Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the subject of Room 237, a documentary that seeks to present a number of theories surrounding the film and its maker. Laid out like a visual essay Room 237 uses audio recordings of theorists and mixes them with footage from The Shining and a number of other films to explore the idea that the film has a number of hidden, or not so hidden meanings.

These theories range from explorations of the geography of the Overlook Hotel right down the rabbit hole and into discussions of numerology and the theory that The Shining was a confession from Kubrick about his involvement in faking the moon landing.

I spoke to producer Tim Kirk and director Rodney Ascher about these theories and some of the difficult questions that Room 237 raised.

Why The Shining? Obviously Kubrick had an obsessive attention to detail, is that the main thing?

Rodney Ascher
There’s a couple of things. It started with The Shining, it started when Tim sent me an online analysis that was super deep about The Shining. Mind blowing ideas about Zodiac and government conspiracies and Kubrick’s personal life. That’s what got us up and running but for a thousand reasons The Shining was the one that made sense. Kubrick is a more deliberate filmmaker than any other so there’s less reason to think there’s arbitrary decisions. I think the reason The Shining may have generated more of this kind of analysis than many other films, besides the fact that all those meanings are in there, is that it’s the intersection of art and entertainment. It’s clearly an ambitious film where a lot of interesting things are going on but it’s also a movie that people are very happy to watch on Friday night. They’ll watch it again and again because they love it. Some other films that are more plainly symbolic might not be as entertaining to watch.

Tim Kirk
I also think that because Kubrick was such a perfectionist and such a deliberate filmmaker then anything you see in it, like a continuity error or something that stands out to you, you can ascribe meaning to it because if it’s there, he put it there and it’s for a reason.

Do you wholly believe that all of them are there for a conscious reason, a deliberate choice?

Rodney Ascher
First I’d like to retain a bit of ambiguity on our own part. If ambiguity is in The Shining and Kubrick’s refusal to flat-out explain all the themes and all the things he was trying to do have helped create an opportunity for the audience to interact with it. If we explained explicitly everything that we were trying to do that might restrict people taking it as they will.

Tim Kirk
We made this without being judgemental

Rodney Ascher
Oh yeah, we were never judgemental.

But there is an element, of course, where you make a decision. Not necessarily a judgemental one but you make a judgement call when, for instance, you decide whether or not to include something, in the same way that he did. So I’m curious where you drew those lines. Presumably there are theories that you didn’t include and there are those that you chose for a particular reason?

Rodney Ascher
The theories that we picked were different enough from each other. We wanted people who were different from each other, who would bring different experiences and different tools for understanding the film to it. We wanted people who had written enough that it was juicy. We didn’t want to have a hundred voices that were each speaking for a minute or two. We wanted to hear voices that were more in-depth. There were a couple of things that we found online that we didn’t quite understand [chuckles] or people that we couldn’t locate.

Tim Kirk
There was a frustrating moment in the process where I had a spreadsheet with every theory that we’d found and tried to put it into columns and it was impossible. But there are certain things that do emerge from all that. For example numerology, a lot of people have looked at the numbers that are represented. Geoffrey Cocks has this amazing take on it, about the holocaust, and he’s writing this book A Wolf at the Door.

Rodney Ascher
But he’s also into numerology and was able to bring numerology into his greater theory. As opposed to someone who was only about the numbers.

There’s an element in the film of annotation, there are times when you stop and freeze frame or slow something down. But then there are times when you don’t. The clouds for instance. [One of the speakers suggests that you can see Stanley Kubrick’s face in the clouds at one point in The Shining]

Rodney Ascher
There is slow-motion.

But there’s no highlighting what the person is seeing, which seems like something you particularly chose not to do.

Rodney Ascher
That’s a really interesting moment because when I was talking with Jay about it he was describing that moment and he even admits, ‘you might need me to do Photoshop’ and he’ll do that eventually for one of his DVDs that he’s going to make, but hadn’t done it yet. So in a way you’re experiencing it the way I experienced it. I played it really slow so we’re all searching for it.

Can you see them? It sticks in my mind because I couldn’t.

Rodney Ascher
I’ve got the most disappointing answer which is, I think so. And I think it’s an interesting thing for him to describe because people have seen things in clouds and that could be a metaphor for some of the things we’re doing. We’re trying to find images in clouds, or tea leaves or sheep intestines but the contrast is those are truly random objects and it’s a question of whether what we’re looking at in The Shining is the deliberate result of human hands.

There is an overlap; there’s the deliberate, the subconscious and then that which isn’t there. The clouds I feel are more towards the far right [something which just isn’t there] of that scale. Do you feel the same about the theories?

Tim Kirk
I think that’s really helpful and eloquently put. I think each viewer has a different experience with Room 237 but I think as you are watching you are moving back and forth of the scale from believable to questionable to unconscious to…

Rodney Ascher
But I think even the question of believable becomes a semantic question. Are you defining believable by something you believe was deliberately put in the film by Stanley Kubrick to express a particular idea, which is a very demanding level.

The film could be seen by some perhaps to be about film criticism. At one point it is perhaps about film criticism, at one point it’s conspiracy theories and other times maybe it’s something else. To what degree do you think it is about film criticism?

Rodney Ascher
I don’t know that in our eight months of preparing it and batting ideas around that we specifically mentioned film criticism. We did talk about other endeavours where different people were making sense of things.

Tim Kirk
Like biblical interpretations.

Like the Bible Code?

Rodney Ascher
Or even simpler, like the Kabbalah. But the Bible Code is a good way of doing it. We talked a lot about politically in the news every fact can be debated, especially gearing up to an American presidential election. After every debate people say, ‘was this true, was that true?’.

Tim Kirk
I don’t think we set out to make it about film criticism. I can see where you’re coming from. We tried to just present without judgement. If the criticism is that we’re elevating other people to the level of film criticism, I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.

Rodney Ascher
We learn from The Shining that different people see the same film differently… You gotta be cool with that.

Tim Kirk
I think this is about some very passionate intelligent people. Mainly very eloquent and it’s their take on the film.

Rodney Ascher
And it was an experiment of what happens when you take five radically different points of view about the same thing and start bringing them together. But we didn’t know what would rise to the surface and dominate and clearly be the one that won the audience opinion award or what-have-you. Would they all collide and leave no-one standing or would they start to inform each other in different ways, would people pick different ones as their favourite. It was kind of an experiment…

I’m curious about the moment with he moon anagram [One speaker comments that the only word you can make from the letters in ‘Room No’ is moon, thereby supposedly supporting his theory about the moon landing. But you can, of course, make other words from those letters. One in particular instantly comes to mind when watching the film and it got a big laugh in the screening I attended.]. It’s an odd moment in the film because obviously there are other words that can be spelt. Was there ever the idea to not include it? Because it gets a reaction in screenings.

Tim Kirk
It’s important to Jay’s theory. It would be difficult to present Jay’s theory without that.

Rodney Ascher
And it’s specifically talking about the name of the room. Which is important. It kind of took us a while before any others came up. I don’t know that that tempted us to delete it. People have asked why we don’t challenge any of our interviewees more and it’s kind of allowing the audience to have the same experience that we did. We were very curious what everyone was saying about The Shining so went in and we talked to these people, we read their things and in some ways it’s an act of curation, to take these all and put them into a form where other people can experience them. But only over the course of an hour and forty minutes rather than a year and a half.

Room 237 is out in UK cinemas on the 26th of October.