On July 16, 2024, Stanley Kubrick ’s Eyes Wide Shut, one of the most talked-about and controversial movies of all time, turned 25. Thanks to Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise ’s high-profile marriage, the 1999 film was shrouded in gossip from the moment it began filming in 1997 – including rumours that the filming process was abusive and toxic. Famously tough on actors (he gave Shelley Duvall a nervous breakdown during The Shining’s filming), Kubrick demanded unwavering devotion and cult-like secrecy from Kidman and Cruise, who played a married couple in the film.
In fact, the shoot took a staggering 15 months, setting the Guinness World Record for the longest continual film shoot. Throughout this time period, Kubrick insisted his stars immerse themselves in their characters, intentionally blurring the line between reality and fiction as he psychologically wore them down by asking them to shoot upwards of 50 takes of each scene. Kubrick insisted this repetition broke down the facade of performance by exhausting the actors so that they would recite their lines in new and unexpected ways, creating characters they would otherwise be unable to access.
The couple also slept in their characters’ bedroom throughout filming because Kubrick wanted to merge the world of the movie and the couple’s real marriage. Cruise, a famously dedicated actor who insists on perfection, was an ideal target for this kind of obsessive devotion to craft. So much so that, according to Vanity Fair , he developed a stomach ulcer while filming and then sought to keep this from Kubrick.
But Cruise defended Kubrick repeatedly to the press, saying ‘He was not indulgent. You know you are not going to leave that shot until it’s right.’ But it wasn’t just the endless takes that wore on Cruise.
Kubrick refused to let the actor see any dailies (the shots from the day) of his performance, an aspect of filming usually vital to Cruise’s process. ‘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.
’ Instead of allowing the Mission Impossible actor to follow his usual process, Kubrick insisted on deep psychological analysis of Cruise and Kidman’s characters. In hours-long conversations, Kubrick sat with the couple and asked them to confess their deepest fears, their thoughts on marriage and commitment, and even reveal details about their sexual pasts. ‘Tom would hear things that he didn’t want to hear,’ admitted Kidman about these sessions, which both actors vowed to keep secret.
‘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.’ After the movie was done filming, Kidman later acknowledged that Kubrick’s methods had the potential to be toxic. ‘As an actor, you set up: there’s reality, and there’s pretend,’ she said.
‘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,’ she concluded, according to Vanity Fair . According to Todd Field, who played piano player Nick Nightingale in the movie, Kidman and Cruise were all but brainwashed by Kubrick’s methods.
‘You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director,’ he told Grouch reviews in an interview. While Kidman and Cruise have always been largely positive when discussing their time working with Kubrick, some of the details from the process are undeniably bordering on toxic – making Cruise’s stomach ulcer more than a little understandable. In one of Cruise’s character’s imaginings, he sees a vision of his wife having sex with another man.
While the scene itself is no more than a minute long, Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model and pose in countless erotic positions. If this wasn’t exploitative and questionable enough, he forbade Cruise from the set during this process and told Kidman she was not to tell her husband anything about what happened, which was reportedly intended to increase jealousy and tension between the couple. The critical reception of Eyes Wide Shut was mixed, with many calling Cruise’s performance overwrought and disconnected.
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‘You can see that they didn’t quite grasp what the movie was, even when they saw it, because they carried the baggage in.’ ‘You have to understand: it’s Stanley Kubrick. It’s not going to be what you think it is.
And he’s not going to tell you everything. So even the people who think they know Stanley Kubrick’s movies, missed it,’ he continued. ‘Because whatever preconception you have, you’ve got to take it on its own merits and not the surrounding elements.
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