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Eyes Wide Shut

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Rent Eyes Wide Shut on Fandango at Home, or buy it on Fandango at Home.

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

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Stanley Kubrick

Dr. William Harford

Nicole Kidman

Alice Harford

Sydney Pollack

Victor Ziegler

Marie Richardson

Rade Serbedzija

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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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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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Share All sharing options for: Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999

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.

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20 Eye-Opening Facts About Eyes Wide Shut

By meredith danko | jul 15, 2020, 4:00 pm edt.

Warner Bros./Liaison via Getty Images Plus

In the late 1990s, stories about what was happening on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s already-secretive film Eyes Wide Shut constantly made headlines. Everyone wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes with real-life celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and the 15-month shoot only intrigued people more. Finally, the film was released on July 16, 1999—more than four months after Kubrick had passed away. While there is still a lot we don’t know about the movie, here are 20 things we do.

1. Eyes Wide Shut is based on a 1926 novella.

Eyes Wide Shut is loosely is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle ( Dream Story ) , which was published in 1926. Considering that the movie takes place in 1990s New York, it is obviously not a direct adaptation, but it overlaps in its plot and themes. “[The book] explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality,” Kubrick said . “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?”

2. Production on Eyes Wide Shut began in 1996.

By then, Kubrick had been holding onto the rights to Traumnovelle —which screenwriter Jay Cocks purchased on his behalf, in order to keep the project under wraps—for nearly 30 years. Kubrick had planned to begin working on the film after making 2001 : A Space Odyssey , but then got the opportunity to adapt A Clockwork Orange .

3. The studio pushed Stanley Kubrick to cast A-list names.

Terry Semel, then-head of Warner Bros., told Kubrick , “What I would really love you to consider is a movie star in the lead role; you haven't done that since Jack Nicholson [in The Shining ].”

4. Stanley Kubrick wanted to cast Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

Kubrick liked the idea of casting a real-life married couple in the film, and originally considered Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. (He also liked the idea of Steve Martin .) Eventually, he went with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were married from 1990 to 2001.

5. London stood in for New York City.

Though the film is set in New York, it was filmed in London. In order to construct the most accurate sets possible, Vanity Fair reported that Kubrick “sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines.”

6. Some of the shots in Eyes Wide Shut required no set at all.

In order to give the movie a dream-like quality, the filmmakers used an old-school method of shooting—and a treadmill. “In some of the scenes, the backgrounds were rear-projection plates,” cinematographer Larry Smith explained . “Generally, when Tom’s facing the camera, the backgrounds are rear-projected; anything that shows him from a side view was done on the streets of London. We had the plates shot in New York by a second unit [that included cinematographers Patrick Turley, Malik Sayeed and Arthur Jafa]. Once the plates were sent to us, we had them force-developed and balanced to the necessary levels. We’d then go onto our street sets and shoot Tom walking on a treadmill. After setting the treadmill to a certain speed, we’d put some lighting effects on him to simulate the glow from the various storefronts that were passing by in the plates. We spent a few weeks on those shots.”

7. Eyes Wide Shut holds a Guinness World Record.

The film has a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest constant movie shoot, with a total of 400 days , which was a surprise to the cast and crew. Cruise and Kidman had only committed to six months of filming. The extended shoot was a lot to ask of Cruise in particular, who was at the height of his career. He even had to delay work on Mission: Impossible II to finish Eyes Wide Shut . He didn’t seem to mind though. “We knew from the beginning the level of commitment needed,” Cruise told TIME . “We were going to do what it took to do this picture.”

8. The script for Eyes Wide Shut kept changing.

According to Todd Field , who portrayed piano player Nick Nightingale (and is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker in his own right), “We’d rehearse and rehearse a scene, 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, it was more like writing.”

9. Tom Cruise developed ulcers while shooting Eyes Wide Shut .

“I didn't want to tell Stanley," Cruise told TIME . “He panicked. I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up. You try not to kick things up, but you go through things you can't help.”

10. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman slept in their characters' bedroom.

In order to reflect their real-life relationship, Cruise and Kidman were asked to choose the color for the curtains in their on-screen bedroom, where they also slept .

11. The apartment featured in the movie was a re-creation of Stanley Kubrick's.

According to Cruise , “The apartment in the movie was the New York apartment [Stanley] and his wife Christianne lived in. He recreated it. The furniture in the house was furniture from their own home. Of course the paintings were Christianne's paintings. It was as personal a story as he's ever done.”

12. Stanley Kubrick temporarily banned Tom Cruise from the set.

Given his penchant for accuracy, it’s quite possible that Kubrick wanted to stir up some real-life jealousy between his stars in order to help them embody their characters. In a fantasy sequence, Kidman’s character has sex with another man, which motivates the rest of the film’s plot. Kubrick banned Cruise from the set on the days that Kidman shot the scene with a male model. They spent six days filming the one-minute scene. Kubrick also forbid Kidman from telling Cruise any details about it.

13. It took 95 takes for Tom Cruise to walk through a doorway.

Six days for a one-minute scene is nothing compared to the time Kubrick had Cruise do 95 takes of one simple action: walking through a doorway. After watching the playback, he apparently told Cruise, “Hey, Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star.”

14. Security on the set was tight.

Aside from Kubrick, Kidman, Cruise, and their tiny crew, no one was allowed on the set, which was heavily guarded. In May 1997, one photographer managed to capture a picture of Cruise standing next to a man that the photographer thought was just an “old guy, scruffy with an anorak and a beard.” That man was Kubrick, who hadn’t been photographed in 17 years. After the incident, security on the set was tripled.

15. Paul Thomas Anderson spent some time on the set.

One person Cruise did manage to sneak onto the set was his future Magnolia director, Paul Thomas Anderson. While there, Anderson asked Kubrick, “Do you always work with so few people?” Kubrick responded, “Why? How many people do you need?” Anderson then recalled feeling “like such a Hollywood a**hole.”

16. Stanley Kubrick makes a cameo in the movie.

He’s not credited, but the film’s director can be seen sitting in a booth at the Sonata Café.

