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Eyes Wide Shut at 15: Inside the Epic, Secretive Film Shoot that Pushed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to Their Limits

By Amy Nicholson

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Kubrick’s obsession with secrecy so infected his cast and crew that no one has ever spoken about it in detail. The day-to-day life on set can only be inferred from facts and hints. The most major fact: Eyes Wide Shut was exhausting. Kubrick had asked Cruise and Kidman to commit to six months. When they landed in London in the fall of 1996, the couple fully expected to return to Hollywood by spring. Instead, they stayed on through the summer, fall, and another Christmas. Filming wrapped in January of 1998, but in May they were summoned back for more months of reshoots. Altogether they’d spend 15 months on Eyes Wide Shut, the Guinness World Record for the longest continual film shoot.

“Stanley had figured out a way to work in England for a fraction of what we pay here,” explained Sydney Pollack, who joined the cast as the corrosive tycoon Victor Ziegler after the extended shooting forced original actor Harvey Keitel to cry uncle and drop out. “While the rest of us poor bastards are able to get 16 weeks of filming for $70 million with a $20 million star, Stanley could get 45 weeks of shooting for $65 million.” Though every six months Cruise spent in London cost him another $20 million film he wasn’t making—plus he had the fledgling Cruise/Wagner production company to oversee—he swore to the press he had no qualms about his extended art house sabbatical.

“I remember talking to Stanley and I said, ‘Look, I don’t care how long it takes, but I have to know: are we going to finish in six months?’” said Cruise. “People were waiting and writers were waiting. I’d say, ‘Stanley, I don’t care—tell me it’s going to be two years.’”

Kubrick is legendary for his perfectionism—to reconstruct Greenwich Village in London, he sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines. But his approach to character and performance was the opposite. Instead of knowing what he wanted on the set, he waited for the actors to seize upon it themselves. His process: repeated takes designed to break down the idea of performance altogether. The theory was that once his actors bottomed-out in exhaustion and forgot about the cameras, they could rebuild and discover something that neither he nor they expected. During The Shining, he’d put Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall through 50 takes to figure out what he wanted, causing Duvall to have a nervous breakdown. For Eyes Wide Shut, given his stars’ extreme pliancy and eagerness to please, Kubrick went further, once insisting that Cruise do 95 takes of walking through a door.

“In times when we couldn’t get it, it was just like, ‘Fuck!’” admitted Cruise. “I’d bring it upon myself because I demand a lot of myself.” But what he never asked—at least, not openly in the press—was if there was an “it” Kubrick wanted him to get. After all, a director who demands 95 takes could be exacting—or conversely, he could be ill-prepared and uncommunicative. Cruise’s overpreparation had served him well in the past. Not here. He got an ulcer, and tried to keep the news from Kubrick. At its core, the Cruise/Kubrick combination seems cruel: an over-achieving actor desperate to please a never-satisfied auteur. The power balance was firmly shifted to Kubrick, yet to his credit, Cruise has never complained.

Kubrick defenders—Cruise included—insist the legend was fully in command. “He was not indulgent,” Cruise insisted to the press. “You know you are not going to leave that shot until it’s right.” Yet it’s hard not to see indulgence when even small roles demanded prolonged commitment, like starlet Vinessa Shaw’s one-scene cameo as a prostitute, which was meant to take two weeks and ended up wasting two months. Adding to the peril, Kubrick also refused to screen dailies, a practice Cruise relied on. “Making a movie is like stabbing in the dark,” the actor explained. “If I get a sense of the overall picture, then I’m better for the film.” Cruise couldn’t watch and adjust his performance to find his character’s through line—a problem exacerbated by the amount of footage the director filmed. For most of the cast, who appeared only in one or two moments, they had only to match the timbre of their character’s big moment. But Cruise alone is in nearly every scene and had to spend the shoot playing a guessing game. Not knowing which of his mind-melting number of takes would wind up in the film, he still had to figure out how to shape a consistent character from scene to scene. Given Kubrick’s withholding direction and the exponential number of combinations that could be created from his raw footage, it’s understandable if the forever-prepared actor found himself adrift.

Adding to the actor’s peril was the part’s personal and emotional risk. Kubrick decided to find his story through psychoanalyzing his stars, prodding Cruise and Kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret. “Tom would hear things that he didn’t want to hear,” admitted Kidman. “It wasn’t like therapy, because you didn’t have anyone to say, ‘And how do you feel about that?’ It was honest, and brutally honest at times.” The line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred. The couple slept in their characters’ bedroom, chose the colors of the curtains, strewed their clothes on the floor, and even left pocket change on the bedside table just as Cruise did at home.

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“As an actor, you set up: there’s reality, and there’s pretend,” explained Kidman. “And those lines get crossed, and it happens when you’re working with a director that allows that to happen. It’s a very exciting thing to happen; it’s a very dangerous thing to happen.” Added Cruise, “I wanted this to work, but you’re playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up.” At least the two actors had an auditory cue to distinguish fact from fiction: on camera, Kidman changed her Australian accent to American. But there was also external tension pressing down on their performances as both actors—especially Cruise—were media savvy enough to recognize that audiences would project Bill and Alice’s unhappiness on their own marriage, which was already a source of tabloid fodder. Even during the course of filming, the couple had to successfully sue Star magazine for writing that they hired sex therapists to coach them.

Kubrick’s on-set wall of secrecy even divided Cruise and Kidman. To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, Kubrick would direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a handsome naval officer—an imaginary affair that haunts Bill over the course of the film—Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. Not only did he ask the pair to pose in over 50 erotic positions, he banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband’s tension by telling him what happened during the shoot.

Co-star Vinessa Shaw would eventually admit Kubrick had exhausted the once-indefatigable actor, confessing that compared to Cruise’s “gung ho” first months of shooting, by the end, “He was still into it, but not as energetic.” Still, when gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote that the Eyes Wide Shut set was miserable, Cruise quickly fired back a letter insisting that his and Kidman’s relationship with Kubrick was “impeccable and extraordinary. […] Both Nic and I love him.” Added actor and director Todd Field, on set for six months to play the pivotal role of the piano player Nick Nightingale, “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.” However, Cruise’s devotion to Kubrick’s massive mystery masterpiece would prove damaging to his screen image.

Good vs. Right

It’s hard to love Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford. He’s closed off and slippery, a cipher whose choices don’t make consistent sense. What personal history screenwriter Frederic Raphael had included in the original drafts—Harford’s strained relationship with his father, his guilt over his prurient interest in female anatomy—Kubrick had purged from the script, leaving Cruise to play a shallow voyager who only serves to lead the audience on an odyssey of sexual temptation. Also on the page but deleted from the final film is Bill’s explanatory voice-over that invited the audience to understand his feelings. Worse, Kubrick deliberately shunned including the Tom Cruise charisma fans expected in his performance, raising the question of why he cast Cruise at all. Why ask the biggest star in the world to carry your film and then hide his face under a mask for 20 minutes?

Though this is a story of sexual frustration—an emotion Cruise had played with conviction in Born on the Fourth of July —and jealousy, which is just the darker twin of Cruise’s signature competitive streak, his performance in Eyes Wide Shut feels flat. He’d done vulnerability better in Jerry Maguire and had captured neutered paralysis a decade and a half before in Risky Business. Yet in nearly all of Eyes Wide Shut ’s key emotional moments—his wife confessing to her first and second psychological “betrayals,” his patient’s daughter professing her love over her father’s corpse, nearly kissing a call girl’s corpse in the morgue, being unmasked at the orgy—Cruise’s face is stiff and visibly unfeeling, almost as if he never took the mask off at all.

Cruise’s blankness makes Eyes Wide Shut take on an element of kabuki theater, the art form where emotional perception—not projection—is key. The whole film feels like an exercise in theatricality, as though Dr. Bill is not a person but a prop. This isn’t a movie about a human possessed with distrust and jealousy—it’s a movie about distrust and jealousy that simply uses a human as its conduit. With Cruise hidden in a mask and robe, the intention is to hide his individuality in the service of a larger ritualistic machine. Even in his scene with the impossibly sweet prostitute played by Vinessa Shaw, their conversation about how much cash for which physical acts doesn’t spark with lust but limps along like the characters themselves are merely performers recognizing that this is the negotiation that is supposed to take place. “Do you suppose we should talk about money?” he asks—it’s as if their whole conversation is in air quotes.

To critique Tom Cruise’s performance in Eyes Wide Shut, it’s important to distinguish between good and right. Measured against any of his previous screen roles, his acting reads as terrible. It’s artificial, distant, and unrelatable. However, the terribleness of his performance translates into a tricky logic puzzle. On-screen, we’re given only one take of the 95 attempts that Cruise shot. If Kubrick was a perfectionist who demanded Cruise repeat himself 95 times on the set, and in the editing room rejected 94 of those takes, then the “terrible” take Kubrick chose must be the take that Kubrick wanted. What feels flat to the audience must have felt correct to the director, so even though it’s hard to appreciate Cruise’s performance, at least one person must have thought the chosen take was perfect: Stanley Kubrick. And for Cruise, a perfectionist himself who was determined to make his master happy, we’re forced to defend the “badness” of his performance by recognizing him as an excellent soldier following orders.

Yet critics under the sway of thinking that the great Kubrick could do no wrong and Cruise, the popcorn hero, could do little right, blamed the actor for the director’s choices and groaned that “Our forever boyish star just can’t deliver.” The irony, however, is that in 45 years of filmmaking, Kubrick had never asked his actors to deliver. His films had earned Oscar nominations for their acting only twice: Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus (1960). In his much shorter career, Cruise himself had earned as many Oscar nods. That fact alone speaks to the limited value the director placed on acting—to Kubrick, his cast was merely a tool for his vision and individual performances subservient to his intimidating authorial style. Kubrick’s disinterest in actors is evident even in *Eyes Wide Shut’*s credits, which despite including two directors (Pollack and Field) and two great character actors (Alan Cumming and Rade Serbedzija) filled the rest of its cast with new faces and 10th-billed TV actors. As much as Cruise wanted Eyes Wide Shut to prove, yet again, that he could act, Kubrick clearly had scant interest in giving him the opportunity.

Cruise made himself vulnerable before Kubrick and his devotees, but instead of being rewarded for his emotional and financial sacrifice, audiences dismissed his performance as callow. He couldn’t even ask his by-then dead-and-buried director for support. Eyes Wide Shut ’s fallout wasn’t flattering: he was blamed for the film’s failure, and the tabloids took a savage interest in his marriage, which would last only two more years. Yet Cruise continues to defend his two years of hard work. “I didn’t like playing Dr. Bill. I didn’t like him. It was unpleasant,” admitted Cruise a year later in the only public criticism he’s ever given. “But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn’t done this.”

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What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut 100 Times

In 1994, Stanley Kubrick sent the screenwriter Frederic Raphael a novella about a doctor who embarks on a dark odyssey of the soul after learning that his wife has fantasized about fucking another man. The story took place in Hapsburg Vienna; Kubrick wanted to know if Raphael could adapt it into a screenplay set in contemporary New York. As Raphael later recalled in an essay for The New Yorker , he was initially skeptical. “Hadn’t many things changed since 1900,” he recalled asking Kubrick, “not least the relations between men and women?” “Think so?” Kubrick replied. “I don’t think so.” Raphael thought about it. Then he said, “Neither do I.”

The film they eventually collaborated on, Eyes Wide Shut , came out twenty years ago to mixed reviews. While some critics praised it as one of the master’s greatest works, it was perceived by some as a disappointment, an underwhelming valediction from the great director, who died a few months before its release. One of the most consistent complaints about it was that its attitude toward sex seemed badly dated. “It feels creaky, ancient, hopelessly out of touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty thing contemporary sexuality has become,” wrote Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post . Rod Dreher of the New York Post quipped that it seemed to have been made by “someone who hadn’t left the house in 30 years.” Relations between men and women, in other words, had in fact changed a lot.

But had they really? I’ve watched the movie close to a hundred times in the last two years and I’m here to tell you that it was timely then, it’s timely now, and as sad as it is to say this about the world, it may well be timely forever.

My Eyes Wide Shut addiction first took hold in the spring of 2016. I was working on a novel and rarely left my apartment. The book that I was writing was a sort of fairytale, and so was the film. With its dreamy music and strangely mannered dialogue, its Christmas lights twinkling in scene after scene, it would fast track me into a trancelike state of creativity, detaching me from the real world and its mundane concerns.

What critics saw as dated, I saw as timeless. Though it technically takes place in 1990s New York, the film keeps one boot planted firmly in the fin de siècle world of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. The opening credits are set to a waltz; the gentleman who hits on Nicole Kidman’s character in the following scene is an elegant Hungarian; the film’s iconic centerpiece , a masked ritual that turns into an orgy, seems like the sort of affair that might have titillated Gustav Klimt. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s character, the amazingly naïve Dr. Bill Harford. Early on, when his wife suggests that his patients are horny for him, he assures her that women “don’t think like that” — as if he would know better than her. She falls to her knees laughing, then reveals that she was once so taken with a hot sailor that she fantasized about giving up their marriage (and even their daughter) for a single night with the guy.

It’s this confession that serves as the movie’s inciting incident, sending the shocked doctor reeling out of the apartment, out into the wild New York night. And to critics, that registered as bizarrely unrealistic . It was the ’90s after all — the decade of Wild Things and Cruel Intentions , of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Trammel asking Michael Douglas’s Nick Curran, “Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick? It’s nice.” The President was getting head in the Oval Office. Could any man really be as innocent as Dr. Harford?

In the fall of 2017, a month or so after the world learned that an ogre in a tuxedo had been preying on Hollywood’s women for decades and getting away with it , I resumed my daily viewings. By then, #MeToo was in full swing, and a lot of men had been named. Like other women I know, I was overwhelmed, not by the fact that there were so many bad men out there — that was to be expected. It was the “him too?” of it all — the fact that so many of the men I knew were so shocked by the revelations.

