Interview: Inside the helicopter that filmed The Shining's opening scene

To capture those visuals, Kubrick turned to MacGillivray Freeman Films, an independent American film studio known for their documentaries and work with IMAX film (back when IMAX was more associated with sweeping nature films as opposed to summer blockbusters). More specifically, it was helicopter cameraman Jeff Blyth who would get the footage.

Speaking to Polygon, Blyth takes us back to 1978 in his own words: Up into the helicopter and through the entire process of capturing the opening shots of The Shining, including how the footage was captured despite strict rules from Montana’s Glacier National Park, the close calls which involved the helicopter just a few feet off of an active roadway, and even the notorious helicopter shadow that’s plagued him ever since.

MacGillivray Freeman Films

In 1976, Greg MacGillivray's partner, Jim Freeman, died in a helicopter crash. After that, MacGillivray Freeman wasn't interested in doing anything for at least six months. Then along came a job and we all sort of felt like we'd like to get back into the business again, but who's going to do the helicopter work? So I became the helicopter cameraman for MacGillivray Freeman.

In 1978, we got a call out of the blue from Stanley Kubrick's office. He wanted to talk to us about doing some work on The Shining. He asked us to get ourselves up to Glacier National Park and he gave us the simplest possible instructions. “I've got a crew up there,” he said, “They've got the yellow Volkswagen, they've got the clothes for doubling Jack Nicholson. Meet them up there and just shoot some pretty aerial shots.” Those were the marching orders.

Preparing for The Shining

We were going to have to fly for a number of weeks so we made a deal with a local guy in California. He basically gave us the helicopter for a month with a guaranteed amount of flying per day.

One day, I had a very early meeting with the director of Glacier National Park and he gave us what he said were a couple of hard rules. He said, “Number one, you can never land in the park. You have to go out of the park.” That meant we had to get out of the park to go refuel or reload cameras.

The hotel we were staying at was in a little town called St. Mary, just outside the entrance to the park. We used their parking lot for our helicopter landing pad. St. Mary's Lodge is at the far eastern end of the park and the nearest town is Kalispell, at the other end of the park. That's where there was an airport and where we were getting jet fuel. My wife was on the crew and she was driving a van through the park, up over the mountains, all the way down the other side to Kalispell. She’d go to the airport, fill up 55 gallon drums with jet fuel, then drive all the way back through those winding roads and we would hand-pump the helicopter with jet fuel.

The second rule was we couldn't affect traffic. We typically would make arrangements with local police to shut down traffic, but we couldn't do that in the park. So, part of our process was, we always had to look ahead to see what was coming. Did we have clear roads? Could we get in a shot or two? Keeping in mind that a lot of the helicopter work was pretty low to the ground.

The Helicopter

On the helicopter, we were using what's called a belly mount, a rig built by Nelson Tyler, who built this one specially for us that would run under the helicopter between the skids. It had a platform out in front and we could mount two 35 millimeter cameras out there with two different lenses. I could rotate that plate up and down, but there was no left-to-right movement. We had to do that by realigning where the helicopter was. I was constantly telling the pilot “More left,” “More right,” “Up,” “Down,” so that he could get me where I wanted to be. The pilot can't see the car though, only I can see it on the monitor.

While there were two cameras, there was only one crude little black-and-white monitor just a few inches across, but that feed wasn’t from either of those cameras. Those cameras were film, and we were working in a very simple way — I could hit record on each of the cameras, but I couldn’t see out of them — so the monitor was connected to a video camera on the platform between the two film cameras. On my little screen, I've got marks so that I could tell whether I'm using the camera on the left or the camera on the right, because they're two different lenses. One was a 16-millimeter lens and the other was a 9.8 millimeter lens. Each would make for different composition.

We had 400-foot loads of film in each of the two cameras, which isn't very much. That’s about three minutes of filming per camera, so you're not turning it on unless you're pretty well sure you're getting something right now.

We were there for a month and we'd go out every day — assuming the weather was good enough — and we'd find good shots in the air. It was me in the helicopter along with the pilot, Duane Williams. Over the course of the month we practiced a whole bunch of different shots. Greg was driving the Volkswagen and I could call him by walkie-talkie and say, “Okay, let's do this one” and he'd know he's got to get the car over to this particular place.

The Biggest Challenges

One of the biggest issues that we had was bugs. These two cameras are out in the air, right under the nose of the helicopter and we had no way of knowing whether or not we hit a bug because, again, we're not looking through the lens while filming. For all we knew, all of our footage that we were shipping off to London was ruined because we shipped everything undeveloped to Kubrick and he saw it when he developed the film.

So we came up with a little solution. We took a shower cap from this hotel we were staying in, and we mounted the shower cap over the lens with a length of clothes line. The idea was, we could take off with the shower cap on, come up to location and, when we were ready, I would haul in the rope. Also, what we started doing after that was, we would get Duane to bring the helicopter down to four feet off the ground in a little meadow or something and Greg would jump out of the Volkswagen, come over with some cleaner and make sure the lenses were bug free, jump back in the car, and then we'd go back up and shoot some more. That way, we didn’t land in the park.

In the evenings back at St. Mary's Lodge, we would get together and review the videotape and Greg would want to know, “Which lens were you on for this? Was it the left camera or the right camera?” Because it made a difference in terms of composition, which is one of the reasons why that famous helicopter shadow became an issue.

See, that shot with the shadow was on the 9.8 millimeter and it was a wide shot, but I had marks on my monitor framed for 1:1.85, standard size for a movie in those days. In my monitor, that shadow did not come in, nor did it come in in the theater release. However, with the first video release it was framed differently, revealing the shadow that was otherwise cropped. Trust me, nobody was more shocked than I was to see that shadow in the shot.

Getting the Shots

Virtually all the shots came very late in the month of September. By then, we had practiced all these things so often that when we got really clear weather and good sunlight, we nailed them. Like that opening shot of the island, that required dead calm because the slightest bit of crosswind will affect the tailboom of the helicopter and make it yaw — like somebody hit the tailboom. So, if you look at the water, there's not a ripple on the water that morning when we got that one, which is very different than say, the shot following the car where the car goes up the cliff and makes the turn while we keep going off the edge of the cliff.

For that shot, the one where we’re right on the bumper, we were pretty much at the roof line of the Volkswagen at the time we passed him and it was harrowing, but not for the reason you might think. I had spent so much time in helicopters by this time, hundreds and hundreds of hours, that you don't think about it, you're just focused on the little black-and-white monitor. The harrowing part was, because we had no traffic control and because we were on this big cliff with no railing, if some car had been coming the other direction, which we couldn't see, and he happened to come out right at the same time we were there, they'd have seen this helicopter just a few feet off the road and swerved gone off the cliff. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

The Meaning Behind the Opening

The first time I saw the film was a year and a half later at Warner Brothers. They had a screening for crew and people that had worked on the show. I was nervous as hell because, while I had done some second unit work before, this was a much, much higher profile film. I kept thinking, “Oh crap, this is going to be on us for the opening of this movie” and we had no input from Kubrick as to what he used. Then The Shining began and we saw the opening and it worked like gangbusters with that music. It gave the opening this perfect sense of dread.

The nature of The Shining, both the book and the movie, is not so much horror as it is dread. For the opening, I saw this as Kubrick's way of creating a dread that you feel from the beginning. If somebody were watching that movie for the first time, they wouldn't look at the footage of this little car in such a vast landscape and think, “Oh, this is going to be a happy story. This'll turn out well.” Sure, there’s the nature of it all, but when you combine it with that music, the feel is the dread of what's to come. It basically says, “Keep your eye on this because it's not going to go well.”