Shelley Duvall, a reclusive movie actor, has given a very rare interview in which she discusses her classic performance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, claiming that she would cry for days while filming.

The 71-year-old actress commented on creating the 1980 horror classic, which took 56 weeks to film and holds the Guinness World Record for “most retakes for one scene with dialogue” in a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter released on Thursday.

The film, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, stars Duvell as Wendy Torrence, the wife of Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson), who is driven insane by the strange events at the resort hotel.

The actress says that Kubrick’s filming style was “difficult” to participate in in one of her first interviews in years. She remembers, “[Kubrick] doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard. And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult.”

Shelley Duvall | CREDIT: WARNER BROTHERS/GETTY

To prepare for her role as Wendy Torrance, she stated she would put on a Sony Walkman and listen to sorrowful tunes or just think about sad memories.

‘You just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family or friends,’ Duvall explained. ‘But after a while, your body rebels. It says: “Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.” And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry.’

‘To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, “Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.” And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, “I don’t know how you do it.”‘

In response to inquiries about whether Kubrick was cruel or violent to her during production, Duvall stated that while the director had “that streak in him,” he was “very warm and friendly” to her.

“He spent a lot of time with Jack and me. He just wanted to sit down and talk for hours while the crew waited. And the crew would say, ‘Stanley, we have about 60 people waiting.’ But it was very important work,” she recalls.

Anjelica Huston, Duvall’s friend and Nicholson’s girlfriend at the time, told THR she had a feeling Duvall was having a “hard time just dealing with the emotional content of the piece. And they didn’t seem to be all that sympathetic. It seemed to be a little bit like the boys were ganging up,” she told THR. “That might have been completely my misread on the situation, but I just felt it. And when I saw her during those days, she seemed a generally a bit tortured, shook up. I don’t think anyone was being particularly careful of her.”

Duvall, who cried as she re-watched the sequence in which Nicholson chases her with a bat, still appears frightened by the part she previously played. The 71-year-old reveals why she’s filled with emotion when asked why: “Because we filmed that for about three weeks… Every day. It was very hard. Jack was so good—so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing.”

After The Shining, Duvall went on to feature in a number of films, including 1980’s Popeye, which she co-starred in with Robin Williams.