17. Stanley Kubrick died less than a week after showing the studio his final cut of Eyes Wide Shut .

Kubrick died less than a week after showing what would be his final cut of the film to Warner Bros. No one can say how much he would have kept editing the film. One thing that was changed after his death: bodies in the orgy scene were digitally altered so that the movie could be released with an R (rather than an NC-17) rating. Although many claim that Kubrick intended to do this, too. "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.”

18. By the time Eyes Wide Shut was released, a dozen years had passed since Stanley Kubrick's last directorial effort.

Eyes Wide Shut came out a full 12 years after Kubrick’s previous film, 1987's Full Metal Jacket .

19. Eyes Wide Shut topped the box office during its opening week.

The film earned $30,196,742 during its first week in release, which was enough to take the box office’s number one spot—making it Kubrick’s only film to do so.

20. Tom Cruise didn't like Dr. Harford.

One year after the film’s release, Cruise admitted that he “didn’t like playing Dr. Bill. I didn’t like him. It was unpleasant. But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn’t done this.”

An earlier version of this article ran in 2015.

13 Facts You May Not Know About Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Senior Entertainment Reporter, HuffPost

Dr. William Harford (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) in Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut.' (Photo by Warner Bros)

Fifteen years ago, on July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," opened nationwide. Setting records for the longest shoot in movie history, it was an excruciating labor 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. Sidney 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 traveling to New York City to shoot in Greenwich Village, he built a top-secret replica of the neighborhood 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 asshole.''

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.

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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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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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Eyes Wide Shut Ending, Explained

Eyes Wide Shut is the final film of legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and delivers a brilliant ending with many ambiguous messages and symbolism.

Eyes Wide Shut is a dreamlike masterpiece filled with symbolism, allegories, and ambiguous endings that ignite heated discussions in the film community.
The character Milich in the film represents a change in attitude towards the protagonist, suggesting he is aware of the secret society and its activities.
The true meaning of Eyes Wide Shut explores the fragility of masculinity, the decay of marriage and anonymity in a patriarchal society, and the necessity of masks and secrets in relationships.

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's final feature and the director's most dreamlike movie, ending on an ambiguous note. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star in the movie as Bill and Alice, an ordinary couple faced with a harrowing dilemma after a night out. When Alice openly discusses the sexual fantasies she had in the past, Bill sets out on an ethereal nocturnal journey that will lead him to a mysterious secret society.

Kubrick ends his legendary career with yet another masterpiece filled with symbolism and allegories. It's difficult to even describe what kind of movie Eyes Wide Shut is, as it flirts with many genres such as drama, romance, and thriller. Kubrick's exhaustive directing method took the best out of Cruise and Kidman , and the two deliver unmatched onscreen chemistry and some of their best performances ever. However, the film's enigmatic ending continues to ignite heated discussions in the film community.

What Happens in Eyes Wide Shut's Ending?

Eyes wide shut.

After a series of suspicious events involving Bill's appearance at a sexual group's secret meeting, Bill finally learns from his friend Ziegler that his life is not in danger and his paranoia is the result of unfortunate coincidences, including the death of the woman who helped him that night. A troubled Bill comes home to his wife and breaks down, confiding in her everything and promising to be truthful from now on. While Eyes Wide Shut ultimately comes full circle in the end, a lot of what happens in Bill's nocturnal odyssey remains ambiguous, offering more questions than answers for the audience to dissect.

What's the Purpose of Milich in Eyes Wide Shut?

A lot of what happens in the first hour of Eyes Wide Shut only pays off in the film's final moments, and even some of the longer sequences can only be understood when looking carefully beyond the surface. The whole scene at Milich's shop is extremely awkward and all over the place, adding hints of humor to the narrative while simultaneously building up tension to something that appears to be off. At some point, Milich finds his underage daughter having sexual intercourse with two older men in the back of the shop. He gets extremely hysterical and threatens to call the police. On the other hand, his daughter calmly holds tightly to Bill and whispers that he should "have a cloak lined with ermine."

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The words whispered by Milich's daughter seem to indicate she knows about Bill's destination, something that perfectly fits with the movie's mystical atmosphere. While it's difficult to jump to conclusions, the scene in which Bill returns his costume to Milich makes it all the more obvious. Milich's daughter shows up in underwear alongside the same two men from before. This time, Milich is not only completely nonchalant about it, but also offers his daughter to Bill. This scene suggests that Milich is now aware of Bill's activities in the secret society, thus changing his attitude toward Bill, letting his mask fall off and disclosing his true wicked nature.

Who Was the Masked Woman That Helped Bill?

At the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut , a young woman called Mandy, whom Ziegler was having an affair with, overdoses in his room and Dr. Bill is assigned to assist her. The incident isn't discussed again until Bill infiltrates the masked orgy his buddy Nick mentioned. When people immediately perceive him as an outsider, a mysterious masked woman warns Bill he's in great danger and must leave as soon as he can. It's left unclear how the woman and the rest of the group identified Bill as an intruder so easily, but the cab driver he left waiting on the outside is one of the most obvious indications.

When Bill is summoned by a man in a red cloak and judged in front of the whole group, the masked woman steps up and offers herself to be punished in Bill's place. The woman in question turns out to be Mandy, whom Bill helped in Ziegler's room. When he hears of her death by overdose the day after the secret meeting, Bill immediately suspects she really did sacrifice her life in exchange for his.

Mandy's death ends up being one of the unsolved mysteries of the movie. While Ziegler later calls Mandy a "junkie" and claims that she had it coming, it's difficult not to suspect that there's something darker about his masked sexual encounters. The whole ritualistic aspect of the secret meeting indicates that something out of an ordinary orgy was going on in there, and he might have been responsible for Mandy's death.

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Who was the red cloak.

