It's no secret that Stephen King disliked the changes director Stanley Kubrick made for The Shining movie, but Kubrick once outlined his reasoning. While his reputation as a collaborator can be a bit spotty - some loved working with him, while others hated it with a passion - there's no doubt that Kubrick is one of the most acclaimed film directors in the history of the medium. A famously exacting filmmaker, Kubrick became well-known for requiring lots of takes, sometimes dozens, before he was satisfied with a scene.
Kubrick also loved to detail every inch of his frame, creating some of the most gorgeous imagery in movie history. While not in the league of something like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining is itself a very good looking movie, even with its sometimes bland color scheme. Kubrick also innovated the use of steadicam shots on the film, leading to many famous sequences in which characters are followed, such as when Danny Torrance rides his tricycle down the halls of the Overlook Hotel.
That barely scratches the surface of why most horror fans love Kubrick's The Shining, often considered one of the best the genre has ever had to offer. The Shining's most prominent critic has always been Stephen King himself, who thought it did a disservice to his novel. Here's why Kubrick says he made the changes he did, as told to Vicente Molina Foix during a 1980 interview conducted at Kubrick's home.
As much as Stephen King has always bashed Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, it turns out the director quite liked King's book. Kubrick was sent the novel for consideration by a Warner Bros. executive, and found it to be "compulsive reading," and "much more imaginative" than anything he'd read in the horror genre up to that point. It was the first King story Kubrick had been exposed to, outside of seeing the movie adaptation of Carrie. However, as much as Kubrick liked the book, he considered King's prose to be kind of sloppy, like the author hadn't taken much time to perfect his work.
While King has always taken issue with Kubrick's changes to his characters, the director felt that the script he co-wrote with Diane Johnson did in fact retain the essence of the Torrance family. Kubrick just considered their characterizations too "cluttered," and wanted to simplify them and make them more focused. He also thought his version of Wendy was a more believable character, but that aside, feels he did the "psychological dynamics of the story" as written by King justice.
Kubrick thought King's extensive delving into his character's backstories and past issues were unnecessary to conveying the main story, and believed more subtle moments involving Jack and Wendy in the film serve to get across the family's history and struggles without derailing the plot progression. Finally, Kubrick found King's ending to be a bit anti-climactic and fast, and made a point to heavily rework the conclusion of The Shining to where he felt it needed to be to end the film on a high note.
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