‘Doctor Sleep’ Used Kubrick’s Blueprints to Rebuild Overlook Hotel Exactly Like ‘The Shining’
Zack Sharf
The Overlook Hotel made Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) wildly obsessive in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” and it pretty much did the same thing to director Mike Flanagan when he stepped behind the camera for “Doctor Sleep.” The upcoming Warner. Bros horror film is based on Stephen King’s 2013 sequel novel to “The Shining,” following an adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) as he wrestles with his father’s dark legacy and the reemergence of his supernatural powers. Flanagan has already gone on record saying his “Doctor Sleep” film will be an adaptation of King’s novel that also takes into consideration Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation. The latter component led Flanagan on an obsessive mission to recreate the Overlook Hotel exactly as it appears in “The Shining.”
A recent set report from /Film reveals that Flanagan and his “Doctor Sleep” team rebuilt the Overlook Hotel for the 2019 movie “using the exact blueprints from Stanley Kubrick’s film, which were in storage at Warner Bros.” Flanagan also “spent days analyzing every frame of the movie to track down every book on every shelf and every framed photograph on every wall.” The final result is an Overlook Hotel in “Doctor Sleep” that is identical to Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel in “The Shining.”
Flanagan was not the only one to try and replicate Kubrick’s film for “Doctor Sleep.” McGregor tells /Film that in order to play the adult Danny Torrance he studied closely Jack Nicholson’s performance in “The Shining.” The actor did not concern himself with watching original Danny Torrance actor Danny Lloyd because he reasoned that Danny would grow out of his boyish mannerisms by the time he was an adult.
“I don’t know how much we resemble our five-year-old selves when we’re adults, but we are similar to our fathers in many ways,” McGregor said. “So it was more interesting for me to look at Jack in that perspective. I’m not trying to copy Jack Nicholson, no. I’m trying to sound like his son, that’s all. I’m trying to sound vocally like his son, but that’s it really.”
Flanagan previously said he would also honor Kubrick’s lack of jump scares in “Doctor Sleep.” “We used a lot of the lessons that Kubrick taught us about how to do a psychological thriller,” the director said, “in a way that is more about suffocating atmosphere and tension than it ever is about the kind of traditional scares as we understand them today.”
Warner Bros. is opening “Doctor Sleep” in theaters November 8.
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