I knew that Dr. Harford would be shocked, too. Here was a man so oblivious to his own wife’s sexual desires that he couldn’t abide the thought of her merely fantasizing about someone else. He’s totally clueless about what it’s like to be a woman, and when his wife tries to school him, he runs away in fear. Dr. Harford’s ignorance of his wife’s desires and the guys I knew who couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around the avalanche of stories of abuse struck me as two sides of the same coin. Both attitudes stemmed from an inability to understand the interior life of women and a refusal to acknowledge that we might be experiencing sexual thoughts and feelings so foreign to their own. And so when guys told me that they couldn’t believe the stories that were coming out about the powerful men who were being named, I heard them saying that they had chosen to be clueless, too. Was it because they were afraid of what might happen if they’d kept their eyes wide open? Afraid they’d have to be friends with different people, look up to different men, maybe even challenge those in power over them, lest they accept their complicity in a structure they knew to be abusive?

Complicity is what Harford seeks: He’s desperate to be on the inside. At the height of the film, he infiltrates a secret society where powerful men in masks and robes are having ritualistic sex with subservient naked women. Who are these women, and why are they there? They have supermodel bodies, and we can infer that they’ve been hired to do a job. But that’s about all we know. At one point, Harford asks one of them to remove her mask; she refuses, and begs him to leave the party, warning him that if he stays, it could cost him his life. A moment later, he’s exposed as an intruder, and a sort of tribunal is convened to decide what to do with him. As his fate hangs in the balance, the woman he met earlier intervenes, crying out, “Take me instead!”

Later, her body turns up in the morgue. Dr. Harford suspects that she was murdered as punishment for trying to help him, but he doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he allows himself to be lulled into a state of complacency by one of the men who was at the party, a master-of-the-universe type played by Sydney Pollack. Pollack reads Dr. Harford perfectly, accusing him of “jerking himself off” to the thought of the woman sacrificing her life for his. The truth, he insists, isn’t nearly so romantic. “She was a junkie! She OD’d!” As Pollack circles the room, tapping a pool cue in a faint echo of the ritual at the masked ball, he urges the doctor to let it go. The men at the party were “not just ordinary people,” he warns. “If I told you their names […] I don’t think you’d sleep so well.” Harford doesn’t press him for those names or any other details. He doesn’t want to know. Although Harford spent the day leading up to this conversation retracing his steps, desperate for answers, Pollock easily convinces him to give up and go home. That’s how power triumphs — Pollack offers the smallest crumbs of an explanation, drawing him into the conspiracy while offering no real answers, and Harford accepts the bargain.

If all this felt dated back in 1999, maybe that’s because we weren’t quite as savvy as we thought. We’d spent the past year obsessing over the semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, but we’d somehow missed the point of the whole dark saga. We thought it was a story about sex, but it was really about power — about the abuse of it, and our complicity in that abuse. The world’s most powerful man walked away from a scandal unscathed while his intern’s life was torn apart and we shrugged at her ordeal. We were all Dr. Harford. And by that light, Eyes Wide Shut doesn’t seem quaint; it seems prescient.

At the very end of the film, Dr. Harford comes home to find the mask he’d worn at the party resting on his pillow beside his sleeping wife. He breaks down in tears and promises to tell her everything — but the confession, which we never hear, doesn’t seem to bring them happiness. In the next and last scene, Nicole Kidman’s character suggests that the moral of the story is that they should be grateful for what they have. And what do they have? A domestic partnership built on her husband’s ignorance of her desires. She, too, is choosing complacency. Her marriage depends on it. And that’s Kubrick’s point. As long as men choose ignorance, and women accept it, the relations between them will never change. Kubrick, the most controlling and precise of directors, knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t make a naïve film — he made a film about naïvete, and the toll it takes on the world.

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Sex, Death, and Kubrick: How ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Changed Tom Cruise’s Career

Tom Cruise Week

At 400 days spread across two years, Eyes Wide Shut  clocks in as the longest continuous shoot in movie history. That’s remarkable given that nearly all of the film’s action — including its infamous illuminati sex party centerpiece — largely consists of people walking or sitting or talking. In the last film he would direct, Stanley Kubrick gave full flight to his artistic impulses, in all their manipulative glory. In the name of creative exploration, scenes would be shot again and again and again. The unrelenting production bludgeoned the life force of Kubrick’s star, Tom Cruise, and in the process neutralized the actor’s toothy grin and quelled his insatiable zest. Despite the conditions, Cruise pursued his performance with the same drive that has made him such an indomitable movie star. But this time would be different.

Kubrick would consciously play on Cruise and Kidman’s real-life relationship, and not just for its commercial appeal. Before shooting, in secret conversations that eerily mimicked alleged Scientology auditing practices, Kubrick coaxed Cruise and Kidman to reveal their “fears” about their relationship. But there was no room to analyze or respond to the disclosures; they were there only to cultivate fodder for the movie. “You didn’t have anyone to say, ‘And how do you feel about that?’” Kidman would explain. “It was honest, and brutally honest at times.”

Before the shoot concluded, Cruise and Kidman sued the tabloid Star for reporting that on-set “sex therapists” had been hired. Rumors of the interminable shoot plagued the movie. And its eventual reception could be best described as befuddlement. Within two years of the movie’s release, Cruise and Kidman were separated. And Cruise’s career would never be the same.

By the time Eyes Wide Shut went into production, Kubrick had been toying with a version of the project for more than three decades. He’d originally envisioned it as a follow-up to Lolita , his 1962 cultural brush fire, until his wife, Christiane, gently ushered him away. “Don’t … oh, please don’t … not now,” she told him . “We’re so young. Let’s not go through this right now.”

In the mid-’90s, he returned to the project and hired the prolific novelist Frederic Raphael to write a script. The source material was Traumnovelle , or Dream Story , by the relatively obscure, medically trained Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, who Freud once feared was his doppelgänger. Not that Raphael knew that: For no reason that he could discern, Kubrick obfuscated Schnitzler’s identity when he gave his writer the text of Dream Story . It was just one example of a series of odd choices by the director that Raphael observed.

In a stinging piece for The New Yorker in 1999, Raphael recounted his curious experience with Kubrick. Despite the limited scope of their relationship and Kubrick’s well-documented obsession with privacy, Raphael shared a trove of unflattering details. A great admirer of Kubrick’s films, Raphael nonetheless portrayed the filmmaker as indecisive, illogical, awkward, and petty. 1 Still, intentionally or otherwise, Kubrick comes off as the decidedly more charming half of the partnership.

“The Holocaust — what do you think?” Raphael quotes Kubrick asking at one point. “As a subject for a movie.”

“It’s been done a few times, hasn’t it?” Raphael says.

“I didn’t know that,” Kubrick responds, drolly.

Raphael and Kubrick’s finished script would update the novella from early-20th-century Vienna to modern-day Manhattan but is, otherwise, surprisingly faithful.

An attractive married couple — Cruise is Bill Harford, a doctor; Kidman is Alice Harford, a stay-at-home mother to their young daughter — attend a fancy party during which both are separately, unsuccessfully seduced. In the fuzzy exchange that follows, Alice offers a confession: Last summer, while on a family vacation, she saw a handsome naval officer she was so intensely drawn to that she would have, she believes, thrown her life away to be with him. She never took step one to consummate the fantasy, she explains. But the revelation is enough to unmoor Dr. Harford, who almost immediately begins a long night of profound sexual weirdness.

First comes a confession of love from the bereaved daughter of a dead patient. Then, a pleasant encounter with a quiet, dangerous sex worker. And finally — plink-plink-plink- plink — that inimitable illuminati sex party. There, masked men in robes watch other masked men have sex with naked women in masks as atonal chanting — actually recordings of Romanian priests, run backward  — rings out.

It’s an honest-to-god orgy. And when the good doctor is discovered as an intruder, a self-sacrifice from a mysterious young lady is the only thing that saves him from what we assume would be certain death.

That Eyes Wide Shut has its detractors is not only understandable, it’s inevitable. Sixteen years later, the question persists: What is this thing?

Practically, it’s an attempt to explicate internal drama. If sexual jealousy so often feels epic, it’s just as often rooted in empty paranoia. Eyes Wide Shut walks a line — for all its sights and sounds, it presents no actual infidelitous copulation from either husband or wife.

It’s a manifestation of the strange, dark fears within. Schnitzler describes them in the novella as “those hidden, scarcely suspected desires that are capable of producing dark and dangerous whirlpools in even the most clear-headed, purest soul.” It’s surreal, to a point, and an attempt to play out what might happen if one were to let those fears take over. The answer: Why, you’d end up with your life threatened by a powerful masked sex cult, of course.

It’s also pretty funny. We get to see Kidman roll a joint from a stash she keeps in a Band-Aid container in her medicine closet, and later rip cigarettes while downing cookies and milk. We get to see the director Sydney Pollack in a rare performance, wearing only pants and suspenders, showing off the gloriously hairy chest God gave him. And we see that orgy. Rendered in full, there is a certain silliness that is unavoidable. At your next dinner party, encourage guests upon their arrival to use the only password that matters.

But Eyes Wide Shut is also a startling piece of evidence of Cruise’s courage.

The most common knock on Cruise as an actor is that he is shiny, bright, and artificial. A plastic man. But if we can define his plasticity here as endlessly moldable, then so be it.

In her book Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor , Grantland contributor Amy Nicholson recounts the breadth of Cruise’s devotion — “[a] perfectionist himself” — to “his master,” Kubrick. The sprawling shoot, with no solid end date. The repetition — at one point, Cruise did 95 takes just walking through a door. The ulcer he developed on set and kept hidden. The blatant emotional manipulation.

“To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, Kubrick would direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes,” Nicholson explains . For the footage of Alice’s fantasy with the naval officer — which periodically plays in Bill’s mind throughout — “Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. Not only did he ask the pair to pose in over 50 erotic positions, he banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband’s tension by telling him what happened during the shoot.”

It wasn’t only the names at the top of the call sheet that suffered at the hands of Kubrick’s calculated coldness.

Rade Serbedzija — the great Hollywood character actor and a star in his native Croatia — appears in the movie’s most explicitly comical scene, in which Dr. Harford convinces Serbedzija’s disheveled character, Mr. Milich, to open up his costume shop in the middle of the night. For a character often criticized as a cipher, this is Harford at his most actionable: He needs to get to that sex party.

It’s a small hurricane of a performance from Serbedzija. He swerves from peevishly lamenting his hair loss to suddenly imprisoning the Japanese men with whom his pubescent daughter, played by Leelee Sobieski, has been cavorting in the middle of the night — all while calmly executing his business transaction with Dr. Harford. Appropriately, it has a bitter coda: Mr. Milich ultimately willingly conspires in the pimping of his daughter.

“It was kind of torture, what [Kubrick] did to me,” Serbedzija recently recalled to Grantland over the phone from Brijuni, a remote island in the Adriatic Sea. “He wasn’t satisfied with anything I brought. He said, ‘It’s very bad.’” Serbedzija laughs heartily as he explains how Kubrick, essentially, screwed with him. Over and over, Kubrick cut Serbedzija off, bluntly explaining how execrable he was just a few sentences into each take.

“I said, ‘Well, tell me what I have to do.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, you are [the] actor.’ ‘OK, what do we [do] now?’ He said, ‘Let’s try it again.’ And then I started again. And again he said, ‘It’s awful.’ And then I thought, My god, which game is this guy playing with me? ”

Eventually Kubrick, sensing the actor was on to his tactics, ordered a break in shooting and called Serbedzija and Cruise into his office.

“He was very angry with me. And he put on my tape from the audition. And he was laughing. You know? Watching this tape, he was laughing. Tom was watching [for the] first time and he was laughing too. And Stanley said, ‘This guy is excellent! He’s fantastic.’ And he turned to me and he said, ‘Can you try [the] same as this guy?’ And I said, ‘My god. What’s going on?’”

Mulling it over for the night, Serbedzija had his breakthrough. “I was thinking, He must know I’m [a] pretty good actor. Maybe he wanted to say to me, ‘I don’t want to see your acting.’ He wanted me to be really mad. To be really crazy. And I started to play games with [the] whole world.

“Some madness I tried to bring, and everybody was afraid of me on set. Everybody except him. He was watching me, laughing from his eyes. So there is something that is more than acting. Some real madness, you know?”

Serbedzija stops. “That’s it. He [was] really a magician.”

For his star, Kubrick’s trick was to strip it all away — the charm, the charisma, the Cruise-ness of it all. In that woozy opening party scene, Bill Harford is Tom Cruise. When he runs into his old friend, the piano player Nick Nightingale, 2 Harford greets him with a megawatt smile and zealous man-clasp. Not long after, in a wonderfully long, weed-stoked marital spat, Kidman menacingly drawls an accusation at her handsome doctor husband: “You are very, very sure of yourself, aren’t you?” 3

But by the next time Harford and Nightingale encounter one another, Cruise gives us the frozen version of his famous grin. It’s a death mask. By the conclusion — after the events of the evening have unfolded, and as Kidman recounts another sex dream he can barely stomach — Cruise’s Harford is a whimpering husk.

Cruise gave everything to Kubrick. He let him into his marriage. He lent him his movie-star charm and he let him smash it into a million pieces. Cruise believed in Kubrick so completely that for two years he was brave enough to do more takes than he could remember — to produce all that raw copy and to leave it all in Kubrick’s hands.

As the director and actor Todd Field, who played Nightingale, memorably said of Cruise on set : “You’ve never seen [an actor] more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.”

But was it too much? Cruise has never said as much, never even suggested as much. And over the next decade, he would have the gall to gamble again — brilliantly, in the cases of Magnolia and Collateral . But he never again touched anything as psychologically exposed or potentially damaging. And he never again approached a film with sexual themes.

“Some people told me, ‘Well, Tom Cruise is good but, maybe somebody else [could] play this part,’” Serbedzija says. “I really feel it’s not true. He’s so fantastic in this film because he’s actually [doing] less acting. He was being this simple man. It was beautiful.”

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Raphael went on to write a memoir of the director, Eyes Wide Open , that Christiane Kubrick dismissed .

Who becomes his eventual illuminati sex party tipster.

Frank Ocean even borrowed the bit for “Lovecrimes.”

Filed Under: Tom Cruise Week , Tom Cruise , Eyes Wide Shut , Stanley Kubrick , Nicole Kidman , Movies , Rade Serbedzija , Leelee Sobieski , Sydney Pollak

Amos Barshad has written for New York  Magazine, Spin , GQ , XXL , and the Arkansas Times . He is a staff writer for Grantland.