The true identity of the Red Cloak figure, supposedly the leader of the secret meeting, isn't revealed, and doesn't quite impact the overall story. The audience might feel inclined to focus on the masked group rather than Eyes Wide Shut 's true conflict; that is, Bill's obsession and his marriage with Alice. However, there's no denying that this meandering in the story was Kubrick's purpose: he intentionally inserts a distressing twist in the middle in order to disorient both Bill and the audience. But, the beauty of it is precisely how it all comes down again to the simple things in the end.

Regardless of the ending's true intention, it's reasonable to speculate that Ziegler might be the Red Cloak. At the end of the day, his manipulative manners obscured by his nonchalant discourse makes it clear how comfortable he is behind a mask. Ziegler insists that Bill doesn't arouse suspicion towards what he's seen, but can't hide his anger towards Nick and Mandy, indicating that Nick might not only have been beaten but was actually killed just like Mandy.

The True Meaning of Eyes Wide Shut

In short, Eyes Wide Shut is a movie that redefines loving relationships from an unorthodox standpoint. The decision to tell this story from Bill's point of view is extremely effective because his obsessive need to fulfill his desire and patch up his pride perfectly exposes the true nature of fragile masculinity. The scene in which Alice and Bill argue about Ziegler's party sums up everything: while Alice discusses jealously from a pragmatic perspective, Bill is quick to dismiss her speculations as unfounded fantasies or stoner assumptions. However, when she opens up about her own fantasies, Bill is triggered by an unrelenting blow to his ego.

Eyes Wide Shut perfectly analyzes the decaying piles that support the structure of marriage and anonymity in a patriarchal society. Mandy perfectly embodies the fact that women always end up being much more exposed than men, despite standing in the same spot, while the masks suggest that even the most earnest relationships can't survive without one or two secrets. Neither demonizing what monogamy stands for nor defending its conservative constraints, the movie addresses the topics of the ideal matrimony life with a somewhat satirical approach , especially after Bill's many failed attempts to cheat on his wife brings him to a dangerous masked orgy with nefarious consequences, let alone how close he got to contract HIV from a sex worker, something that would've impacted not only him but also Alice.

By committing to marriage, Bill's life is no longer singular, and that's precisely why he breaks down when he finds the mask next to Alice's pillow. That's the pivotal moment he realizes how close he got to destroying the life he built. In the final scene, Alice formally tells Bill they have something very important to do: to unify their fragmented selves once again, to become two once again.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the joke's on him: tom cruise and eyes wide shut.

The New York of “ Eyes Wide Shut ” is a dream of New York—a sex dream about an emotionally and carnally wound-up young man who denies his animal essence, his wife’s, and almost everyone’s. It’s a comedy. Stanley Kubrick ’s movies are comedies more often than not—coal-black; a tad goofy even when bloody and cruel; the kind where you aren’t sure if it’s appropriate to laugh, because the situations depicted are horrible and sad, the characters deluded.

To make a film like this work, you need one of two types of lead actors: the kind that is plausible as a brilliant and insightful person who trips on his own arrogance (like Malcolm McDowell ’s Alex in “ A Clockwork Orange ,” Matthew Modine ’s Pvt. Joker in “ Full Metal Jacket ,” and Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”); or the kind that reads as a bit of a dope to start with, and never stops being one. The latter category encompasses most of the human characters in “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ”—first cavemen, then cavemen in spaceships, that legendary bone-to-orbit cut preparing us for the end sequence in which astronaut Dave Bowman evolves while gazing up in awe at the re-appeared monolith—and Ryan O’Neal as the title character of “ Barry Lyndon ,” a tragedy about a ridiculous and limited man who bleeds and suffers just like everyone, and is moving despite it all.

Tom Cruise ’s Dr. Bill Harford in “Eyes Wide Shut” is the second kind of Kubrick hero. He’s is a bit of a dope but takes himself absolutely seriously, never looking inward, at least not as deeply as he should. An undercurrent of film noir runs through most if not all of Kubrick’s films. His first two features, the war fable “Fear and Desire” and the boxing potboiler “Killer’s Kiss,” were stylistically rooted in noir—“Fear and Desire,” like “ Paths of Glory ” and “Full Metal Jacket,” has terse, hardboiled narration, linking it to the most overtly noir-ish Kubrick film, his breakthrough “ The Killing .” The film noir hero tends to be a smart, ambitious, horny guy who lets his horniness overwhelm his judgement. Dr. Bill is a cuckolded film noir patsy turned film noir hero, cheated upon not in fact, but in his own imagination. And, in noir hero fashion, he gets drawn into a sexual/criminal conspiracy, this one involving the procurement of young women for anonymous orgies with rich older men. He’s always one step behind the architects of the plan, whatever it is, and he's never quite smart enough or observant enough to prove he saw what he saw.

That’s Bill, a cinematic cousin of somebody like Fred MacMurray in “ Double Indemnity ” or William Hurt in “ Body Heat ,” but diminished and driving himself mad, a eunuch with blueballs, prowling city streets on on the knife-edge of Christmas, constantly taunted and humiliated, his heterosexuality and masculinity, indeed his essential carnality, questioned at every turn.

The doctor’s nighttime odyssey (like “2001,” this film is indebted to Homer) kicks off after he smokes pot with his gorgeous young wife Alice ( Nicole Kidman ) and she confesses a momentary craving for a sailor so powerful that she briefly considered throwing away her stable life just to have him. The revelation of the intensity of his wife’s sexual craving for someone other than him (fear and desire indeed) unmoors him from his comfortable existence and sends him careening around the city, where he encounters women who all seem to represent aspects of his wife, or his reductive view of her. They even have similar hair color. And if there are men in their lives—like Sidney Pollack’s Victor Ziegler, who calls Bill to deal with a young woman who overdosed on a speedball while in his company; or Rade Serbedjia’s Millich, the pathologically controlling and jealous costume shop proprietor who accuses Bill of wanting to have sex with his teenage daughter ( Leelee Sobieski )— They mirror aspects of Bill. It’s surely no coincidence that the masks worn by the orgy participants are distinguished by their prominent (erect) Bills. Bill never actually strays, though. He keeps blundering into situations where sex seems imminent, and yet he couldn’t cheat on Alice even if he wanted to. He’s too bad to be good and too good to be bad.

