Rewrite and translate this title This Book Offers an Unprecedented Look Behind the Scenes of The Shining to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

“I felt like one of those crazy guys in the basement with all the photos up and the strings going between the pins,” says Lee Unkrich. “Like someone trying to solve a serial killer case that had been unsolved for decades.” Unkrich, an Oscar-winning director of films such as Toy Story 3 and Coco, has been obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s pioneering horror film The Shining since seeing it when he was 12. “I just wanted to know more about how it was made,” he says. “I wanted to see images from behind the scenes of the film and there was just nothing out there because Stanley kept such a tight grip over everything that went out into the world.”

However, after Kubrick died in 1999 and his family opened up his archive, more images were being made available. Unkrich’s lifelong pursuit to learn more about the film thus gathered some momentum. “When doing press for Toy Story 3 (2010) I finally got to visit the archive and I saw volumes and volumes of material,” he says. “Photos, documents, props – so much.” And so the idea for an in-depth book that explores, and reveals, the making of the film – like never before – came to light. “I began the epic quest to track down everybody who worked on the film,” Unkrich says. “ I didn’t care whether it was the director of photography or it was somebody who was cooking food for Jack Nicholson. I wanted to talk to everybody because everyone has a story.” 

Teaming up with the writer Jonathan W Rinzler, it would take them so long to put the book together that Rinzler sadly passed away before it was finally published. However, well over a decade in the making, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is finally being released as a hardcover two-volume book spanning 1,396 pages and featuring hundreds of photographs, rare production ephemera and extensive interviews with the cast and crew. It is remarkable in its detail, scope and depth and something that the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh describes as “a stunning achievement.” 

For Unkrich, it allowed him to finally see things he’d dreamed of since he was a child. “My obsession with the film started pretty simply with me learning that there had been an epilogue to the film that Stanley had edited out after the film was released,” he explains. “It was a hospital scene where Ullman, the hotel manager, goes to visit Wendy and Danny in the hospital. So in the archive, I was able to open a screenplay and flip to the back and finally see that hospital scene that I had thought about literally for decades.”

From then on, the discoveries just kept coming, from Kubrick’s drafts, notes, and correspondence to photographs that cast and crew had taken on set. There was even a discovery of three ringbinders that had been mislabelled but contained 35-millimetre frames featuring every single shot he did on the entire film. “Stanley had famously destroyed all of the negatives and all of the outtakes for all of his films,” explains Unkrich of this rare find. “He had his assistant Leon Vitali take them to the dump and incinerate them but they had forgotten about these notebooks.”

Another day, when looking through photographs with Vitali, who passed away in 2022, they noticed a man on set in the background which turned out to be Werner Herzog making a set visit. This then led to a story about Herzog being the person who convinced Kubrick that the sound of Danny’s tricycle going over the hardwood floors and carpet – a now iconic scene – sounded great because at that point Kubrick was worried that it wasn’t working.

Despite Kubrick being notoriously detailed, particular and obsessive in his working methods – he and the film’s co-writer Diane Johnson spent a year talking non-stop about what the script should be before they even put pen to paper – some revelations also show just how much was left to his imagination. “A lot of visual things in the film were never on the page in the screenplay,” says Unkrich. “Like the scene with the bloody elevators, that was never ever written down. Or a lot of times in the script, it would say things like ‘Danny has a horrific vision’ but he didn’t say what it was – that was just for Stanley to think about and figure out.” 

Although vast unearthings took place to put this book together, Unkrich relishes the fact that he hasn’t been able to figure out everything about the film and there’s still plenty open to interpretation. “It felt like a rare privilege to be able to try to understand more about how he ticked,” he says. “But you don’t really know what’s going on personally in anybody’s head. Part of my worry in doing this book is that a lot of the mystery of the film would go away but, thankfully, there were a lot of things I still don’t have answers to. I like that despite this exhaustive telling of the making of the film, there are some things that went to Stanley’s grave with him that he never shared with anybody.”