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Eyes Wide Shut

1999, Drama, 2h 39m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Kubrick's intense study of the human psyche yields an impressive cinematic work. Read critic reviews

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Eyes wide shut   photos.

After Dr. Bill Hartford's (Tom Cruise) wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.

Rating: R (Nudity|Language|Some Drug Related Material|Strong Sexual Content)

Genre: Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Producer: Stanley Kubrick

Writer: Stanley Kubrick , Frederic Raphael , Arthur Schnitzer

Release Date (Theaters): Jul 16, 1999  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Jan 4, 2010

Box Office (Gross USA): $55.7M

Runtime: 2h 39m

Distributor: Argentina Video Home, Warner Sogefilms S.A. [es], Warner Bros. Pictures

Production Co: Warner Brothers, Hobby Films, Pole Star

Sound Mix: Dolby Stereo, Dolby A, SDDS, DTS, Surround, Dolby Digital, Dolby SR

Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)

Cast & Crew

Dr. William Harford

Nicole Kidman

Alice Harford

Sydney Pollack

Victor Ziegler

Marie Richardson

Rade Serbedzija

Nick Nightingale

Vinessa Shaw

Alan Cumming

Hotel Desk Clerk

Sky du Mont

Sandor Szavost

Fay Masterson

Leelee Sobieski

Milich's Daughter

Thomas Gibson

Carl Thomas

Madison Eginton

Helena Harford

Louise J. Taylor

Stewart Thorndike

Julienne Davis

Mandy Curran

Carmela Marner

Waitress at Gillespie's

Tres Hanley

Coffee Shop Manager (uncredited)

Clarke Hayes

Hospital Receptionist

Leslie Lowe

Ilona Ziegler

Stanley Kubrick

Frederic Raphael

Arthur Schnitzer

Brian W. Cook

Co-Producer

Executive Producer

Jocelyn Pook

Denise Chamian

Leon Vitali

Film Editing

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Critic Reviews for Eyes Wide Shut

Audience reviews for eyes wide shut.

It's a headscratcher. That's part of why it's a masterwork. Dream-like and filled with clues of deep meanings Stanley Kubrick's last film is a must-see. Multiple times. Keep digging for meaning. But, do it with eyes wide open.

I should not have watched this with my mom

Kubrick's last and massively underrated motion picture reaps tiny seeds of its climax from the get go. Eyes Wide Shut explores sex, infidelity, marriage, humilation, deviance and other topics; personally I think the main theme of the film is want - the want to wear a mask and the want to take off one's mask. Nicole Kidman is great in a supporting role whilst Tom Cruise is good, but comletely overshadowed by Kubrick's artistry at play and Cruise seems like he's straggling slightly in performance at times. It's definitely Kubrick's most NSFW picture in my opinion even more severe in its images than A Clockwork Orange. The music ranges from reversed chanting to Chris Isaak and meanders in sync with the tone of the film. It channels, studies and explores every element of the psychology of sex ranging from the stark, desperate and horrifying to the playfully mischevious fantasy. Often, Eyes Wide Shut even borders on Lynchian weirdness and unsettling dream-like sequences. It is my favourite film of Kubrick's.

Eyes Wide Shut has a good story for a psychological thriller. Overall, it is a good film (better than most films) but a low four stars, not at the level of the Shining or 2001. The film lacked in style and vibe, especially when I am reminded of American Beauty. Eyes Wide Shut may have been great if it were shorter and had an eerie, melancholy, wandering/lost vibe and camera style to match. But, again, it is a good story for a thriller, so give it a view if you in the mood.

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Eyes Wide Shut, 20 years on: how does Stanley Kubrick’s last testament stand up?

Of all Stanley Kubrick’s films, his swansong remains the most divisive. After a production shrouded in secrecy, the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut opened to mixed reviews. Was Kubrick ahead of the times, or behind them?

10 April 2019

By  Paul O’Callaghan

As 1999 approached, what little was known about Eyes Wide Shut was almost indecently tantalising. Here was Stanley Kubrick, for many the world’s greatest living filmmaker, returning with his first finished project in 12 years – a sexually provocative adult drama, utterly shrouded in secrecy, starring pre-eminent Hollywood power couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick’s sudden death in March 1999, six days after delivering his final cut to Warner Bros, only served to intensify anticipation for what would now, alas, be the master’s final gift to cinema.

But while the pre-release marketing campaign, which Warner Bros claimed was executed in accordance with Kubrick’s wishes, teased a steamy, erotic thriller, the final film was a complex, confounding, intimate epic. Relocating the events of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 psychosexual novella, Dream Story, from early 20th-century Vienna to eve-of-the-millennium Manhattan, it depicts an extraordinary chapter in the life of Dr Bill Harford (Cruise), who embarks on a dreamlike nocturnal odyssey after his wife, Alice (Kidman), confesses, while intoxicated, to having had intense fantasies about another man. Bill’s wanderings offer him an enticing glimpse of a murky, sexual underworld, and ultimately lead him to a ritualistic masked orgy in an opulent mansion. But despite encountering a wealth of potential partners, Bill finds his opportunities to taste forbidden fruit thwarted at every turn.

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Come to the film expecting a salacious romp, then, and you may find it to be a profoundly frustrating viewing experience, all foreplay and no penetration. Indeed, some early detractors were annoyed to have been so flagrantly misled by the titillating trailer. “Eyes Wide Shut turns out to be the dirtiest movie of 1958,” quipped the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter.

But while it’s often talked of as a critical flop, the film had its fair share of early champions. Roger Ebert called it a “mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy”, Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune proclaimed it a “masterpiece”, and, perhaps predictably, it was widely praised by French cinephile journalists. It was also far from a commercial disaster, ultimately grossing over $162m worldwide: underwhelming for a Tom Cruise star vehicle, but really rather respectable for a near-three-hour existential art film about sexual dysfunction.

Come to terms with the lack of thrusting and you’ll discover a film of myriad other perverse pleasures. It’s more wryly amusing than many of its detractors would have you believe – though your mileage may vary depending on how tickled you are by the notion of one of Hollywood’s most handsome movie stars roaming the streets of America’s most densely populated city with the express purpose of cheating on his wife, and still somehow failing to get laid.

Kubrick seems to take immense delight in subverting Cruise’s virile man-of-action image – Bill is almost pathologically passive, unable to acknowledge, let alone explore, his sexuality. He’s also cringe-inducingly bourgeois, introducing himself as a doctor to everyone he meets, as if this automatically grants him moral authority in any situation. And the film is punctuated by moments of unexpected absurdity: a grieving daughter confesses her undying love for Bill, despite barely knowing him; the orgy sequence, entrancingly sinister at first, collapses into florid melodrama as soon as the menacing masked figures begin to speak. Appearing on the Charlie Rose show in 2000, Steve Martin revealed that Kubrick approached him for the lead role in a Dream Story adaptation back in 1980, and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Eyes Wide Shut as a full-blown sex farce.

But that’s not to suggest a lack of serious intent on Kubrick’s part. The film excels as an unflinching examination of a long-term relationship unravelling at the seams as a result of mutual suppressed desire and emotional dishonesty. Pivotal scenes in which Alice confesses her contempt for Bill and her interest in other men are given an extra jolt of authenticity by the fact that the actors were a married couple. These sequences are even more compellingly uncomfortable today, now that we know that Cruise abruptly filed for divorce from Kidman in 2001. In a 2014 Vanity Fair article, Amy Nicholson explains: “Kubrick decided to find his story through psychoanalyzing his stars, prodding Cruise and Kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret.”

There’s also a sense of art mirroring reality in the way that Bill’s sexuality is repeatedly called into question – explicitly in one scene by a group of homophobic frat boys, implicitly by the character’s general reticence around women. Persistent rumours about Cruise’s orientation are an integral part of the star’s biography, and Kubrick seems keen for viewers to keep these in mind throughout Eyes Wide Shut.

But while this blurring of fiction and reality is enthralling to behold in the finished film, it would seem that the production process, and the media circus surrounding it, was personally damaging to Cruise in particular. Ahead of the film’s release, US magazine Star alleged that Kubrick hired sex therapists for the couple after they proved unable to act amorously with one another. This came hot on the heels of an Express article suggesting that their marriage was a business arrangement, perhaps conceived to cover up their homosexuality. In both cases, the pair successfully sued, but Cruise has never since managed to quash intense speculation about his private life.

Eyes Wide Shut ultimately broke the star’s uninterrupted run of major box office hits since 1992’s A Few Good Men. To add insult to injury, Cruise was singled out by some early critics as the film’s weak link, his all-too-convincing performance as a haunted, repressed individual written off as merely wooden. It’s surely no coincidence that after the controversies and perceived failure of the film, the star became considerably more risk-averse in his choice of roles. Despite the widespread acclaim that he received later, in 1999, for his explosive turn as a monstrous sex guru in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, he swiftly retreated back into his comfort zone as an actor and continues to this day to mostly play wholesome, unwaveringly heterosexual heroes in bombastic action blockbusters. This might ultimately be the most lamentable aspect of Eyes Wide Shut’s legacy, as the vulnerability he displays under Kubrick’s tutelage is often thrilling to behold.

While the initial critical response was mixed rather than hostile, the tide has continued to turn in the film’s favour, with a steady stream of reappraisals positioning it as a misunderstood masterpiece. But it remains perhaps Kubrick’s most divisive major work. For me, it’s great but with a few significant shortcomings. The strange middle ground it occupies between reality and dreamscape is unquestionably a high barrier to entry. As a psychologically probing relationship drama, it often comes across as illogical and overwrought; as a surreal psychosexual thriller, it’s less transportive and transgressive than David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Dr. (2001). Where the film really soars is in its assured handling of dramatic tonal shifts, but that’s far more of a niche proposition than the high-minded visceral horror of The Shining (1980) or the trippy sci-fi spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

The film suffers a little by sticking so closely to the narrative of Schnitzler’s Dream Story. The central notion of a man being shaken to his core by the revelation of his wife’s inner sexual life makes perfect sense in a story written when psychoanalysis was a nascent practice. But it’s much harder to buy into the idea that a modern urban sophisticate like Bill would be so taken aback by Alice’s confessions. Kubrick’s decision to lift dialogue straight from the book also backfires; the final scene sees the protagonists ruminate on the film’s themes in a disappointingly heavy-handed manner, with Alice questioning whether “the reality of one night… can ever be the whole truth”, and Bill postulating that “no dream is ever just a dream”.

It’s perhaps inevitable that some of the film’s musings on sex and sexuality would have aged poorly, but the way in which a prostitute’s HIV diagnosis is used as a cheap plot twist is inexcusably crass. The inference here seems to be that Bill has dodged a metaphorical bullet by not sleeping with the girl in question. As such, the film ends up propagating the harmful and offensive notion of HIV as a grave punishment for aberrant or immoral behaviour.

And there are occasional moments that seem uncharacteristically clumsy for a perfectionist of Kubrick’s calibre. The use of voiceover to draw an explicit connection between an orgy attendee and a girl lying dead in a morgue feels particularly hokey. It’s tempting to imagine that, had the director lived longer, he would have continued to tinker with the film after delivering his final cut, as was his habit, and that such rough edges would have been smoothed out. But this question of authorship holds some admirers back from fully embracing the film as it stands. In an MSN chat with fans in 2001, David Lynch declared: “I really love Eyes Wide Shut. I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died.” And in a 2017 interview on MTV ’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Christopher Nolan explained: “I started looking at the reality of how the film was finished – he died before the scoring sessions were complete. So, even though I think the studio appropriately put out the film as his version, knowing where that happens in my own process… it’s a little bit early… (the film) is an extraordinary achievement, but it is a little bit hampered by very, very small and superficial, almost technical flaws that I’m pretty sure he would have ironed out.”

And yet, as with Kubrick’s more widely adored films, Eyes Wide Shut has proven powerfully prescient, often in enjoyably unexpected ways. In its depiction of sex as a ritualistic power game presided over by the ultra wealthy, the film foreshadowed the most unlikely literary phenomenon of recent years,  E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy. Though the softcore screen adaptations, which chart the romantic adventures of Jamie Dornan’s BDSM -fixated billionaire and Dakota Johnson’s demure girl next door, are about as far from Kubrickian as you can imagine, director James Foley tips his hat to Eyes Wide Shut in Fifty Shades Darker’s most memorable set piece, a masked ball in a sprawling mansion that treads a fine line between sexy and sinister.

The film has also exerted an influence on high-society hedonism beyond the realm of fiction. In 2010, Vogue celebrated its 90th anniversary with an Eyes Wide Shut-inspired party, while, thanks to sex-positive enterprises like Killing Kittens, upscale orgies are today a relatively mainstream nightlife option in cities like London and New York.

In its ominous references to decadent elites pulling society’s strings, the film also anticipates an obsession with secret societies and conspiracy theories that has become a defining trait of 21st-century popular culture – from the shadowy religious sects at the centre of Dan Brown’s unfathomably popular Robert Langdon novels, to the grotesque farce of the Pizzagate scandal in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. Indeed, the internet is today rife with outlandish tales asserting that Eyes Wide Shut was inspired by the clandestine activity of a real-world Illuminati, and that Kubrick was murdered for attempting to expose their scandalous practices. This may not quite be how Kubrick aficionados would ideally want their idol to be remembered, but it’s testament to Eyes Wide Shut’s idiosyncratic, enigmatic brilliance that the film continues to inspire such unpredictable responses.

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• Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999

Throughout the week, The Ringer will celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the best years in movie history and argue why some films deserve to be called the best of ’99. Here, two of our writers make the case for Stanley Kubrick’s psychosexual portrait of a marriage.

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Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Here, Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman discuss the final film of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut.

Adam Nayman: In thinking about how we could make the case that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was—and remains—the best movie of 1999 (a very good year for movies, according to our Ringer colleagues and pretty much everybody else), I thought it’d be good to start somewhere a bit unexpected: with just how funny it is. I know that saying “[Weird Movie X] is actually a comedy” to make other people feel bad for not getting it is an annoying move. But Eyes Wide Shut is laugh-out-loud hilarious, on purpose. I was 18 years old when it came out, and I have vivid memories of it being treated as a pop-cultural punch line—as something to make fun of.