It still seems amazing that Cruise, among the most controlling of modern stars, gave himself to Kubrick so completely, letting himself be cast in such a sexually fumbling, baseline-schmucky part, the sort Matthew Broderick might've played for more obvious laughs (Kubrick originally wanted Steve Martin as Bill). Cruise built his star image playing handsome, fearless, cocky, ultra-heterosexual young men who mastered whatever skill or job they'd decided to practice, be it piloting fighter jets, driving race cars, playing pool, bartending, practicing law, representing pro athletes, or being a secret agent. Offscreen, the actor was long suspected of being closeted—a rumor amplified by his hyper-controlling relationships with a succession of public-facing spouses who read, from afar, less as wives than wife-symbols—and he sued media outlets that implied he was anything other than a 100% USDA-inspected slab of lady-loving, corn-fed American beefcake (thus the infamous 2006 “South Park” “ Tom won’t come out of the closet ” scene).

So it was doubly startling for 1999 audiences to watch Cruise being swatted across the screen from one cringe-inducing psychosexual horror setpiece to the next, each enjoying its own version of a hearty pirate’s laugh at the idea of Cruise playing a butch straight man who dominates every room he’s in; and to witness his onscreen humiliation by homophobic frat boys. That same year, Cruise got an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor in “ Magnolia ,” playing a motivational speaker who admonishes his audience of baying young men to “respect the cock, tame the cunt.”

Cruise is a smart actor with often-excellent taste in material and collaborators; it’s inconcievable that he and his then-wife Kidman would submit themselves to over a year’s worth of grueling, repetitive shoots on Kubrick’s meticulously recreated New York sets in London without understanding what they were in for, at least partially. But what’s really important, from the standpoint of Cruise’s performance, is that he never seems as if he knows that the joke is on Bill. This doesn’t seem like the performance of an actor who has decided not to play his character as self-aware (like, say, Daniel Day-Lewis in “ The Last of the Mohicans ,” playing a character that Entertainment Weekly ’s Owen Gleiberman described as seeming completely free of 20th century neuroses) but rather a not-too-self-aware actor throwing himself into every scene as if bound and determined to somehow “win” them. This is surely a vestigial leftover of the way Cruise acts in most Tom Cruise films, strutting and bobbing through scenes, getting into trouble, then smiling or talking or flying or running or acrobatting his way out. It’s a mode he can’t entirely turn off, but can only tamp down or allow to be subverted (which is what I think is happening in this movie, and in a few other against-the-grain Cruise performances). It’s as if Cruise travels the full narrative length of Kubrick’s dream trail encrusted by scholarly and journalistic and critical footnotes that have accumulated on his filmography since " Risky Business ." He’s the leading man as Christmas tree, festooned with lights and baubles.

What perfect casting/what a great performance/what’s the difference? Is there any? Maybe not. Sometimes great casting is what allows for a great performance. John Frankenheimer cast Laurence Harvey , a handsome hunk of wood, as the brainwashed assassin in the 1962 version of “The Manchurian Candidate,” and his inability to tune in to his costars’ emotional wavelength works for the part; it translates as “repressed, tortured, closed off individual,” the type of guy who would be gobsmacked by an ordinary summer romance, to the point where it would constitute the core of a tragic backstory . Harvey’s inexpressiveness becomes a source of mirth when he’s put in the same frame with actors like Frank Sinatra , Angela Lansbury , or Akim Tamiroff, who get a predatory glint in their eye when they sense the possibility of stealing a scene. They know how to mess with people and have fun doing it, and poor, friendless Harvey is an irresistible target. and when Raymond expresses delight that he was, however momentarily, “lovable,“ you can practically see the quote marks around the word, and it’s as sad as it is hilarious.

Oliver Stone pulled off something similar when he cast Cruise as Ron Kovic in “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” a choice that Stone later said might’ve hurt the film at the American box office because nobody wanted to see the smirking flyboy from “ Top Gun ” castrated by a bullet, wheeling around with a catheter in his hand, cursing his mom and Richard Nixon . The star seeming not-entirely-in on—not the “joke,” exactly, but the vision of the movie—made Kovic’s dawning self-awareness of his participation in macho right-wing propaganda all the more effective. Kovic wanted to be like the guys on the recruiting poster, and now he couldn’t stand up and salute the lies anymore, and a lot of his friends were dead, along with untold numbers of Vietnamese. Al Pacino , who was cast in an aborted version “Born” a decade earlier, might not have been as effective as Cruise overall, because while Pacino is an altogether deeper actor, he’s so closely associated with men who have no illusions about how brutal and soul-draining American life and institutions can be. (Marvelous as his performance in “Serpico” is, it doesn’t start to take off until he’s in undercover cop mode, with that beard and long hair and beatnik/hippie energy. In the early scenes where he’s clean-shaven and idealistic, you just have to take Serpico's innocence on faith, because Al Pacino would never be that naive.)

Kubrick, no slouch at casting for affect, was especially good at filling lead male roles with actors who seemed to grasp the general outline of what the director was up to without radiating profound appreciation of the philosophical and cultural nuances. Ryan O’Neal in “ Barry Lyndon ” somehow works despite, or because of, seeming a bit stiff and anachronistic—out of his element in a lot of ways. His anxiety-verging-on-panic at not knowing whether he’s doing a good enough job for Kubrick fits perfectly with the character’s persistent insecurity and imposter syndrome. So does the shoddy Irish accent.

Decades later, Ben Affleck in “ Gone Girl ” pulled an “Eyes Wide Shut”—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that director David Fincher pulled it by casting him. “The baggage he comes with is most useful to this movie,” Fincher told Film Comment . “I was interested in him primarily because I needed someone who understood the stakes of the kind of public scrutiny that Nick is subjected to and the absurdity of trying to resist public opinion. Ben knows that, not conceptually, but by experience. When I first met with him, I said this is about a guy who gets his nuts in a vise in reel one and then the movie continues to tighten that vise for the next eight reels. And he was ready to play. It’s an easy thing for someone to say, 'Yeah, yeah, I’d love to be a part of that,' and then, on a daily basis, to ask: 'Really? Do I have to be that foolish? Do I have to step in it up to my knees?' Actors don’t like to be made the brunt of the joke. They go into acting to avoid that. Unlike comics, who are used to going face first into the ground.”

