Stanley Kubrick kept Jack Nicholson in character in a very unusual way while making ‘The Shining’

There are few topics less understood by outsiders than “method acting.” Indeed, there’s a recent (terrific) 500-plus-page book called The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act that essentially says “yeah, there’s no real set of rules here.”

As such, actors and directors have been chasing their vision of the perfect performance all over stages and film sets for years, using all sorts of zany tricks. (This led, of course, to Sir Laurence Olivier playfully asking Dustin Hoffman, “Dear boy, have you ever considered acting?)

Anyhow, not many directors had as big of a reputation for putting their actors through the wringer like the Bronx-born revolutionary Stanley Kubrick. Most stories involve him forcing the repetition of doing take after take after take in search of some “true” version of the scene, but apparently his string-pulling also extended to when his cast was nowhere near the camera, and even taking a lunch break.

While making The Shining, the much-beloved and heavily scrutinized adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, Kubrick seized upon something that he knew would drive his leading man, Jack Nicholson, a little crazy — exactly what he needed to portray a man slowly plunging into violent madness.

Something you may not know about Neptune, N.J.’s favorite son Jack Nicholson is that the man dislikes cheese sandwiches. We’re not sure how one can dislike such a thing — cheese and bread is a pretty simple and terrific mix, most would agree — but the man is not into it. As such, so the legend goes, Kubrick made sure he was only served cheese sandwiches for two weeks during the production, to ensure a sense of frustration. (For what it’s worth, Pixar director Lee Unkrich, who wrote a book about The Shining, calls this an exaggeration.)

But something so weird has to have at least a smidge of truth to it, right? (Note: do not ask us to argue before the Supreme Court using such a line of attack.) Either way, it’s fun to think of Nicholson seeing the “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” manuscript prop and him swapping in “cheese sandwiches” in his mind.

Restricting his diet is particularly galling, considering the well-stocked pantry of the Overlook Hotel gets such a bright close-up in the movie. Check out all that was denied the star of Five Easy Pieces and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Shining is now considered by most cinephiles to be one of the eeriest and effective horror movies ever made. But critics back in 1980 were much more muted in their response, and it was only a modest success at the box office. King disliked it so much he was compelled to create his own miniseries adaptation for ABC in 1997. It was also one of the few Kubrick films not to receive any Academy Award nominations. It didn’t even get a Golden Globe nomination! Woof!

Today, of course, it’s up there with his treasured masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey for design influences and, importantly, radical interpretation. Indeed, an entire cult exists around The Shining, with some arguing you need to watch it projected both forwards and backwards to truly understand it. (For more on all this, enter the madness of the documentary Room 237 at your own risk!)

If it took limiting the diet of the leading man to cheese sandwiches to make this all happen, it was certainly worth it.

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Below, the teaser trailer for The Shining, which is a longer version of an image that appears in the finished film, scored to Wendy Carlos’ diabolically frightening electronic music. If you saw this in a theater in 1980 when your parents took you to see something like Wholly Moses! or The Private Eyes or The Empire Strikes Back, you didn’t sleep for a week afterward. (Gen X knows that sitting through coming attractions was always a roll of the dice, and the “scary movie” trailers would frequently be waiting and ready to pounce, even at a kid-friendly film!)