I understand why this happened: it’s a strange, arty, deliberately stylized movie that uses dream logic to address challenging themes of love, commitment, male vanity, and the fear of death; it speaks the language of symbolism and metaphor; Kubrick’s death earlier that year meant it carried a lot of pressure as his last will and testament; it has a lot of topless women. And, for the only time in Kubrick’s career, he worked with movie stars who were more famous than he was. The media scrutiny on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s troubled marriage, and whether spending a grueling 400 days on a movie set shooting a drama about jealousy and infidelity damaged it further, predictably reframed the conversation about the film around celebrity, instead of cinema. Even more predictable was the way that critics of all kinds acted like horny teenagers—or accused Kubrick of being a horny teenager—when the movie premiered.

“Now we get the fucking laughing fit, right?” snaps Cruise’s Bill Harford during an early, pot-fueled argument with Kidman’s Alice, and I wish I could just play that clip every time I read or hear somebody say that Eyes Wide Shut is a movie to laugh at. It’s a movie to laugh with , and the scene where Cruise and Kidman get tetchy with each other in their underwear is Exhibit A. Alice’s case of the giggles is in response to her husband’s statement that she would “never be unfaithful to him,” an idea that she goes on to demolish over the course of an amazing, five-minute monologue that serves as the true beginning of the movie’s story and that sets “Dr. Bill” off on a series of nighttime adventures fueled by paranoid jealousy.

The comedy starts with the opening shot, which holds on Alice’s naked, statuesque body just long enough for us to get an eyeful before cutting away. Right off the top, Kubrick establishes a comic rhythm of interruption. (Another example: The stately Shostakovich waltz that plays over the credits is revealed as emanating from the Harfords’ own stereo—I don’t know why, but the shot of Cruise turning the music off strikes me as something out of Mel Brooks). These are little, witty touches; for a more spectacular example, check out the way that Kubrick and cinematographer Larry Smith turn the argument between Bill and Alice into a sophisticated sight gag. By the end, Alice is doubled over with laughter, at which point the film’s elegant Steadicam perspective gets supplanted by a bobbing, handheld camera—the image becoming destabilized right along with our (anti?)hero’s self-confidence as a husband, lover, and master-of-the-universe alpha male. After all, the larger joke about Eyes Wide Shut is that it’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie in which Tom Cruise can’t get laid (Maverick and Jerry Maguire didn’t have that problem). We’re going to have to talk at some point about whether or not Eyes Wide Shut is a movie about men—Stanley Kubrick included—gawking at women, but can we start by discussing how it is also, in a very serious way, a movie about women laughing at men? Or are you going to make fun of me for even suggesting such a thing?

Manuela Lazic: I will, in fact, laugh at you for suggesting this, but not because I disagree, and not with a full-hearted laugh. Imagine I’m doing something a little sadder—a little like Alice’s own laugh at her husband, perhaps—because of course women have to laugh at men in Eyes Wide Shut. But that’s never all they do. Alice has to get stoned before she can laugh in her husband’s face with so much frame-shattering, camera-disorienting abandon. Because if Eyes Wide Shut really is about men, it is also, more specifically and as you said, about how men perceive women—and there’s nothing really funny about that. Rewatching that pot-smoking scene, I was struck by how angry, sad, and exposed Alice gets when she starts to giggle.

While the pot helps her to open up, laughter functions here (as it often does) like a self-defense mechanism for Alice to protect herself from feeling as upset as she should. Earlier in the film, she has a similar interaction with the suave Hungarian stranger who tries to get her into bed at Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party. Here again, she is wasted (this time on champagne). Alcohol and drugs get Alice to both reveal herself and peel away at the arrogance of the men around her, which perplexes both Bill and the stranger. She may remain silent during most of the Hungarian’s talk, but she is smiling at his terrible double entendres the entire time, and ultimately leaves him hanging.

As a woman who has suffered through such eye-roll-inducing talk from men, I was astonished by Alice’s decision to take this attempted seduction with a smile. But Alice’s approach isn’t testimony to Kubrick writing this character through a male misogynistic lens. On the contrary, it is the presentation of one of the few options that women have when confronted with the ludicrous vanity of men (my reaction would have been overt anger, disdain, and immediate flight).

When Alice is faced with this behavior again, this time from her husband, the smile she offered the Hungarian turns into full-blown laughter, before she explains with literally sobering seriousness what lies behind the smile. It’s a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking moment because Alice really wishes Bill could understand that she, too, has desires.

For me, the funniest sections of Eyes Wide Shut are those when Bill is seen reflecting on his discovery of female desire, often when he’s in his car and Kubrick’s camera zooms in on his terrified eyes. In this alone time, he finally gets to explore his interiority and use his imagination (in other words, he gets to think!) instead of “acting” in and on the world. He is clearly disturbed by this new exercise. Alice, by contrast, is used to questioning her thoughts (like when she developed an intense crush on a naval officer during a family holiday, and couldn’t decide whether she wanted him to leave their hotel or take her away) and exploring the world through dreams. In fact, Bill’s deep dive into an underworld of performative sex, and life-threatening curiosity on the streets of New York and outside the city, is clearly paralleled by Alice’s abstract but not so unintelligible dreams: Unlike her husband, who has to physically move through space to find himself in situations that challenge his beliefs, Alice uses her brains to confront the truth about her perfect-seeming marriage.

I love this idea, and I love how Kubrick deploys it through this masterpiece. He manages to show how women’s need to rely on their interiority to live in the world is at once a blessing and a terrible example of inequality between the sexes. Right after Alice tells him about her longing for that naval officer, Dr. Bill receives a call and has to go to the bedside of a patient who just died. There, he meets the man’s daughter, Marion, who suddenly tells Bill that she loves him and that she doesn’t want to move to Chicago with her soon-to-be husband. Bill has been the love of her life all along. The moment is both hilarious and terrifying, thanks in great part to Marie Richardson’s explosively emotional performance as Marion, but also because of how this scene has been contextualized by Alice’s monologue (and because Richardson has been styled to look a bit like Kidman).

Kubrick, in his usual ironic, on-the-nose way, has followed Alice’s tale of overwhelming desire with an example of that very feeling in the person of Marion, for Bill to directly experience it himself. Here, he is the naval officer, and Marion is Alice: With her thoughts alone (“Marion, we barely know each other,” says Bill, needlessly), Marion has already built a relationship with the object of her desire. The scene becomes simultaneously funnier and more heartbreaking when Marion’s fiancé shows up and Bill says goodbye, leaving Marion to her fate as a wife and a misunderstood and desirous person—just like Alice has become.

Another undeniably funny thing about Eyes Wide Shut is its style. Each crossfade feels a little off but in a Kubrickian way—they have a calculated tonal significance, meant (I think!) to highlight the artificiality of the world Bill evolves in. The camera’s fluidity recalls The Shining ’s long tracking shots in the deserted hotel of Jack Torrance’s mind. Yet Eyes Wide Shut is much weirder than The Shining (yes, such a thing seems possible to me): The obviously fake New York streets! The Wu-Tang Clan reference! The Chris Isaak song! Do you agree that this film is strangely clunky? And do you think it is clunky for good reason, beyond the difficult shoot? What makes this stiffness compelling? And do you think this film’s style has been influential?

Nayman: I’m going to have to go to the judges on those Wu-Tang references; according to the internet, Eyes Wide Shut is actually Illuminati propaganda filled with subliminal imagery. I would, of course, happily watch a Room 237 –style essay about Eyes Wide Shut ’s hidden messages, except that there probably isn’t quite enough ambiguity in the film to support it. I like that you called Kubrick’s irony “on-the-nose,” because it is, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t also suggestive and complicated (as you have already described in the scene with Marion, although you left out the part about Marion’s fiancé being a visual doppelgänger for Bill, played by Thomas Gibson, which means there’s one degree of separation between one of the best American films of the ’90s and Dharma & Greg ).

As for style, I think it’s more that Eyes Wide Shut extends and refines techniques and motifs dating back to its director’s earliest work; it’s almost like a greatest hits album. For instance, that late shot of Alice, fast asleep with the mask on the pillow beside her, is a direct reference to a shot from Kubrick’s (excellent) sophomore feature, Killer’s Kiss . That movie is also evoked by the presence of those creepy mannequins in the sex shop where Leelee Sobieski appears as a 21st-century version of Lolita , right before Bill goes to the mansion that looks like the Overlook Hotel ... but I’d better stop before this turns into Room 237 II after all.

I’d agree that Eyes Wide Shut is aggressively artificial, and that the phoniness of its Manhattan setting is crucial: to quote that other modern deconstructed-rom-com masterpiece They Came Together , it’s like New York City is a character in the movie—a weirdly untrustworthy one. Kubrick’s carefully color-coded version of the world’s most photographed city—all of those blue filters and all the Klimt-style gold at the edge of the frame—is not just a case of aesthetic flexing but a cue to understand that we’re somewhere between the literal and the figurative. Eyes Wide Shut is not interested in building up a sense of everyday reality; its architecture is the rickety constructions of the subconscious.

The German title of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle , on which Eyes Wide Shut is based, translates to “A Dream Story,” and it’s that slightly tranced-out quality—of events experienced with “eyes wide shut”—that I think Kubrick finally perfected here after deploying it more sparingly in his earlier movies. The tracking shots in The Shining (and Full Metal Jacket ) are hypnotic, but in Eyes Wide Shut , the effect of all that serene, gliding camera movement is to submerge the viewer in layers of aspirational fantasy. Bill and Alice’s high-rolling life is a dream, and then, as we discover, there are even deeper layers underneath, both in terms of what the characters desire and also the topography of their New York. One hint to what the movie is doing as far as dreaming goes, lies in the—again, quite hilarious—way that Bill, for all his wealth and social status, moves through the movie as an almost completely passive figure, especially after the revelation of Alice’s imagined infidelity. In almost every scene, he ends up repeating or parroting the dialogue of other characters, as if he has no ideas of his own.

I truly love Cruise’s performance, and I think that it makes for an interesting contrast with his Oscar-nominated work the same year in Magnolia. There, as Frank “T.J.” Mackey, Cruise weaponized his clean-cut, sex-symbol status to play a guy peddling penis worship (“ respect the cock ”) to a millennial-incel audience. As Magnolia went on, we saw the scared, grieving little boy inside the persona. In Eyes Wide Shut , Cruise’s characterization is less sentimental, because Bill isn’t psychologically damaged or in need of redemption. He’s a cipher, and considering the significance of masks in the movie’s design—with the selection of Venetian masks in particular evoking a long history of literary and theatrical eroticism—the way that Kubrick uses Cruise’s flawless visage as a mask for Bill’s insecurity and lack of imagination is ingenious.

Obviously, in a movie filled with double entendres and body doubles, the infamous secret-society sequence with the guests all decked out in masks is meant to parallel Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party, with the difference being that Bill goes to the latter alone, as a bachelor. I don’t know if you want to talk about what goes on the mansion, but if Eyes Wide Shut is a “dream story” what does it mean that a 20-minute sequence set at an orgy plays out like such an absurd and embarrassing nightmare?

Lazic: One cannot talk about Tom Cruise without bringing up the idea of masks and disguise—and, tangentially, the realm of dreams. As you say, Kubrick uses Cruise’s perfect face as a veil in and of itself, and therefore a signifier of falseness: There’s nothing perfect lying beneath his perfect features. This is similar to how the actor’s visage was employed three years prior by Brian De Palma, the master of the body double himself, in the first Mission: Impossible film. There, Cruise used masks to deceive his traitors and alter reality. But of course, the most existentially disturbing mask that Cruise ever wore was the facial prosthetic his character David Aames was offered after his accident in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 psychological epic Vanilla Sky —or was he? “It’s only a mask if you treat it that way,” says one of the doctors, but David can no longer pretend that this smooth, consistent, standard face is his.

Just as this disappointing substitute for a face takes David into a nightmarish version of his life in which he is not handsome and doesn’t get the girl, Dr. Bill’s Venetian mask transports him to a dark place where other people, as you say, keep their protective camouflage and force him to show his real face, humiliating him.

This scene in the mansion is so deliciously cringe-worthy because it is such an overblown, tongue-in-cheek yet disturbing abstraction of what Bill is experiencing out in the world, after he finds out about female desire. His experience at this sordid party is a grotesque, dreamlike copy of his aborted adventure with Domino (also the name of a type of Venetian mask, of course!), a sex worker played by Vinessa Shaw who picks him up, takes him to her place, has to decide herself what she will do for him, and eventually can’t even get to it because he soon chickens out. She even feels too sorry for Bill to want his money. Just like he stands on the outside looking in at orgies at the secret gathering, Bill can’t participate in this superficial sexual masquerade with Domino. He’s too aware of his own pretense and of this woman’s selfhood. Kubrick makes Bill’s discomfort in Domino’s tiny room just as crushing as his shame when the cloaked cult unmasks him, because they are essentially the same sensations.

After his wild—or anti-climactic, considering he only got to have a look at things—night at the mansion, Bill searches for answers in Ziegler, his boss, played by Sydney Pollack. Their small talk when Bill enters his superior’s expensive office is as absurd as it gets, until Ziegler snaps: He comes clean to Bill, explaining that he too was at the secret meeting, but also, and more importantly, that the shaming ceremony that Bill was subjected to, including the suggested sacrifice of a woman for his sake, was “all staged to scare the shit out of [him].”

At last, the masks finally come down, and casting Pollack as Ziegler proves perfect. With his hyper-naturalistic acting style and gregarious manner, the legendary actor-director is the polar opposite of Cruise’s ideal looks—it is no coincidence that, from very early on in the film, Ziegler reveals his drug-fueled sexual activities to Bill. In this film, Pollack’s down-to-earth appearance is aligned with Ziegler’s bone-chilling honesty. Again, Kubrick parallels this scene with another one, set out in the world: Bill goes looking for Domino, but instead of finding her at her apartment, he meets her roommate, who kills the explicit sexual tension between them by announcing that Domino has been diagnosed with HIV. Did Domino really have the virus? Did she even exist? Although Bill didn’t end up having sex with her, he shivers when he learns how close he came to danger, and the entire chapter feels like a Fatal Attraction –esque cautionary tale about what men do to prove their masculine prowess to themselves. With Ziegler and Domino, Bill is twice denounced for trying to keep on the mask of male sexual vanity and control.