Fincher subsequently poked fun at Affleck, in DVD narration and interview comments delivered in such a deadpan-vicious way that you couldn't tell if Fincher was venting in the guise of a put-on or doing an elaborate comedic bit. Either way, the gist was that Affleck was convincing as an untrustworthy person because he was himself untrustworthy. "He has to do these things in the foreground where he takes out his phone and looks at it and he puts it away so his sister doesn’t see it," Fincher said. "There are people who do that and it’s too pointed. But Ben is very very subtle, and there’s a kind of indirectness to the way he can do those things. Probably because he’s so duplicitous." Thus does the inherent untrustworthiness of Ben Affleck as both actor and person (according to Fincher, whether he's kidding or serious) become the framework for the entire performance's believability. This is a guy whose performance as an innocent man is judged by the media and public and immediately found lacking, and the character proves to be so much dumber than his conniving, vengeful wife that when the final scene arrives, we laugh at how inevitable it was. A more subtle, likable, deep leading man might've have ruined everything. Fincher needed a meathead who was funny and had read a few books, and who seemed to have a sixth sense for how to hide a cell phone from his sister.

This is similar to the idea of Kubrick cuckolding Cruise with an anecdote and sending him all over New York in search of satisfaction and insight that never quite, er, comes (although there’s a hint of hope in that final scene). On top of that, Affleck is an actor who is effective within a narrow range but will never be thought of as a chameleonic or particularly delicate performer—somebody who can play the subtext without overwhelming the text, or who can seamlessly integrate the two so that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

That might be why Affleck disliked working with Terrence Malick , a highly improvisational filmmaker who deals in archetypes and symbols, and expects actors to devise a character while he’s devising the film that they’re in. Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt can do that; Affleck really can’t. The difference between Affleck and somebody like Pitt (or DiCaprio) is the difference between an old-fashioned square-jawed leading man-type, like Rock Hudson or Gary Cooper or Alan Ladd, who tried to stick to the words and hit the marks and color within the lines, and somebody like James Dean or Marlon Brando or Dennis Hopper , who treated every page as potential raw material for a collage they hadn’t thought up yet. That’s why Dean and Hudson played off each other so beautifully in “Giant”—Dean with his tormented Method affectations and odd expressions and voices, and Hudson playing the guy he’d been told to play, while often seeming puzzled or horrified by whatever Dean was doing opposite him, as if he’d been placed in the same room with a badger or wild boar and told “Now the two of you sit down and have a nice lunch while we film it.”

I like to think of Cruise in “Eyes Wide Shut” as Rock Hudson turned loose in a Stanley Kubrick neo-noir dream, and not just for the obvious reasons. He’s in there angrily and desperately trying to win something that cannot be won, explain things that can’t be explained, and regain dignity that was lost a long time ago and will never come back. He keeps flashing his doctor’s ID as if he’s a detective (another film noir staple) working a case, and people indulge him not because they truly regard the ID as authority but because Bill’s intensity is just so damned odd that they aren’t sure how else to react. It’s hilarious because Bill doesn’t know how ridiculous it all is, and how ridiculous he is. He’s a movie star who lacks the movie star’s prerogative. Only by surrendering to the flow and accepting defeat can he survive. Only his wife, an awesome force unlocked in one moment, can save him.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Eyes Wide Shut: 20 years on, Stanley Kubrick’s most notorious film is still shrouded in mystery

On its 20th anniversary, ed power reflects on a film that was unflinching in its insights into sexuality and brusque about matters of the heart – to a degree unthinkable in mainstream entertainment today, article bookmarked.

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Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut

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I t was the fastest “yes” Tom Cruise ever uttered. Late in 1995, the world’s biggest movie star travelled by helicopter to Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire. Waiting on the expansive lawn was director Stanley Kubrick , who’d lived semi-reclusively in the 18th-century pile since 1978. So began their great adventure together making Eyes Wide Shut , the eternally divisive psycho-sexual meditation released 20 years ago in the UK this week.

A still potent mystique hangs over Eyes Wide Shut. That’s partly down to the subject matter. When the glamorous wife ( Nicole Kidman ) of a successful doctor (Cruise) confesses the desire she felt for a stranger months previously, he plunges down a whirlpool of jealousy.

Over the course of a single hallucinatory evening, Dr Harford embarks on a tour of the murkiest recesses of the human heart. He fends off the daughter of a patient only just passed away, almost hires a manic pixie dream girl prostitute and then blunders upon a masked orgy. It’s nightmarish. The audience is never entirely clear whether what’s happening is real or a dive into Harford’s green-eyed dream-life.

All of that would be enough to ensure its notoriety. Yet the allure of Eyes Wide Shut also surely flows from the degree to which death intrudes on a film about sex. Kubrick suffered a fatal coronary before its release. Just six days previously, he had screened his final cut for Cruise and Kidman.

Eyes Wide Shut, along with all that, appeared to foreshadow the unravelling of Cruise and his co-star Kidman’s outwardly luminous marriage. They divorced in August 2001 – almost exactly two years since the project’s release.It seemed ominous and more than a coincidence. Had Kubrick’s caper put a stake through the heart of their relationship?

Such were the questions lurking in the future as Cruise, grinning like the matinee idol he was, sat down to a long lunch with Kubrick at Childwickbury in 1995. The conversation was mostly trivial. They discussed their shared passions: vintage cameras, planes, the New York Yankees. Cruise told Kubrick how seeing the director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at age six had blown his mind. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What is life? What is space? What is existence?” (Some of us will have had the same experience watching Top Gun .)