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining by Lee Unkrich is published by Taschen, and is out now. 

“I felt like one of those crazy guys in the basement with all the photos up and the strings going between the pins,” says Lee Unkrich. “Like someone trying to solve a serial killer case that had been unsolved for decades.” Unkrich, an Oscar-winning director of films such as Toy Story 3 and Coco, has been obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s pioneering horror film The Shining since seeing it when he was 12. “I just wanted to know more about how it was made,” he says. “I wanted to see images from behind the scenes of the film and there was just nothing out there because Stanley kept such a tight grip over everything that went out into the world.”

However, after Kubrick died in 1999 and his family opened up his archive, more images were being made available. Unkrich’s lifelong pursuit to learn more about the film thus gathered some momentum. “When doing press for Toy Story 3 (2010) I finally got to visit the archive and I saw volumes and volumes of material,” he says. “Photos, documents, props – so much.” And so the idea for an in-depth book that explores, and reveals, the making of the film – like never before – came to light. “I began the epic quest to track down everybody who worked on the film,” Unkrich says. “ I didn’t care whether it was the director of photography or it was somebody who was cooking food for Jack Nicholson. I wanted to talk to everybody because everyone has a story.” 

Teaming up with the writer Jonathan W Rinzler, it would take them so long to put the book together that Rinzler sadly passed away before it was finally published. However, well over a decade in the making, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is finally being released as a hardcover two-volume book spanning 1,396 pages and featuring hundreds of photographs, rare production ephemera and extensive interviews with the cast and crew. It is remarkable in its detail, scope and depth and something that the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh describes as “a stunning achievement.” 

For Unkrich, it allowed him to finally see things he’d dreamed of since he was a child. “My obsession with the film started pretty simply with me learning that there had been an epilogue to the film that Stanley had edited out after the film was released,” he explains. “It was a hospital scene where Ullman, the hotel manager, goes to visit Wendy and Danny in the hospital. So in the archive, I was able to open a screenplay and flip to the back and finally see that hospital scene that I had thought about literally for decades.”

From then on, the discoveries just kept coming, from Kubrick’s drafts, notes, and correspondence to photographs that cast and crew had taken on set. There was even a discovery of three ringbinders that had been mislabelled but contained 35-millimetre frames featuring every single shot he did on the entire film. “Stanley had famously destroyed all of the negatives and all of the outtakes for all of his films,” explains Unkrich of this rare find. “He had his assistant Leon Vitali take them to the dump and incinerate them but they had forgotten about these notebooks.”

Another day, when looking through photographs with Vitali, who passed away in 2022, they noticed a man on set in the background which turned out to be Werner Herzog making a set visit. This then led to a story about Herzog being the person who convinced Kubrick that the sound of Danny’s tricycle going over the hardwood floors and carpet – a now iconic scene – sounded great because at that point Kubrick was worried that it wasn’t working.

Despite Kubrick being notoriously detailed, particular and obsessive in his working methods – he and the film’s co-writer Diane Johnson spent a year talking non-stop about what the script should be before they even put pen to paper – some revelations also show just how much was left to his imagination. “A lot of visual things in the film were never on the page in the screenplay,” says Unkrich. “Like the scene with the bloody elevators, that was never ever written down. Or a lot of times in the script, it would say things like ‘Danny has a horrific vision’ but he didn’t say what it was – that was just for Stanley to think about and figure out.” 

Although vast unearthings took place to put this book together, Unkrich relishes the fact that he hasn’t been able to figure out everything about the film and there’s still plenty open to interpretation. “It felt like a rare privilege to be able to try to understand more about how he ticked,” he says. “But you don’t really know what’s going on personally in anybody’s head. Part of my worry in doing this book is that a lot of the mystery of the film would go away but, thankfully, there were a lot of things I still don’t have answers to. I like that despite this exhaustive telling of the making of the film, there are some things that went to Stanley’s grave with him that he never shared with anybody.”

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining by Lee Unkrich is published by Taschen, and is out now.