I love that scene with Pollack because it feels like Kubrick revealing his tricks in the clearest, most direct way he ever has. What follows is one of the most astounding, delectable, and moving displays of discomfiting a man I’ve ever seen in cinema (in the same category, see Phantom Thread and most other Paul Thomas Anderson movies). That’s what is truly funny to me: how weepy Bill gets when he sees the mask on his pillow, and how Cruise says “I’ll tell you everythiiiiiiing”!

How do you think this character arc fits in Kubrick’s filmography? Do you think Bill has really gotten the message by the end, or is Kubrick again being sarcastic about Bill’s newfound willingness to understand his wife? I find that the Barbie doll that their daughter Helena picks up at the toy store in the last scene, interrupting their conversation, may be a sign of things to come for her, and for women in general …

Nayman: I think “I’ll tell you everything” is funny too, although the hard cut to Kidman’s face the morning after—with those dreamy blue filters swapped out for some harsh natural light—is probably the most emotional moment in the movie for me, the one where the script, the actors, and the filmmaking combine to allow for authentic fragility amid the satire and sarcasm, and to address the “real” transgressions that have been coded into Bill’s adventures. I refuse to offer a definitive interpretation of whether or not Bill did a “bad, bad thing” either during Eyes Wide Shut ’s duration or at some other point in his marriage to Alice; the point is how we see him given every opportunity to do so and failing mostly because of external circumstances rather than any moral imperative (again, this is a movie in which Tom Cruise definitively fails to get laid).

The scene where Bill visits the morgue and sees the corpse of the woman who “saved” him during Ziegler’s orgy—gazing at her as she lies naked on the slab, her body exposed and her eyes wide shut—anticipates the morbid cruelty of Pollack’s monologue, which is all about concealing the truth, about the seduction of repression. It’s also, quite literally, about staring death in the face. That’s why when we see Bill reading a copy of the New York Post with the big-type headline “LUCKY TO BE ALIVE” (an image that used to be my Twitter avatar), it plays, like so much of Kubrick at his best, two ways: it’s a grim sight gag that also hints at the mind-set Bill is about to bring home with him as a husband and father.

Dr. Bill’s newfound willingness to communicate with his wife is sincere, and as a result, it’s funny: the two things don’t cancel each other out but instead are heightened in tandem. In the scene in the Macy’s, he insists on using a very particular “F-word” to suggest a solution to their marital impasse—“forever.” This is a significant idea given the context of Kubrick’s career: a lusting for immortality (for some kind of “forever”) is always tied to male protagonists in his films, whether it’s Barry Lyndon yearning for an aristocratic title that he can pass on to his son, or Jack Torrance in The Shining telling his son he wants to stay at the Overlook “forever and ever and ever” (presumably all by himself, after he’s done butchering his wife and son). In sharp contrast to his attitude in the early scenes, where he took both Alice and her fidelity for granted, Bill now clings to the renewed promise of enduring domestic bliss. Alice, though, counters with an F-word of her own, offering a more provisional solution to the problem at hand—and getting the last dirty word in Kubrick’s entire career. In the end, Alice wants exactly the same thing as her husband, and in giving him a piece of her mind, she rescues Eyes Wide Shut from the kind of bleak, ambiguous ending that was typically Kubrick’s stock in trade. It’s a happy ending, right?

Lazic: It’s funny that you should ask me that because the last time you did, it was about Phantom Thread —and I think these two endings are comparable. Plus, I’m pretty sure Phantom Thread will go down as the best movie of 2018 the same way that Eyes Wide Shut is obviously no. 1 for 1999.

Nayman: Yes, that was the thing that we were setting out to prove several thousand words ago, I think we did it. Anyway, go on.

Lazic: There is a sense of mutual delusion at the end of PTA’s film, as the couple finds a perverse system to repeat ad infinitum in order to stay satisfied with each other. But of course, who’s to say that neither of them will ever get tired of mushroom omelettes? The ending of Eyes Wide Shut is more down to earth, thanks to Alice’s pragmatism. Even though there’s a similar sense of Alice wanting Bill “flat on [his] back, helpless, tender, open, with only [her] to help,” the difference is that she wants him in that position not to overpower him, but to have sex with him, and “as soon as possible” rather than regularly. Her ambitions aren’t as big as Alma’s in Phantom Thread , perhaps because she refuses to work that hard at saving her marriage: She won’t be having crazy dreams and laughing in his face every time he needs to settle down a little just to remind him that she, too, is a person with desires and not just a perfect spouse. “Now we’re awake, forever” is a line that could have been uttered by PTA’s hopeful, mad couple, even as they begin a dreamlike (or nightmarish?) existence together. Alice, with her sense of reality in check, now has her eyes wide open. She has no patience for mindfucks.

In This Stream

1999 movies week: a celebration of the best year in film.

• Make the Case: Why ‘Three Kings’ Was the Best and Most Predictive Movie of 1999
• ‘Being John Malkovich’ Was a Head Trip Masterpiece—and the Best Film of 1999

‘Shogun’ Episode 8, ‘Ripley’ Episode 3, and ‘Top Chef’ Episode 4

Covering the campaign and trump’s third run for the white house with new york magazine’s olivia nuzzi, can imax save movie theaters.

The Ending Of Eyes Wide Shut Explained

1999 was a busy year for a lot of reasons. Facing the centennial, there was a lot to look forward to, and a lot to leave behind. For director Stanley Kubrick, there was one film idea that he just had to finish before the year was over, and that was "Eyes Wide Shut." The movie is based on a German novella from 1926 called "Traumnovelle," or "Dream Story," which focuses on a man in Vienna who finds out his wife has fantasies of other men, and goes on a two-day journey dealing with personal realizations about sex, individualism, and morality.

For Kubrick's film, he transferred the story from early 20th century Vienna to New York City, Greenwich Village specifically, in the 1990s. The director cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman , husband and wife at the time, as the main couple in the story named Bill and Alice. The movie began filming in November 1996 and ended in June 1998, holding the Guinness World Records for longest constant movie shoot at over 15 months, with 46 weeks of unbroken shooting.

The film is a confounding story, and even two decades later, fans and critics alike continue to debate the meaning behind "Eyes Wide Shut" and whether the final cut was what Kubrick really wanted.

The themes and meaning of Eyes Wide Shut

While Kubrick's other films explore topics like free will, conformity, and class privilege, "Eyes Wide Shut" takes on society's dehumanization of sex. For Bill and Alice, sex and temptation is all around them, but they only have eyes for each other. But one night Alice admits that she considered having an affair with a handsome naval officer a year earlier, and Bill's whole world is turned upside down. He then begins a night-long journey to explore and possibly give in to his own temptations, stumbling upon a secret society participating in a masked orgy.

The story is strange and winding, adding to the dreamlike quality of filmmaking that takes influence from the original "Dream Story." Throughout the night, Bill meets various strangers who attempt to engage him in sex. While he almost gives in a few times, he makes it through the encounters unscathed until he gets to the main event, the secret society's weird orgy. With this film, Kubrick is taking on "the causes and effects of depersonalized sex." One early review of the film describes the orgy scene as "the fulcrum" of "Eyes Wide Shut," saying, "sex is normally the most intimate means of human interaction, yet here it is reduced to a ritualistic, almost creepy form of gratification ... There is freedom in anonymity, but also isolation and a complete dearth of emotion" ( Reel Views ).

After this encounter, Bill finally realizes the dark side of this world of sex and anonymity, returning to his wife Alice's side. She is still open with him about her past sexual fantasies, but in the end they stay loyal to each other, happy that their marriage and mutual sexual attraction have survived this long.

The crazy process to make Kubrick's last movie

It's safe to say that Kubrick had a reputation for being quite the demanding and unusual filmmaker. Although many people are familiar with his abuse of Shelley Duvall on the set of "The Shining," some might not know just how crazy it was to make "Eyes Wide Shut," the director's last film.

Along with how long it took to film the movie, Kubrick put his main two actors through a lot of intense experiences. The director took take after take of the same scene, but not because he had a detailed vision in mind. According to a  Vanity Fair article detailing the film's production, his "theory was that once his actors bottomed-out in exhaustion and forgot about the cameras, they could rebuild and discover something that neither he nor they expected." Kubrick also never let his actors see any daily footage, and this inability to track his own performance across the film gave Cruise an ulcer, which he hid from Kubrick.

The director also thoroughly blended fact and fiction, creating a feeling of distrust between Cruise and Kidman by choosing to "direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a handsome naval officer—an imaginary affair that haunts Bill over the course of the film—Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model ... He banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband's tension by telling him what happened during the shoot." The emotional abuse he put his actors through was apparently worth it for them, but it's up to debate whether or not it improved the final product.

Debate and censorship for Eyes Wide Shut

"Eyes Wide Shut" is Kubrick's final film before his death. According to the documentary "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," Kubrick was in the middle of post-production when he showed what Warner Bros. executives claim was a relatively final cut of the film on March 1, 1999. The director died six days later, on March 7, 1999, at the age of 70. "Eyes Wide Shut" opened on July 16, 1999, and did well at the box office and with critics. It currently holds a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes . But that doesn't mean that there isn't any controversy attached to the film's release. 

Firstly, the movie had to be censored to hit the R-rating, with the orgy scene taking a large hit. According to a 1999 New York Times article, "65 seconds of the movie were digitally altered. Essentially, shrouded digital figures were placed in front of couples engaged in sex, partly blocking the audience's view." At the same time, some people argued that "Eyes Wide Shut" was an unfinished film, and the final product was not the one Kubrick intended to release. A frequent collaborator of Kubrick, writer Michael Herr, revealed in a Vanity Fair piece that Kubrick called him shortly before he had to show the Warner Bros. executives a cut the film, saying that "there was looping to be done and the music wasn't finished, lots of small technical fixes on color and sound; would I show work that wasn't finished?" He was forced to show the executives due to contractual reasons but didn't want to, and this was likely the cut that later became the final product.

While there's a lot of interesting history and questions revolving around "Eyes Wide Shut," unfortunately Kubrick isn't around to clarify anything. Still, the director's final film impresses as an unforgettable story about morality and sexuality, no matter what way you look at it.

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From the EW archives: Behind the scenes of Eyes Wide Shut

Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film was Stanley Kubrick's last work before his death

Editor-at-Large

The following appeared in the Jul. 23, 1999 issue of EW.

”Nicole and I talk about it so much at night. When we’re 70 years old, sitting on the front porch, we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Wow! We made this movie with Stanley Kubrick!’ We know it may take a long time to finish, but we don’t care. We really don’t.”

That was Tom Cruise in younger, more innocent days, way back in November 1996, just weeks into shooting Eyes Wide Shut . At the time, the poor guy figured it would take six months to finish the film, eight at the most. ”We’ll be done by June,” he cheerily predicted. ”But however long it takes is fine with us.”

Well, he got the month right, anyway: The cameras finally stopped rolling on Eyes in June — of 1998 — ending one of the longest shoots ever bankrolled by a major studio (or at least the longest since Kubrick’s last two-year production).

Also one of the most gossiped about. Like a lot of the late great director’s movies, Eyes was shot in total secrecy, its sets at Pinewood Studios in England locked tighter than that CIA vault Cruise dangled into in Mission: Impossible . Whatever the film’s married costars were up to inside Kubrick’s sealed soundstages — one (false) rumor had Cruise wearing a dress — the world would have to wait to find out. And wait. And wait some more.

Not anymore. This week, Kubrick’s final film — he died at 70 of a heart attack just days after screening a finished cut — will at long last unspool. All the speculation about its plot (”a story of sexual jealousy and obsession” is all Warner Bros. had said about the production) will finally be over. All the questions about how kinky (and naked) Cruise and Kidman would get will finally be answered.

Still, there is one mystery that won’t be revealed on screen this week. And it’s this: Those two years Kubrick took to finish Eyes ? How exactly did he spend them? How, precisely, did he make the movie? And — most titillating of all — what was it like inside those closed sets, where the world’s most demanding director held Hollywood’s most powerful couple hostage for so long they almost did end up in rocking chairs on their front porch?

To solve that mystery, all you have to do is keep your ears wide open.

”He was a really normal guy,” Kidman said of Kubrick shortly after his funeral last March. ”A really smart, really great guy. We were even talking about doing another film together.”

Kubrick has been called many things over the years — brilliant, inspiring, abrasive, tyrannical — but ”normal” is a new one. Rumors of his eccentricities ranged from the mildly loopy (never motoring over 35 miles per hour) to the oddly paranoid (he was said to be terrified of America, even though he grew up in the Bronx) to the downright notorious (he supposedly drove actors mad with his relentless perfectionism, insisting on shooting retake after retake). Obsessively private and press shy, he seldom left England and almost never attended public events (recent photographs are almost impossible to find). Which, of course, only made him more fascinating.

But according to the actors of Eyes Wide Shut — like 35-year-old Todd Field ( Twister, Walking and Talking ), who labored for seven months playing a jazz musician in the film — it turns out the roly-poly, fuzzy-faced filmmaker was an altogether different sort of man. Meet Kubrick the Cuddly. “He could be like a little boy,” says Field. “His sense of humor went from very highbrow to very lowbrow. One minute he’d make the most sophisticated joke, like out of a Preston Sturges movie, and the next he’d be doing Steve Martin imitations from The Jerk . He thought that part where Steve Martin doesn’t have any rhythm was just hysterical.”

But don’t get your hopes up: There are no funny balloon animals or fake-arrows-through-the-head gags in Eyes Wide Shut . Kubrick’s cinematic corpus closes on a serious, surreally pervy note, with an R-rated $65 million psycho-drama that has Cruise and Kidman playing an upscale Manhattan couple who make the relationship-rocking mistake of discussing their deepest sexual fantasies. A blue movie with stars is how Kubrick described it — or at least how he described a very similar concept he and screenwriter Terry Southern noodled around with some 35 years ago, while working on their script for Dr. Strangelove .

“Like a lot of people of my generation, I think Stanley felt he missed the sexual revolution,” muses 67-year-old Eyes screenwriter Frederic Raphael ( Two for the Road, Darling ). “We all felt like we were born too early or too late for the orgy. And Stanley was curious about that. Also, it was a genre — the sexual relations film — he’d never attempted before. As a director, I think he’d been wanting to explore that for a long time.”

