'Room 237' Director Talks About Film, Kubrick's 'Shining'

What's inside Room 237?

For anyone who has ever been haunted by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, it's a question that lingers well after movie screens fade to black on Jack Torrance's frozen corpse.

Some--like the subjects of Highland Park filmmaker Rodney Ascher's debut documentary, Room 237--unraveling the mysteries contained within The Overlook has developed into a life long obsession.

Room 237 was produced through Ascher's production company, Highland Park Classics.

The film showed at the Sundance International Film Festival in January, earning the top spot in documentaries among critics.

Positive reviews from outlets like Variety, The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter.

Ascher's subjects construct meaning from The Shining with rigor matched perhaps only by Kubrick himself, resulting in theories that range from the compelling (one subject suggests the film is an allegory for the Holocaust) to the absurd (another claims The Shining is Kubrick's veiled confession for staging the Moon Landing).

Highland Park-Mount Washington Patch sat down with Ascher to talk about his debut documentary.

Highland Park-Mount Washington Patch: How did you become interested in the Shining and, specifically, the world of Shining theorists?

Rodney Ascher: I’ve always been interested in The Shining ever since I saw it as a little kid, or tried to see it and had to run out because I was so frightened by the music and its sort of creeping sense of inevitability. In my teenage years I was able to revisit it and laugh it off before it would get back under my skin after repeated viewings.

But we got into shining theorists because maybe two years ago, a friend of mine [Tim Kirk] sent me an article that was circulating on the Internet about some of its hidden meanings. So we started looking around and were kind of amazed at how much stuff there was.

Interestingly enough, a lot of it is very different, so we thought that in the course of investigating it, talking to different people and different ideas of what the movie was trying to say, it would be interesting to see whether different people’s ideas were in contrast with each other or supported one another.

The film has received a lot of great press, how has it been to see a project that you put so much time into succeed critically? Did you expect this movie to capture imaginations like it has?

RA: It’s exciting and a little weird because I had always imagined that it was going to be a real niche kind of project for fanatics, so I’m happy to see that it might be breaking a little wilder than that. After our premier at Sundance, it was really funny, because there’s a classic scene from All About Eve, after the debut of a Broadway play would be the next morning when the cast and crew would read the newspaper to see the reviews, but these days that time has really collapsed.

It was a half hour after the first show when I went online and looked at Twitter and had the instant feedback. It was very scaring opening up a web page, looking and seeing, "Well what did they think?" I hoped it would, again, I thought it was going to be popular among a smaller group of fanatics. It’s hard to exaggerate how gratifying it is to see it getting good reviews in both film comment and bloody-disgusting.com. There’s also the weirdness that there’s a lot of good reviews, but I still look around, and everything else around me is exactly the same. So a lot of that stuff is very virtual.

How long did it take you to complete the project?

RA: We were researching for six or eight months before I did the first interview, which was January of last year. After we did that interview, we had our debut the following January. So there was a year of actual production, with maybe eight months beforehand where me and Tim were researching and figuring out what our approach was going to be.

Room 237 has been at a hit on the festival circuit, how will the movie going audience that can't make it to festivals seen the film?

RA: Nothing has been announced yet, but we are looking at some kind of real distribution during the second half of the year. It might play theatrically in a couple of theaters and a DVD or different forms, so it will get out there.

Can you tell us a little bit about Highland Park Classics, your locally based production company?

RA: That’s the production company name that I’ve used since we moved to Highland Park in April 2007. So for the half dozen short films, web comedies or music videos that I’ve shot out here, I would use the Highland Park Classics banner. The studio is my garage where I have a little green screen and I edit on my computer at home.

What's next for Highland Park Classics?

RA: I'm doing a short about a music video I shot 20 some years ago. It's a crazy story where a friend of mine who had a noise band, lured this exploitation filmmaker out of retirement to shoot his video, and it was never finished. It sat in storage for 20 some years and we're just taking a look it at now. It takes place in Miami, but I think it might get the Highland Park Classics logo on it.