“He was just waiting, alone in a garden,” Cruise remembered of meeting Kubrick. “He walked me around the grounds, and I just remember thinking, ‘This guy is kind of a magical, wonderful guy.’”

Still, they did eventually get around to the matter at hand. Kubrick wanted the star of Top Gun and Cocktail to play the lead in his sexually frank adaptation of an Austrian avant-garde novel from the 1920s. The film was to lay a seemingly solid marriage out on the figurative slab. Like a pathologist peeling back waxy layers of skin, Kubrick would coldly scrutinise what festered beneath.

Cruise was all in. And he had a suggestion of his own. He wondered if Kubrick might consider casting his real-life spouse, Nicole Kidman, as the wife. Two decades on, this unlikely teaming-up of hermit director, cocksure actor and screen siren can be considered one of Hollywood’s most fascinating anomalies. How on earth did this movie ever come to exist?

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Eyes Wide Shut would cast a long shadow. It added to the background noise as Cruise’s public image underwent a post-Kidman meltdown. In 2005, he went on Oprah Winfrey and proclaimed his love of Katie Holmes. He did so in the traditional fashion of bouncing on a couch and baying like a labrador. The maniacal side he had first hinted at when going through the grinder with Kubrick had blossomed into something awe-inducing and frightening.

It’s impossible to watch Eyes Wide Shut today without all of that – Kubrick’s coronary, the Hollywood divorce, the couch-bouncing – playing on a continuous loop in your head. The effect is to amp up the already lurid weirdness. It is a deeply dissonant film. Even for Kubrick, certainly for Kidman and Cruise. But it’s also unflinching in its insights into sexuality and brusque about matters of the heart – and other body parts – to a degree unthinkable in mainstream entertainment today. Even in 1999, it felt slightly like something from another era. Eyes Wide Shut harked back to the chilliness and stylised nihilism of Seventies cinema.

On top of all that, it claims the Blue Riband for most famous on-screen orgy in Hollywood history. In the unlikely event of Kubrick and his stars ever being forgotten, it will reign in perpetuity as the group sex fandango to rule them all. Say “screen orgy” and what most people think of is Cruise gawping in pervy incredulity as revellers in Venetian masks get jiggy with it (and with each other).

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The movie was a boundary-breaker long before its release. It holds the record for longest ever continuous film shoot. The 400 days Kubrick required his cast and crew to toil at Pinewood Studios was laborious even by his painstaking standards. And it played havoc with Cruise, forced to push back Mission: Impossible 2 again and again. As an entire production sat on its hands and waited on the actor in America, Kubrick rubbed his chin and tinkered.

Eye’s Wide Shut had been a lifeline obsession for the director. Its origins stretched back to the earliest years of his career. As a hotshot younger photographer in New York, he’d been spellbound by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”). He felt it confronted one of the last taboos in society: how to deal with “forbidden” desire within a marriage?

“The book opposes the real adventures of a husband and the fantasy adventures of his wife,” Kubrick commented. “[It] asks the question: is there a serious difference between dreaming a sexual adventure, and actually having one?”

Kubrick had made several previous attempts to adapt Traumnovelle . In 1973, he had the idea of changing the setting from turn of the century Vienna to contemporary Dublin. His plan was to cast Woody Allen in the Cruise role of happily married husband sexually unmoored when his wife confesses her secret desires. Somewhere along the way he concluded, moreover, that the time-frame should be changed from Schnitzler’s Mardi Gras to Christmas – giving us the least seasonal Yuletide movie ever.

Steve Martin was also considered by Kubrick after the director had decided the adaptation should be set in New York. By the early Nineties he was eyeing A-list Mr and Mrs Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger as his emotionally diseased power-couple. And then Cruise’s name came up.

It was suggested not by Kubrick but by his producer at Warner Brothers, Terry Semel. The director wanted Warner to stump up a $65m budget for Eyes Wide Shot. Kubrick refused to film outside the UK and much of the production costs would go towards recreating Manhattan in England. Semel was amenable – but only with a knock-out star in the Dr Harford role. Who was more knock-out than the magnetic lead from Top Gun and Mission: Impossible ?

Kubrick wasn’t sure. The last big name he’d worked with had been Jack Nicholson on The Shining in 1980. The film was eventually hailed a masterpiece. But the shoot had been hell. Kubrick had been particularly unappreciative of Nicholson’s tendency to speak his mind rather than do as instructed. “Stars,” he told Semel, “have too many opinions.”

Semel persevered. And Cruise said “yes” without hesitation. Once that was settled, Kubrick was amenable to casting Kidman as Mrs Harford. “Tom and Nicole” were one of the most recognisable couples in the world. Their marriage had been subject to the traditional tabloid tittle-tattle. A real-life husband and wife portraying unravelling spouses introduced a new layer of psychosexual subtext. Kubrick loved it.

Kubrick appeared to, additionally, get a kick out of exploring fissures in Cruise and Kidman’s real marriage. He had Kidman disclose her inner-most feelings in extensive therapy sessions, the contents of which were not revealed to Cruise. And he forbade the actor from the set when Kidman was shooting her fantasy trysts with the naval officer who had awoken something in Alice.

He retained his enthusiasm through the gruelling shoot. Cruise and Kidman found it harder to stay positive. It wasn’t the intensity of the material, nor the semi-nudity required of Kidman (who’d been strict from the outset as to what she would and would not do). It was that it went on and on, seemingly without end. On one occasion, Kubrick had Cruise walk through the same door 95 times. “Hey, Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star,” he is reported to have joked. Cruise tried to laugh but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

“We shot for 10-and-a-half months but we were there for a year and a half,” Kidman later lamented. “Sometimes it as very frustrating because you were thinking, is this ever going to end?

Cruise was meanwhile coming under pressure from Paramount Pictures over Mission: Impossible 2, already put back twice for Eyes Wide Shut. More than once he’d politely taken Kubrick aside and wondered if the director might possibly have an idea when he might done. Kubrick never had a straight answer. Cruise soon had ulcers – a fact he kept from Kubrick. He didn’t want more complications.