He didn’t get the chance to explore it with Southern (the two had a falling-out over credit for Strangelove , although the writer, who died in 1995, did end up penning a 1970 novel called Blue Movie , dedicated to “Stanley K”). Instead, Kubrick went on to lens such unsexy masterpieces as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange , and The Shining . But he remained curious, finding inspiration for his A-list sex flick idea in — of all places — obscure early-20th-century Germanic literature. Specifically, Traumnovelle , a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler about a Viennese couple who take a walk on the uberspannt side.

Kubrick purchased the screen rights to the book around 1970 (actually, he had his pal Jay Cocks, then a TIME magazine reporter, now a screenwriter, buy them for him, to hide his interest in the project), but sat on the concept for another couple of decades. Then, in 1994 — seven years after the release of his penultimate film, Full Metal Jacket — he suddenly got interested again, hiring Raphael to update Schnitzler’s story in a screenplay. It turned out not to be such a sexy assignment (“I was Gaul and he was Caesar,” Raphael says of the collaboration), but it did provide the writer with plenty of material for a dissy, dishy memoir called Eyes Wide Open , published last month in a breach of the Kubrick code of silence that’s infuriated the director’s family, studio, and many of Eyes ‘ actors. (“If you write about this sacred conflict, cast me as Spartacus, leader of the slaves,” Raphael requests.)

According to Raphael’s tell-all, Kubrick had always intended on casting a married couple for the film — although the pair he thought of first were Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. But after Cruise and Kidman helicoptered to Kubrick’s English estate to take a meeting — holding hands the entire time, Raphael reports — the roles belonged to them. There were no problems filling the film’s other parts, either; in fact, Kubrick filled some of them twice. Harvey Keitel was originally cast as Cruise’s millionaire orgy-going bud but was replaced by Sydney Pollack when scheduling conflicts came up during filming. Jennifer Jason Leigh also left in mid-production (scheduling problems again, not acting ones), with Swedish actress Marie Richardson taking over her small role.

Meanwhile, Kubrick’s craftsmen set about erecting New York City on Pinewood’s backlots, re-creating Greenwich Village to painstakingly precise specifications. Kubrick went so far as to send workmen to Manhattan to measure street widths and note newspaper vending machine locations. He also dispatched cameramen to shoot real New York footage for rear-screen projection scenes of Cruise strolling around town (a cinematic trick that long predates the work of today’s digitized directors).

Because of the nature of the material — and also because it‘s how Kubrick always worked — filming on Eyes was an intensely intimate affair. Kubrick himself usually manned the camera, allowing only a handful of crew on the set. One outsider permitted to watch the proceedings was 29-year-old Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson (Cruise, who’ll be appearing in Anderson’s follow-up, Magnolia , smuggled him past security). “Kubrick had a really small crew,” recalls Anderson. “I asked him, ‘Do you always work with so few people?’ He gave me this look and said, ‘Why? How many people do you need?’ I felt like such a Hollywood a–hole.”

Although Raphael had spent two years toiling on scores of different drafts of the film, much of Eyes ended up being reworded on the fly. “We’d rehearse and rehearse a scene,” explains Field, “and it would change from hour to hour. We’d keep giving the script supervisor notes all the time, so by the end of the day the scene might be completely different. It wasn’t really improvisation,” he clarifies. “It was more like writing.”

Sometimes the rehearsing/rewriting process would go on all day. Then, finally, Kubrick would let the cameras roll. And roll. “Time was not of the essence,” understates Vinessa Shaw, the 23-year-old former teen star ( Ladybugs ) who signed on for a two-week stint playing a prostitute and ended up shooting for two months. “I remember one time, around three in the morning, I did my 69th take of a scene. Iheard somebody say, ‘Wow! That must be a record.’ And then I ended up doing 20 more takes.” Not that she’s complaining: “It gives you a real sense of freedom,” she goes on. “Doing a scene over and over, all of a sudden you see it as completely different. It gives you a chance to explore.”

She wasn’t the only Eyes cast member who found Kubrick’s compulsiveness exhilarating — at least at the beginning. “He’s got amazing energy,” Cruise gushed during those early weeks of shooting. “You work on a scene and you work on it and work on it — and you know you are not going to leave that shot until it‘s right.” Still, even Cruise’s enthusiasm started to flag by the end. “I was there for a month early on and Tom was so gung ho,” Shaw recalls. “And then I came back for another month at the end of the shoot and there was a difference. He was still into it, but not as energetic.” In fact, Cruise had developed an ulcer during filming.

For Kidman, the long hours and multiple retakes were the easy part. “As an actor, you have to be very truthful,” she explains, “and that can be difficult on a marriage. It was almost like discovering a new aspect of each other, which was exciting but also scary. People ask me, ‘God, why did you put yourselves through all that?’ And it is a strange thing for a couple to do. It‘s strange that all that stuff is going to be out there on the screen. There aren’t a lot of directors we’d do that for. But Stanley was much more than a director to us.”

He was much more than a director in other ways as well. After filming wrapped, he supervised the editing, as he did on most of his pictures, splicing miles of footage into a 2-hour-35-minute film. He was also the movie’s de facto marketer, laying out every detail of the picture’s publicity campaign (his widow, Christiane, 67, now has final say on marketing decisions). And he was always his best — or at least harshest — critic, working on his films up to the very last minute, and sometimes beyond (he cut The Shining by four minutes after its release).

What tweaks he might have made on Eyes we’ll never know (those digitized bodies that were posthumously inserted into the orgy scene, Austin Powers -style, to avoid an NC-17 rating, could’ve turned out differently, for one thing). “I think Stanley would have been tinkering with it for the next 20 years,” Kidman believes. “He was still tinkering with movies he made decades ago. He was never finished. It was never perfect enough.”

Not enough for him, perhaps. But to the rest of the world, no director ever came closer to perfection. Certainly none ever pushed harder or labored longer to achieve it. Just ask the older, wiser Tom Cruise. You can probably find him on his front porch, sipping a glass of warm milk.

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“eyes wide shut” – original 3 hour director’s cut.

In the special features section, on the “Eyes Wide Shut” DVD, there are three interviews, labeled under “Cast & Crew”.  Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Steven Spielberg.  (Why is Spielberg listed as a crew member?  Because he helped cut the missing 29 minutes.)

Contrary to what Warner Bros. execs said at the time, they were not “delighted” with the original version of “Eyes Wide Shut”.  They didn’t like it, didn’t understand it and wanted cuts.  Director Stanley Kubrick said “no,” (he had final authority), until he was found dead four days later from a heart attack.

Edited scene:  Originally, Alice does have a brief sexual encounter with Sander Szavost at the Christmas party.  (Song follows, titled “Baby did a Bad Thing”.)

Sky du Mont as Sander Szavost with Nicole Kidman as Alice.

Edited:  Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) is betraying Bill Harford (Tom Cruise.)  Alice (Nicole Kidman) is being used as a sex slave by the Illuminati-like lodge, and by Ziegler himself.

Probably the most interesting sequence rumored to be cut is Alice Harford’s dream, which Nicole Kidman mentions indirectly.  The interviewer asks her why did she laugh while sleeping?  Kidman replies, “I was laughing at the imagery of the dream.”  Apparently, her character is a victim of a secret society (the Illuminati) and she’s remembering her MK-Ultra programming thru the dream.

Warner Bros. were especially disturbed by whatever was in this scene.

Further proof of the cut dream sequence occurs at the film’s conclusion.  At the toy store, Helena Harford (Madison Eginton) picks up a Barbie doll with wings.  In the edited dream, Alice is seen “flying”.  [ILLUMINATI BUTTERFLY SYBOLISM.]

Helena Harford shows mother an image of her other half.

Not edited, but not easily understood are the final scenes.  The daughter appears separated from her parents, while Alice keeps Bill occupied in conversation.  (As their daughter is being taken away by the secret society.)

Nicole Kidman said she’s seen the movie twice.  Is this a hint, i.e., once the original, twice, the cut version?

Of the three interviewed, she’s the only one who cries, saying Kubrick’s death “seemed wrong” and “that he had more to say.”

Tom Cruise describes his director as a “magical, wonderful guy.”

Tom Cruise with director Stanley Kubrick.

“Eyes Wide Shut”, three years in the making, was wearing on Cruise, who both “dreaded and looked forward to ending” the Dr. Bill Harford character.  Kubrick said, “Every scene, every moment, has to be earned.”  Cruise asks, “Just tell me how long is this gonna take?  Two years?”  Kubrick laughed, saying, “Tom, if it took that long, then everything they say about us is true!”  When asked about his death, Cruise replies that he had great concern for the movie – another indication that he was telling us something happened to “Eyes Wide Shut” after the director died.

Stanley Kubrick & Steven Spielberg

The Salieri of the piece is Steven Spielberg, who doesn’t talk about “Eyes Wide Shut” at all.  He mentions that he didn’t like “The Shining” at first, that Jack Nicholson’s performance was “Kabuki theater”; however, “Stanley’s films grow on you over time.”  For him, Kubrick’s best gifts were “his friendship” and “his impeccable craft, his compositions, and his films.”

Sketches for Kubrick’s concept for “A.I.”

In another interview, not on this DVD, Spielberg claims that Kubrick wanted him to direct “A.I.” (Artificial Intelligence.)  Kubrick would produce it.  What most people aren’t aware of is that Spielberg completely rewrote the script Kubrick wrote.  “A.I” (based on the short story “Summer Toys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss.)  “A.I.” was headed for darker themes, something Steven Spielberg wanted no part of.  Thus, with “A.I.” we have a Disneyized version of an unrealized Stanley Kubrick film.

As for any hope for the missing “Eyes Wide Shut” footage reappearing, it ain’t gonna happen.  The cast, the crew and Kubrick’s family have been sworn to secrecy.  Warners denies there ever were any major cuts.  (There is what is called the “European Version” containing 90 seconds more of orgy footage.)

A positive note:  only Stanley Kubrick would’ve dared make this movie and there are still clues to what can be learned from it.

Text ©2017-ERN

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'He finished with his life less than a week after he finished with his movie'

O n Saturday afternoon, just 12 hours before he died, Stanley Kubrick was his usual, expansive self. Sitting in his famously private home in Hertfordshire, surrounded by all the trappings of the nerd, Kubrick was engaged in a surprisingly mundane activity: the workaholic director was glued to the television, watching the Ireland-England rugby match.

Proving that he could engage in more than one activity at a time, Kubrick was also on the telephone to an old friend and colleague. While the two were supposed to be discussing the poster design for his latest film Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was providing a running commentary on the match, obsessing on the England scrum-half Kieran Bracken.

"I kept saying, 'Stanley, will you go away? I'm trying to watch the rugby too.' " Julian Senior, the grandly titled senior vice-president of European advertising and publicity at Warner Bros, the studio behind Eyes Wide Shut and every other Kubrick film for the last 19 years, was trying to make the most of his weekend.

Kubrick, however, was having none of it. "Stanley did not understand what weekends were," says Senior. "His work was his life. He was excited about the release of the film. He wanted to talk about the publicity schedule. It was the same voice we'd known for the last 20 years - young, vibrant. He'd had flu a couple of weeks ago but apart from that there was no hint of illness. He said: 'Let's think about what we're going to do. Get me a list of the top four or five magazines and the best writers. We'll do a few interviews.' "

Kubrick had finished an 80-second trailer for the film, to be shown tomorrow before an audience of 3,000 polyester suits at ShoWest, the forum for American exhibitors. But it is not just the polyester suits who are excited at the prospect. With speculation about the film at fever pitch before the director's death, the rumour mill has gone into overdrive since he died in his sleep at 4 o'clock on Sunday morning.

With a 15-month shoot, and over two-and-a-half years since the project got underway, Eyes Wide Shut had become one of the longest ever film productions. The question "Will he ever finish it?" had moved from humour to anxiety. On his death, the fans were sent into a state of panic, clogging up Internet chat lines with speculation about what the studio might do to the master's film. With Kubrick reportedly having a clause written into his contract that a film could only be released when he said so, and only in the final version he submitted, there were fears that Eyes Wide Shut would never be shown on a public screen.

Like A Clockwork Orange, which Kubrick withdrew from exhibition in the UK following the outcry over its effects on an impressionable youth and an even more impressionable establishment, it seemed that an unfinished Eyes Wide Shut might never be released. After all, could anyone imagine the ultimate perfectionist allowing anyone else to finish his film, even from the grave?

There have been several Kubrick projects over the years that have not seen the light of day, including an eastern European project and the rumoured - everything was rumour with Kubrick - film before Eyes Wide Shut, titled AI, shorthand for "artificial intelligence". Film-makers have an unhappy habit of dying mid-production, and many have left treatments behind which have been shot by their successors. Seen the new Kurasawa movie? Not yet, it is only just going into production. A year after the Japanese director died, his director of photography is shooting a script left behind by the master. And the habit of bringing in a director to finish someone else's work - usually because of a falling out with a studio or a star - led to Kubrick's decision to leave Hollywood and settle in England. Brought in to take over from director Anthony Mann on Spartacus, Kubrick's experiences with star and producer Kirk Douglas convinced him that the only way to play the Hollywood game was on his own terms.

But for once the paranoia surrounding Kubrick was misplaced. "The film that will be released is Stanley's film," says Senior. "The film is over, the trailer is done, he was working on the poster artwork. We'd even talked about which stills to use for the publicity." Then Senior, with his smooth, comforting Bob Monkhouse voice, chooses a strange turn of phrase. "Stanley finished with his life less than a week after he finished with his movie. If you'd stood back and written it, people would have laughed."

The polyester suits behind the American movie industry will not be the first to see the finished film. That privilege came on Tuesday last week, to an audience of just four. In the screening room at Warner's New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue were the company's two co-chairmen, Terry Semel and Robert Daley, and the film's two co-stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. None of them, it is safe to say, were wearing polyester suits.

The screening was an emotional affair. It was held in New York to suit the stars. Cruise was in New York with his wife before flying to Australia to begin work on the sequel to Mission: Impossible. Kidman was nursing a sore throat, the product of her Broadway run in David Hare's The Blue Room, which transferred from London earlier this year.

"Nicole and Tom were both weeping," says a source at the company. "Nicole kept saying, 'He was like a father figure to me'."

The film, the sole print to date, was taken by a member of Warner's staff from Kubrick's home near London to New York and then flown back the same day. As ever with Kubrick, secrecy was everything. Before and during filming, Warner's executives were reportedly shown the script in a London hotel. Kubrick would not allow them to take the screenplay, which was amended every day by Kubrick, out of the room. It even seems unlikely that co-writer Frederick Raphael knows too much about the final shape of the film.

