The idea of directors as perfectionists isn’t new by any standard, but in today’s terms it seems David Fincher is often cited as the perfectionist director most guilty of several takes. Even recently a Missouri newspaper quoted Fincher’s Gone Girl producer Ceán Chaffin saying Fincher was averaging something like 50 takes per scene.
Of course you also have the Guinness Book of World Records saying it took Stanley Kubrick 127 takes to get the scene where Shelley Duvall swings a bat at Jack Nicholson just right in The Shining, of course the factual reality of that is in question as it’s said a two-shot scene between Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers took 140 takes.
Then you have the likes of Akira Kurosawa‘s perfectionism and Jackie Chan‘s multiple takes due to a lot of stunt work and countless others. However, when it comes to a lot of takes nothing beats the 342 takes Charlie Chaplin needed to finish the scene in City Lights between he and Virginia Cherrill.
[amz asin=”B004OOL73W” size=”small”]I only just received the new Criterion Blu-ray edition of City Lights and haven’t had a chance to dig into the features, but they’ve released the following excerpt from the supplemental material in which Chaplin historian Hooman Mehran narrates over nearly four minutes of behind-the-scenes, 16mm footage shot by Ralph Barton, exploring the scene in question.
I’ve included the excerpt below along with the scene directly after that. Take a look at a perfectionist at work.
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