shining In His Tornado Movie: ‘The Studio Actually Didn’t Believe It’
By Sean O'Connell,
2024-07-13
Later this month, audiences will ride the stormy summer blockbuster season through the offering that is Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters , a reimagining/reinterpretation of the classic 1996 thriller, helmed by Jan de Bont. The new Twisters already is getting positive reactions , including a vote of confidence from the unofficial King of Blockbusters, Tom Cruise. Imagine the irony, then, if Cruise were to learn the full story behind his one-time Eyes Wide Shut collaborator Stanley Kubrick supporting Jan de Bont on the original Twister, allowing him to use a clip from The Shining during a pivotal scene in the original film?
Behind-the-scenes stories like this are the best. Jan de Bont was coming off of Speed , and looking for his next high-profile adventure. He found it in Twister , a movie about professional storm chasers who increasingly encounter more dangerous tornadoes over the course of the film. De Bont, from the very beginning, knew that he wanted to associate one of the bigger twisters – visually – with Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece, The Shining . And while appearing on CinemaBlend’s official ReelBlend podcast, De Bont told the cool story about how the movie was included in his film.
You can see a clip of The Shining during this scene from Twister , when a massive tornado rips apart a drive-in movie theater:
Whenever a clip from an existing movie appears in a new movie, you know that permission had to be granted. So I asked Jan de Bont what it took to get The Shining in his tornado movie, and he told ReelBlend:
I had that in mind almost at the very beginning of the production process. And I told the studio, ‘I want to see on that screen a part of The Shining where Nicholson with his axe breaks through the wall and comes right at (the screen). Because I basically created five different tornadoes. The first one was kind of a pretty boy. Beautiful, but not knowing what to do. The second one … became the double water tornado. Another one was the Big Bully. And the Big Bully, that was him (in that scene). And I wanted to see (Nicholson) as the big bully, as his face goes through.
But Jan de Bont, as expected, met resistance from the studio. For one thing, they assumed that Stanley Kubrick would balk at his footage being used in a tornado blockbuster. Still, de Bont wanted to give it a shot. He told ReelBlend:
I had spoken to Kubrick once before. By that time, he had seen Speed, and he loved it! And he said, ‘Absolutely, you can do that, no problem at all.’ And it was so great to really … because the studio actually didn't believe it. It was the same studio (Warner Bros.) that represented his movies, And they said, ‘No. You can't.’ I said, ‘Let me try it.’ And he said absolutely . So it was so great!
Just knowing that Stanley Kubrick, the legend behind so many cinematic classics , saw and loved Speed brings me such joy. But then, when you learn how important Kubrick was to Jan de Bont, the whole story collects a beautiful emotional bow. He finally tells ReelBlend:
From my childhood, when I was still living in Amsterdam, the very first movie on the big screen I ever saw was 2001. I went to London, on the first week of the opening of that movie. And I was totally blown away. Like that type of storytelling, that kind of visual storytelling, was so revealing, so new, so exciting. And since then, I've been an eternal fan of Kubrick.
And we are fans of Jan de Bont. You have to listen to his full conversation on the ReelBlend podcast.
I used that scene in a thread on a message board where we guessed a movie based on a screen shot of it. So I put a screen shot up of the drive in screen from the movie when the drive in screen covered the whole real screen andcthe twinsxwere in the hallway. Of course everyone guessed the shining and shit all over themselves when I told them they were wrong.
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