But now, with a July release fixed for the US and the rest of the world pencilled in, starting with the UK in late August, tongues are looser about the film. The 70-year-old director reportedly called it his best film, and Warner's - or at least the two people at Warner's to have seen the film - say they are delighted with the finished result. Loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 short novel Dream Story, the German writer whose version of La Ronde provided the basis for Hare's The Blue Room, Eyes Wide Shut is the story of two sexual psychologists whose work crosses over into their personal lives. According to Kubrick, in a rare comment about the film: "It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality."

The film moves the action from Vienna to present day New York. Shot at Pinewood and laboriously reconstructed locations around England, it goes from a masked ball featuring hundreds of extras to a smaller masked orgy. Cruise's character is called Bill. Other than that, and some of the details of the location shooting, little is known.

"The couple's fantasies intersect and interact with their real lives," says Senior, who has seen "most of the film. Possibly that's the thread that connects it to his other films. Stanley had this thing about trying to control the uncontrollable. HAL, the computer in 2001, is supposed to deliver total control but becomes uncontrollable; the aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange produces a quite different result to that which was intended; in Full Metal Jacket, the soldiers being turned into killing machines for the Vietnam War turn in upon themselves." And now we have Cruise and Kidman playing a Manhattan couple charged with helping other people through their sexual dysfunction who find their dreams seeping into their reality - again, the theory cannot cope with the reality.

If the subject matter sounds difficult - and films about sexual dysfunction have a habit of bombing commercially - Warner's is confident about the prospects for Eyes Wide Shut. "It will have enormous appeal," says Senior, "Hollywood's favourite couple in a movie about sexual obsession and jealousy. One of the things I was due to talk with him about on Sunday was the Venice film festival. They'd already approached us and if somebody says we want to open the festival with Stanley Kubrick's film as a tribute, it would be churlish to turn them down."

And the rumours that there is still work to be done on the film? Kubrick would almost certainly have continued to tinker. He was known to attend cinemas screening his films to check that the projection and sound levels were right. Perfectionist? As one collaborator said: "There's nothing wrong with being a perfectionist." Tom Cruise, however, might disagree, and reportedly asserted his influence as a star during the filming of Eyes Wide Shut, telling the director that he probably had enough to work with when asked to do his 50th take walking through a door. Kubrick ended up with a million feet of film, which he has managed to edit down to two hours 21 minutes, the same length as 2001.

Following the New York screening, work will continue as normal, preparing the film for certification in the US, and then dubbing it for foreign territories, a process Kubrick would normally have worked on himself together with a translator. "Now the movie comes back, Stanley goes through the normal routine he always does," says Senior. "Does? Did... did - the word is what Stanley did."

What's in the can: a sneak preview

By Andrew Pulver

The origins Kubrick first went on record in 1972 saying he'd like to adapt Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream Story) - the same writer whose well-known play La Ronde was the source of Nicole Kidman's recent stage hit, The Blue Room. In the same year, Frederic Raphael published Who Were You With Last Night?, supposedly a novelisation of a Traumnovelle screenplay he'd written for Kubrick, but was shelved in favour of Barry Lyndon. Filming finally began November 4, 1996, and finished some time in June 1998.

The story Traumnovelle is set over a single night in Vienna, and has as its principal characters a doctor and his wife, Fridolin and Albertine. Kubrick described it to French critic Michel Ciment as follows: "The book opposes the real adventures of a husband and the fantasy adventures of his wife, and asks the question: is there a serious difference between dreaming a sexual adventure, and actually having one?" Kubrick and fellow scripter Frederic Raphael updated the story to contemporary New York, focusing on a married couple, both psychiatrists, who embark on a series of fantasy-fulfilling escapades involving sex, drugs and transvestitism.

The cast Kubrick cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and reports attest that they agreed to plentiful nudity and graphic sex scenes - so much so that Eyes Wide Shut is in danger of scoring a financially disastrous NC-17 rating in the US. Cruise reportedly dons women's clothing, and newspaper reports claimed that a leading clinical psychiatrist was brought on set to teach Kidman how to replicate a heroin injection authentically. High-profile casualties of the 18-month shoot include Harvey Keitel, who left after six months (no explanation was given, but Keitel has clashed with dictatorial directors before, notably being replaced on Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now); and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who had begun shooting the lead role in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ before Kubrick decided to reshoot all her scenes. Replacements were Sydney Pollack (director of Sabrina and The Way We Were; actor in Husbands And Wives) and Swedish actress Marie Richardson (The Best Intentions).

The locations Kubrick's well-known aversion to leaving England meant that, like Full Metal Jacket and Lolita, a foreign environment was simulated over here. Pinewood Studios, just outside London, housed most of the sets. Street scenes were filmed in London's Hatton Garden and Worship Street, both dressed to resemble New York. Kubrick filmed the climactic masked-ball-and-orgy at Elveden Hall near Bury St Edmunds, and Highclere Castle near Newbury. Another party scene was filmed at stately home Luton Hoo. Most notoriously, however, the production pitched up at transvestite cabaret bar Madame JoJo's in London's Soho. Scenes were also filmed at Hamley's toy store in Regent Street.

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Eyes wide shut: what the mask on the pillow means.

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's final movie starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but what does the mask on the pillow near the end mean?

What does the mask on the pillow at the end of Eyes Wide Shut   mean? Eyes Wide Shut cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a married couple, with the former playing a doctor who goes on a strange, sexually charged journey one night when his wife admits to having had adulterous thoughts. The movie is based on the 1920's novella Dream Story  and Kubrick developed the project for decades, and once considered a slightly more comedic take with Steve Martin in the lead role.

In keeping with the filmmaker's quest for perfection, the shoot for Eyes Wide Shut famously rolled on, with the movie holding the record for the longest consecutive shoot, as filming began in late 1996 and wrapped in mid-1998. Tragically it was the director's final film with Kubrick dying less than a week after screening an incomplete cut for the studio and its stars. The movie went through post-production following Stanley Kubrick's death, though some have argued about how much it represents his intended vision.

Related: Every Stanley Kubrick Movie Ranked, Worst To Best

While the final movie was greeted with somewhat mixed reviews at the time, the appreciation for Eyes Wide Shut has only grown since its 1999 debut. Like much of the director's work like The Shining , movie fans love to debate the symbolism and meaning of Eyes Wide Shut . There are many, many readings of the story available, with the movie itself embracing a sort of dream/nightmare logic. Masks - both literal and figurative - are a major motif, and one of the most important sequences is when Bill infiltrates a masked sex party at a remote mansion, which is being held by members of high society. He's eventually discovered and forced to remove his mask but is saved from a bleak fate by another masked woman who tried to warn him to leave earlier.

The second half of Eyes Wide Shut sees Bill being given ominous warnings from this secret society, and he can't seem to find his mask from the party. In one of the final scenes, Bill comes home and as he comes to bed he sees Alice ( Nicole Kidman ) sleeping next to the same Venetian mask he wore at the party. He then breaks down crying and confesses to Alice his misadventures of the past few days. The big question is how did the mask get there, and who left it?

The most obvious answer is Alice found the mask and left it out as a way to let Bill know she knew something was going on. This is the implication of Dream Story  too - with the movie being quite faithful to the structure of the novella - though Kubrick obviously leaves this moment up to interpretation. The second, and more terrifying suggestion, is the mask is a final warning from the secret society for Bill to drop any further investigation or the fate that befell the woman who saved him could be visited upon Alice.

One intriguing reading of the Eyes Wide Shut   mask being on the pillow is that it's only in Bill's head as if he's exhausted by trying to hide his attempts at infidelity or true feelings from Alice, leading to an emotional breakdown. Other interpretations are floating around, including the idea Alice was also at the party, and while there's no set meaning for how the mask got on that pillow, the idea Alice put it there herself seems to be the prevailing theory. Given how upset she appeared following his confession, it's very unlikely she knew exactly what he was out doing, however.

Next: The Shining: Why Stanley Kubrick Changed Stephen King's Story

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Eyes Wide Shut: What you never knew about the Stanley Kubrick movie starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman

FIFTEEN years ago Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman starred in Eyes Wide Shut. But they weren’t the director’s first choice to star in the film. Here’s what you never knew.

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FIFTEEN years ago Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, opened around the world.

Setting records for the longest shoot in movie history, it was an excruciating labour of love for lead stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — one that would often be traced back to the alleged start of their marriage’s decline. Throughout the process, cryptic reports implied that Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism had reached peak levels, which was especially eyebrow-raising given the film’s sexual explicitness. The director, who won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey , died of a heart attack in March 1999, days after screening the final cut. Had he lived, perhaps we’d have more perspective on the movie’s production — or perhaps not, as Kubrick was notoriously reclusive.

An excerpt from Amy Nicholson’s book, Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor , printed in Vanity Fair , offers details about the project’s goings-on. Coupled with a 1999 Entertainment Weekly article pegged to the film’s release and a Los Angeles Times report about its box-office expectations, the passage reveals some things you may not know about Eyes Wide Shut .

1. Kubrick always intended to cast an actual married couple as the movie’s leads, but Cruise and Kidman weren’t who he had in mind. The initial pair he thought of was Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

2. Sydney Pollack’s role first went to Harvey Keitel, who dropped out due to scheduling conflicts.

3. Jennifer Jason Leigh was originally tapped to play Marion Nathanson but left mid-production due to scheduling conflicts. Marie Richardson wound up playing that part.

4. When Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise arrived in London in the fall of 1996 to shoot the movie, they expected to be wrapped and back in Los Angeles by the following spring. Instead, the production didn’t conclude until January 1998, making it the Guinness World Record’s longest-running film shoot in history. (Kidman and Cruise reportedly signed open-ended contracts that stated they’d stick with the project no matter how long it took to complete.)

5. To say Kubrick is a perfectionist is an understatement: His intent was to film scenes so many times that it would wear down his actors and they’d forget the cameras existed. During the course of shooting Eyes Wide Shut , the director filmed 95 takes of Cruise walking through a door.

6. Cruise was so anxious about giving the legendary director what he wanted that he developed an ulcer. He never told Kubrick.

7. Frenzied tabloids ran reports that Cruise and Kidman’s marriage was crumbling in late ‘90s. If anything, that notion was only enhanced by their Eyes Wide Shut dynamic. Kubrick coaxed the couple into sharing their personal reservations about the marriage with him, in turn transferring those troubles onto their characters, Bill and Alice. Kidman called it a kind of “brutally honest” anti-therapy, as no one asked how they felt about each other’s criticisms.

8. Director Todd Field ( Little Children , In the Bedroom ), who starred in the movie as piano player Nick Nightingale, said of Kidman and Cruise: “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.”

9. Kubrick was terrified of flying, so instead of travelling to New York City to shoot in Greenwich Village, he built a top-secret replica of the neighbourhood at England’s Pinewood Studios. A set designer was sent to measure the exact width of the streets and distance between newspaper stands.

10. Kubrick allowed only a skeleton crew to remain on the set throughout filming. One rare outsider permitted to watch the action unfold was Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson. Cruise was in talks for the lead role in Anderson’s Magnolia and had to sneak him past security. ‘’I asked [Kubrick], ‘Do you always work with so few people?’ Anderson recalled. “He gave me this look and said, ‘Why? How many people do you need?’ I felt like such a Hollywood a**hole.’’

11. Cruise isn’t the only actor who filmed dozens of takes. Vinessa Shaw, who played the prostitute Domino, recalled having shot about 90 takes for a single scene.

12. Had Kubrick not died before the movie opened, he may still be making adjustments to it today, like he did with The Shining after its release. “I think Stanley would have been tinkering with it for the next 20 years,” Kidman said. “He was still tinkering with movies he made decades ago. He was never finished. It was never perfect enough.”

13. Warner Bros. wanted a $20 million opening weekend to consider the movie a success. It surpassed that, grossing $21.7 million across 2,400 screens. Marketing tracking studies for the film showed it had an awareness level of 78 but lacked the first-choice status among moviegoers that other summer fare like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Big Daddy saw.

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post .

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Stanley Kubrick’s final movie was also his most beguiling

Have a sexy, existentially troubling Christmas.

Stanley Kubrick’s name is synonymous with some of cinema’s most impenetrable and alluring mysteries. Between 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining , the famous auteur was noteworthy for refusing easy answers, creating lasting works of art that are still heavily interrogated. So when the filmmaker passed away on March 7th, 1999, a mere six days after screening a cut of his final film for his inner circle, it was guaranteed that Eyes Wide Shut would become a crucial fixation for pop culture’s unyielding obsession with conspiracy.

After reading the Austrian novella Dream Story shortly after the release of 2001, Kubrick spent the next three decades entertaining the thought of adapting it. Arthur Schnitzler’s original story was a quintessential piece of the decadent movement, which championed hedonistic maximalism over logic and realism, and Kubrick initially considered making it an audacious sex comedy.

The final product is anything but; despite its playfulness, the film is uncanny and haunting, and the decision to update the setting from early-1900s Vienna to 1990s New York City throws it into the midst of America’s fixation on the secret lives of the rich and powerful. Exploding outwards from the consequences of Watergate, Americans are obsessed with the idea of a sinister and politically influential cabal of wealthy elites. Eyes Wide Shut takes the paranoia of ’70s conspiracy thrillers and grafts it onto a Christmastime relationship drama, asking us to peel back the curtain and interrogate our own notions of sex, love, and nuclear domesticity.

In the ’70s, when Kubrick initially considered adapting Dream Story, he wanted to cast someone who would have “ a comedian’s resilience, ” such as Steve Martin or Woody Allen. But Warner Bros. wanted a movie star in the role, eventually leading to the casting of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Bill Harford and his wife, Alice. Eyes Wide Shut follows Bill’s dreamlike odyssey into an underground world of sexual debauchery and danger after Alice reveals to him that she nearly had an affair the year prior, and there’s a bit of delicious irony in the fact that Cruise and Kidman were married at the time. The film brilliantly shreds Cruise’s rugged ’90s charisma, exposing a rawness and embarrassing vulnerability in the face of Kidman’s coy, multifaceted sensuality.