“I didn’t want to tell Stanley,” Cruise told Time . “He panicked. I wanted this to work, but you’re playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up. You try not to kick things up, but you go through things you can’t help.”

It’s astonishing that scheduling was Cruise’s biggest issue. Kubrick made full use of the opportunity to strip away the actor’s movie star aura. Again and again through the 159 minutes, Kubrick went out of his way to paint him unflatteringly.

The fly-boy glibness central to the actor’s persona was openly ridiculed by the director. In an early scene, Harford flirts with two models at a party. Kubrick has Cruise unleash his trademark boyishness. But he frames it in such way as to make Cruise come across callow and charmless. Being chatted up by Tom Cruise, the film more or less says out loud, is the least seductive experience under the sun.

There were also winks towards unfounded rumours about Cruise’s sexuality. Navigating New York by night, Harford has a run-in with fratboys who taunt him with homophobic slurs. Kubrick used the same scene to mock Cruise’s “diminutive” 5ft 7in stature. “I got dumps bigger than you,” one of the aggressors laughs, swatting Harford aside.

“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,” went a BFI essay marking Eyes Wide Shut’ s anniversary. “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 yet, both Cruise and Kidman proclaimed themselves delighted with the finished movie. Kubrick was so anxious that details might leak that when he arranged a screening for them in Los Angeles the projectionist was ordered to look away from the screen.

Their director’s paranoia notwithstanding they were proud of what their hard work had yielded. Here was an avant-grade film with a message everybody could understand: you can never fully know the person next to you in bed.

“I don’t think it’s a morality tale,” said Kidman. “It’s different for every person who watches it.”

Cruise agreed. Kubrick had made a masterpiece of ambivalence. “The movie is whatever the audience takes from it,” he said. “Wherever you are in life you’re going to take away something different.”

Twenty years on, Eyes Wide Shut is an acknowledged classic. But it is also notorious – largely on account of the masked orgy. It is in every sense the centre piece, and it was the sequence with which Kubrick struggled the most. He was never a prudish director.

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But nor was he one for pressing his audiences’ noses in debauchery. As time came to shoot Eye Wide Shut ’s carnival of flesh, assistant director Brian Cook joked that they should have hired Tony Scott to help out. The subject at hand far better suited his flashy style.

Kubrick’s way of getting his head into the orgy was via the soundscapes of composer Jocelyn Pook. One of his producers had introduced him to her piece “Backward Priests”, which features Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy played in reverse. Kubrick was struck by the dark, dissonant quality.

“He looked at me right in the eyes and said ‘Let’s make sex music!’ I thought to myself, what the hell is sex music? Is it Barry White?” Pook would tell Dazed and Confused . “Stanley didn’t really care to elaborate, he just trusted me to answer the question.”

She composed 24 minutes of roiling chants and percussion, using the same back-to-front technique pioneered with “Backwards Priests”. “And God told to his apprentices,” go the lyrics (when played right way around). “I gave you a command ... to pray to the Lord for mercy, life, peace, health, salvation, the search, the leave and the forgiveness of the sins of God’s children.”

Kubrick and his crew were meanwhile immersed in softcore pornography, in particular David Duchovny’s Red Shoe Diaries. They wanted a sense of how far they should be prepared to push the material. And to settle on a line they would not cross.

The orgy was shot at Mentmore Towers, a rural estate in Buckinghamshire built by the Rothschilds (known to hold mysterious masked balls). Initially, Kubrick wanted the models participating in the sequence to simulate sex at length. They were even asked to peruse the Kama Sutra. The response that came back was that they hadn’t signed up for that level of explicitness.

So the sequence was instead reimagined as a choreographic piece suggestive of bacchanalia. As Cruises takes it all in, you can’t quite focus on what’s going on. It’s mostly dark, suggestive blurs. The imagination is left to do the heavy lifting.

Cruise and Kidman may have adored Eyes Wide Shut but critics were slower coming around to it, even after Kubrick’s sudden death at 70 made this his accidental swan song. That wasn’t unusual with the director. Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining had been greeted with bafflement. And A Clockwork Orange had sparked a full-on moral panic. The reaction to Eyes Wide Shut was somewhere between these two poles. Many simply found it distant and a bit dull (it did make back its budget nearly three times over and is Kubrick’s highest grosser).

“It’s empty of ideas which is fine,” said The Washington Post . “But it’s also empty of heat.” “This is a film about sex that isn’t sexy,” agreed Total Film. “A movie about love with a cold heart.”

Kubrick, though, was always about the slow burn. And so it is only with the decades that the true genius of Eyes Wide Shut has been revealed. Christopher Nolan, a self-confessed Kubrick acolyte, is among the many who have confessed to misunderstanding it on first viewing. Only later, older and slightly wiser, did he begin to grasp what Kubrick was reaching for.

“Watching it with fresh eyes, it plays very differently to a middle-age man than it did to a young man,” Nolan said. “There’s a very real sense in which it is the 2001 of relationship movies.”

“I was happy that he had chosen to go after something very difficult: the idea of what should and shouldn’t remain unspoken in a marriage,” agreed Steven Soderbergh. “He was trying to get at something that was emotionally ambitious in a way that most of his films aren’t.”

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‘Eyes Wide Shut’: The Absurd Magic of Stanley Kubrick’s Last Film

Released in 1999, months after the death of the indomitable, legendary filmmaker behind it, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was, and remains, to multiple viewers, one of Kubrick’s most confounding projects. One of the most blatant reasons for the mixed response to the film is the general prognostication of what the film was going to be like in the months leading up to its release. It was deemed by many, without having seen even a shred of the film outside the trailer, which admittedly is a little misleading, as the “Sexiest Movie of all Time” starring the most picturesque, real-life Hollywood couple Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.

What the audiences saw in the theaters, was of course, a surreal, hypnotic, dazzling visual experience, that was anything but titillating. The critics, as usual with Kubrick’s cinema, couldn’t reconcile their preconceived idea of the film with what was on the screen. To watch a Kubrick film, to truly watch one, requires a loss of any notions or ideas you might have about the way the narrative and the characters are dealt with. You have to let the film’s intellectual, visual and thematic intentions wash over you.