As a director, Kubrick always maintained intense, complex, and sometimes abusive relationships with his actors. He was exacting upon his two leads, often demanding dozens of takes (including one infamous example of Tom Cruise walking through a door 95 times ), but he also intentionally blurred the line between character and performer. He encouraged Kidman and Cruise to share intimate anxieties about marriage with him, and in one stinging example, he asked Kidman to shoot six days of sex scenes with another actor for a short dream sequence that tortures Bill throughout the movie.

Perfect plot points for a classic Christmas movie.

Kubrick’s direction nourishes a distance in Bill and Alice, one born of two conflicting interpretations of marriage. Bill thinks the security his wealth provides is enough to keep Alice content with the domestic expectations placed upon her as a wife and mother, but he’s shocked to discover that she has sexual desires and the agency to act on them. For the first time, he sees her without the curtain of marriage, and it shakes him to the core.

So begins a man’s odyssey to reclaim his masculinity, and Cruise’s journey into the heart of New York City comes alive with Christmas lights and neon-bathed temptation. Larry Smith, who had served as a gaffer on Barry Lyndon and The Shining, was chosen by Kubrick to be the cinematographer, and his mesmerizing camerawork feels as dark and encroaching as something out of Taxi Driver. Much of Eyes Wide Shut’s runtime is dedicated to Bill’s journey through the streets of NYC, as he observes several awkward, illicit, and potentially dangerous sexual encounters. The potentiality of Alice’s affair and Bill’s resulting emasculation seems to open a portal to a dreamscape, one in which Bill discovers just how much of the world around him is governed by humanity’s baser natures.

And cool outfits.

Look no further than the most iconic scene in the movie. After encountering an old friend, a piano player named Nick Nightingale (played by current awards season frontrunner Todd Field), Bill sneaks into an intensely private upper-class party that turns out to be an elaborate masked orgy. Accompanied by Jocelyn Pook’s foreboding and ominous score (responsible for what might as well be the de-facto soundtrack for cults everywhere), both the audience and Bill are thrust into a world where the rich and powerful have bought the ability to release their deepest inhibitions. For most of society, sex is shameful, a temptation to be suppressed and hidden until domesticized, but the open secret of power and status is that it’s nothing more than an excuse to indulge the most instinctual desires of the flesh. It’s a desire that’s so simple it’s almost novel, but as Bill discovers, it’s one that they might be willing to kill for to keep secret.

Like Kubrick’s other works, Eyes Wide Shut has become a passionate source of discussion and analysis, with its real-world implications arguably more popular than the film itself. Conspiracists believe the movie is Kubrick’s bombshell exposé on the real Illuminati, and some go so far as to suggest they had him killed over it. In his typical, ghastly sense of humor, Kubrick does offer to reveal a sort of diabolical conspiracy, even if it’s not the one you might think. Eyes Wide Shut quietly invites you to consider what lies beneath the mask you’ve constructed for your significant other. What secrets do they keep, and what desires do they hunger for? And, perhaps most urgently, how badly do you want to know?

Eyes Wide Shut is streaming on Netflix until December 31.

How Many Films Did Tom Cruise And Nicole Kidman Star In Together?

When we talk about the '90s power couples, there are a few that have stuck in our minds through the decades. Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman , Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, and of course, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. These iconic couples had people invested in their relationships from the moment they were spotted arm-in-arm on a red carpet all the way to the second news of their breakups broke.

Kidman and Cruise, in particular, caused a great stir when their marriage ended. Everybody remembers the striking image of Kidman as she strolled the streets in apparent glee as the divorce was finalized. Later, the "Big Little Lies" star opened up about the relationship saying, "Our life together was perfect. It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system," she added, "That was a great relationship. I think it ran its course. I was really damaged and not sure whether [love and marriage] was ever going to happen again to me," via InTouch Weekly . 

But as we all know, it all worked out in the end. Kidman found love in singer Keith Urban while Cruise went on to marry Katie Holmes and have a child with her before splitting up after six years of matrimony. And while Cruise and Kidman's marriage didn't last, it's safe to say their contributions to cinema will stand the test of time, especially in the movies they did together. 

Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise starred in three movies together

Unsurprisingly, the two Hollywood stars' paths first crossed on the set of the film, "Days of Thunder." In a 2017 interview with People , Nicole Kidman fondly reminisced about the first time she saw Tom Cruise during an audition for her role in the film, "I remember being so nervous and seeing Tom Cruise drive up in a Porsche [. . .] and he got out of the car and walked through, and I was like 'Ah!' and my jaw dropped." She also added that she was intimidated auditioning in front of the movie's executives and Cruise and believed she wouldn't get the part. But she was called and offered the role on the very same day.

Although Kidman had previously gained notoriety from working in the Australian thriller, "Dead Calm," and several other Australian films, she broke through the American film scene with "Days of Thunder." At the time of filming, Kidman was 22, while Cruise was 28 and in the process of getting a divorce from his first wife, Mimi Rogers. In a 1995 interview with Playboy , Rogers would share that the marriage primarily ended due to Cruise's desire to become a monk, which didn't happen. Months before the film's release in 1990, the divorce was finalized and Kidman and Cruise went public shortly after. The actors wed in a private ceremony on Christmas Eve that same year.

Eyes Wide Shut was one of their most notable projects

In 1992, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise appeared in their first film as a married couple, "Far and Away." And while the film did relatively well, their big break as an iconic Hollywood couple would happen in 1999 with Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." The official trailer for the film featured several explicit scenes, including some steamy kisses shared between the real-life couple.

Unsurprisingly, the couple's chemistry sizzled in the erotic mystery. In 1995, the couple admitted to Vanity Fair that their initial attraction was sexual. Kidman gushed, "I thought he was the sexiest man I'd ever seen in my life." And Cruise also said something similar, "Instant lust, that's what I felt," he added, "I thought she was amazingly sexy and stunning. It grew into love and respect."

Due to the themes of infidelity in the movie and their striking performances, many believed that Kidman and Cruise were tapping into real-life emotions. But Kidman denied these rumors in a 2020 interview with The New York Times , "We were happily married through that," she added, "We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We'd rent out a place and go racing at 3 in the morning." Sadly, the couple's divorce was finalized in 2001 after 11 years of marriage. Although the pair has been vague about what went down behind the scenes, many have speculated that this might be why they really got divorced . 

Nicole Kidman Seems To Shade Tom Cruise As She Reveals Love Advice She’d Give Her Younger Self

The actress has been honest about how depressed she felt after their high-profile divorce and reveals how she got through it.

• Nicole Kidman reflects on her past struggles with Tom Cruise and offers advice to be kinder to oneself.
• She credits her loved ones with saving her from depression and helping her navigate challenges.
• Kidman opens up about the impact of her darker roles on her mental health, highlighting the importance of family support.

Before she was married to Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman was known for her high-profile marriage to Tom Cruise . The pair went through an infamous divorce after a decade together, which culminated with their two adopted kids choosing to live with Cruise.

While Kidman has been careful about what she says to the media about her ex-husband, she recently shared the candid advice she wishes she could go back in time to tell her younger self.

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Nicole kidman wishes she’d been kinder to herself.

“Be kind to yourself,” Kidman said to PEOPLE on Wednesday, May 10. “I’m my toughest critic. My biggest thing would be ‘Go easy on yourself, Nicky.”

She went on to give an update about her current marriage and the two teen daughters she’s raising with her country singer husband. “I have my sister, mother, nieces, nephews, daughters. I’m raising a soon to be 16-year-old and a 13-year-old who are divine,” Nicole, 56, said of her support system.

“They’re just lovely people and I’m so lucky that I have Keith, who’s just my love, my deep, deep love. That gives me the ability to go and do whatever I have to do because I know where I can come back to,” she continued.

The actress credits those around her for helping her stay sane in the ace of pressure, both from her career and living life in the spotlight.

Kidman Says Her Loved Ones Saved Her From Depression

“I’ve had so many mentors. I’ve had so many people that when you reach out and you go, ‘I’m really in need of help right now,’ they have appeared, saved me, helped me, taught me, guided me and been unbelievably generous towards me,” she continued. “I am the recipient of an enormous amount of love. A lot of people have believed in me and given me the courage and opportunity when they didn’t have to. I’m always passing that on.”

Kidman has previously expressed how difficult it was having her marriage to Cruise thrown in the headlines, adding that even the aftermath of their divorce left her in a fragile mental state . She’s credited her husband Urban for helping her bounce back after dark times.

These Nicole Kidman Movies Have Grossed Over $100 Million At The Box Office

More recently, Kidman has shared how some of her darker roles have affected her mentally, crediting her family for being a constant source of support, including while filming her recent Amazon series Expats about a mother whose child goes missing while they were living abroad.

Referring to the scene where Kidman reacts to the child going missing, she told The Guardian , “ I said, I cannot, cannot do this.’ It was like when a donkey just goes, ‘I’m not going,’”

“I was alone in Hong Kong without my family, which was a terrible mistake,” she further said of the experience. "I couldn’t just get on a plane and get to them. And they couldn’t get to me. That affected the performance, to the degree that it also affected my psyche.”

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Far and Away

A young Irish couple flee to the States, but subsequently struggle to obtain land and prosper freely. A young Irish couple flee to the States, but subsequently struggle to obtain land and prosper freely. A young Irish couple flee to the States, but subsequently struggle to obtain land and prosper freely.

• Nicole Kidman
• Thomas Gibson
• 161 User reviews
• 38 Critic reviews
• 49 Metascore
• 3 nominations

• Joseph Donnelly

• Shannon Christie

• Stephen Chase

• Daniel Christie

• Nora Christie

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia In Ireland, this movie has become something of a cult classic comedy for some due to the notoriously bad "Oirish" accents.
• Goofs When Joseph and Shannon step off the ship in America, vendors are selling American flags with 50 stars.

[about Grace]

Shannon Christie : She's got an awfully large chest to be goin' to church.

Joseph Donnelly : Shannon, all chests are equal in the eyes of the Lord.

• Crazy credits Near the end of the credits, special thanks are given to, among others, Fungi the Dingle Dolphin (although the correct spelling of the dolphin's name is Fungie).
• When Joseph's dad dies, there is some added material where the dad says, "I've given you nothing, you boys. A small mold cottage on a bit of rock that isn't even ours, full of hollow labor." Also, there is a bit where the priest there looks at the dying dad curiously as he says his last words.
• Connections Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Sister Act/Encino Man/Alien³/Far and Away (1992)
• Soundtracks Book of Days Music Composed and Performed by Enya Lyrics by Roma Ryan Produced by Nicky Ryan Courtesy of Warner Music (U.K.), Ltd.

User reviews 161

• Aug 10, 2007
• How long is Far and Away? Powered by Alexa
• May 22, 1992 (United States)
• United States
• Un horizonte lejano
• Billings, Montana, USA (Oklahoma land rush)
• Imagine Entertainment
• Universal Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $60,000,000 (estimated)
• $58,883,840
• $10,194,520
• May 24, 1992
• $137,783,840

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 20 minutes

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30 Years Ago Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman Adopted Two Kids- This is What They Look Like Today

I n the realm of Hollywood, where fame often casts a glaring spotlight on every aspect of one’s life, there exist enigmatic figures who navigate the shadows with quiet grace. Among them are Isabella and Connor Cruise , the adoptive children of legendary actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Since their parents parted ways in 2001, the siblings have largely eluded the public eye, cultivating a mysterious aura around their lives.

Cruise and Kidman, whose union captivated fans worldwide, embarked on their journey into parenthood through adoption. Isabella, fondly known as Bella, entered their lives two years after their marriage, filling a void left by a heartbreaking ectopic pregnancy experienced by Kidman. The family grew again in 1995 with the adoption of Connor, cementing their bond through shared love and commitment.

Despite their challenges, Cruise and Kidman remained dedicated to their craft and family. Their professional collaboration on the set of “Eyes Wide Shut” in 1999 served as a testament to their enduring connection, with Kidman recalling moments of joy amidst the demanding shoot. However, the idyllic facade shattered in 2001 when Cruise filed for divorce, marking the end of an era for the once inseparable couple.

Tom Cruise's adopted children were suddenly faced with an incredible challenge

In the aftermath of their split, Tom Cruise's adopted children found themselves navigating a new reality. Divided between their parents’ residences on opposite sides of the globe. As Cruise embarked on a new chapter with Katie Holmes, their children adapted to the dynamics of a blended family, forging bonds with their stepmother and half-sibling.

Despite their physical distance from Kidman, Isabella expressed affection for her mother in rare public statements. Affirming the enduring ties that bind their family together. However, significant family events, such as Isabella’s wedding in 2015, unfolded without the presence of her famous parents, underscoring the complexities of their relationship dynamics.

Where are they today?

Today, Bella Kidman Cruise remains a largely private figure, opting to keep her life out of the public eye. While details about her current endeavors are scarce, it’s known that she has pursued interests in art and fashion. Bella has occasionally shared glimpses of her artwork on social media platforms, showcasing her talent and creative expression.

Beyond her artistic pursuits, she appears to maintain a low-profile lifestyle, avoiding the trappings of celebrity culture. Despite her famous lineage, Bella seems content to carve her path on her terms. Away from the spotlight that often accompanies her family name. Her journey serves as a testament to her resilience and independence, forging her identity separate from the legacy of Hollywood fame.

Read More:  Tom Cruise's Adoptive Son Connor Quit Hollywood to Live Quiet, Peaceful Life As Fisherman

Connor Cruise , much like his sister Bella, continues to lead a private life away from the glare of the public spotlight. While details about his current endeavors are limited, it’s known that he has dabbled in various creative pursuits. These include music and DJing, and fishing. Connor has occasionally shared snippets of his DJ performances on social media platforms, showcasing his passion for music and performance.

Beyond his artistic interests, he appears to maintain a low-key lifestyle, eschewing the trappings of celebrity culture. Despite being the son of two Hollywood icons, Connor seems to prefer anonymity. Focusing on his personal growth and pursuits outside of the spotlight. His journey reflects a desire for autonomy and authenticity, as he forges his path away from the shadow of his famous parents.

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• “Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's Kids Isabella and Connor Through the Years: Photos” US Weekly .  Johnni Macke  May 1, 2023.

The post 30 Years Ago Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman Adopted Two Kids- This is What They Look Like Today appeared first on Secret Life Of Mom .