Kubrick once said, “In all things mysterious, never explain.” And my intention here is not to attempt an explanation of the film, which would deprive any viewer the intensity of his personal experience with this work of art. This merely constitutes an analysis of why the film works so well in its ambiguity, by focusing on a few significant scenes or moments in the film. Again, that is by no proportion, meant to suggest the fact that not every single frame, let alone every scene of a Kubrick film is elemental to one’s accessibility to it. This is just what has been stuck in my head ever since I first saw the film.

Please note that the following article contains major spoilers to the film. I would suggest reading after you’ve watched it.

1. “A FRIEND OF THE ZEIGLERS”

The magnificent, grand Christmas Party at the house of Victor and Elona Ziegler is perhaps one of the most pivotal sequences of the film, for it lends us a view into the conflicting personalities of Bill and Alice. The scenes with the doctor flirting with two models and being called up to attend to a stripper who’s lying unconscious after a bad drug reaction in Ziegler’s room, are inter-cut by Alice being wooed by a Hungarian guest named Sandor Szavost, a charming, lascivious man who is completely infatuated by Alice’s beauty.

Captured with jaw dropping elegance and old-fashioned beauty by Kubrick’s lens, when we see Alice dancing with him, it elevates the scene to an entirely different level. On first viewing, one might focus on Bill’s adventures upstairs, but Alice’s haunting conversation with Szavost is much more intriguing. The way she, a little intoxicated, begins to reveal the isolation in her marriage and the way he, showing unambiguous signs of Schadenfreude, tries to pull her into a tryst she just might fall prey to, makes every word they utter, every sad, adrift smile on Nicole Kidman’s face, impossibly engaging. The tinge of melancholy in Alice’s voice is as bewitching as a tragic ballad.

2. “IF YOU MEN ONLY KNEW”

One thing you can rely on Kubrick is that the craft in his films is always exemplary. Aside from the obvious, ground-breaking camerawork, all of his work possess the production design, the costuming, the sound design and editing that set him apart from all directors in history. This particular scene, almost brought word to word to the screen from Arthur Schnitzler’s “Traumnovella”, on which the film is based, is so wondrously lit, acted and features such enthralling music in the background that logic and reason completely dissipate and a loss of conscious senses can be felt. You are completely, utterly transfixed with Alice’s telling of her fantasies; you are lost in it, and you absolutely do not want to recover. It is glorious, thunderous cinema at its best, parallel, in my mind only to the Stargate sequence from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

3. “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE”

The masked orgy is, undoubtedly, the most famous scene from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. It is what many recognize the film from. And understandably so. It is so deliberately detached from everything else in the film that its transportive qualities are undeniable. But it also steadily maintains the hypnotic mood of the film; rather accentuating it to much greater heights. Bill, as a witness to the lustful proceedings, begins to feel a perplexing trap closing in on him, but still continues to explore the darker mysteries of the intricately fashioned manor where the most towering members of high society indulge their most deviant desires. And as an audience, the atmosphere Kubrick creates begins to feel far too dangerous, far too intrusive, but just like Bill, you are entranced, and nothing can help you escape.

4. “WHY DON’T YOU TELL ME THE REST OF IT?”

Is marriage the most dishonest of all relationships? What do we tell, what do we hide, from our partners, with whom we spend all our lives? How much is known of the man whose eyes you stare into everyday? How much is hidden in the dreams of the woman, sleeping right next to you? As Alice recounts a particularly mysterious dream she has, and as Bill, a man who is discovering and confronting the truth for the first time in his life, falls deeper into agony, Kubrick, without relinquishing focus of his protagonists here, dares to explore bigger themes, of why marriage, just like the parties who step into it, will always be flawed. He asks, bolstered by a masterstroke of a monologue by Alice and the turmoil in Tom Cruise’s face, how much do we really want to know?

5. “I’M READY TO REDEEM HIM”

Thrown out of a secretive orgy, his wife’s dreams still preying on his mind, a dangerous man following him, his old friend sent back home, threatened and beaten, for letting him enter the orgy, is Bill Harford dreaming? How could this possibly be happening to single, common man? Walking down the streets of New York, he enters a café and reads his newspaper. What he reads then pulls him into a much more terrifying a spiral than he could have dreamt of in his worst nightmare. And as Kubrick employs a technique that had almost disappeared in the films of the time and is frankly extinct now, the camera zooms into Bill’s face. It is his worst nightmare. The scene that follows, with Bill visiting Mandy in the morgue, underlines the narrative exploitation of the idea of death. What is it to cease to exist? Or as we live, a life seemingly perfect, do we even exist?

6. “NO DREAM IS EVER JUST A DREAM”

Alice Harford is easily the wisest of all Kubrick characters, and incidentally, the only lead female character in a Kubrick film. It speaks to the idea of “Traumnovella”, that men always define women through the constraints of their imagination; their perception of women is too finite to encompass the many desires of women, their dreams, the complexity of their thoughts.

Kubrick wasn’t capable of preaching through his art, and Alice is too humanly imperfect for an audience to consider this scene as any sort of “moral of the story” segment. It ends on a note of an understanding between Bill and Alice; an understanding that their life up to this point had been a long, blissful slumber of a picture-perfect modern life. But their adventures have woken them up, as if at the end of a frightening dream. They may be better off, but certainty, Alice says, scares her even more; for she can envisage the lack of truth in Bill’s certain “Forever”.

Cutting to black after one of the most substantial delivery of a single word in cinema by Nicole Kidman, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is the one film that perfectly fits the idea of being the last artistic accomplishment of a great artist. Kubrick himself called it his “greatest contribution to cinema.” Grossly misunderstood by the majority of critics and audiences of the time, it is Kubrick’s most underrated classic, a position that previously belonged to ‘Barry Lyndon’ and deserves to be viewed in a new light by those who initially dismissed it’s ambiguity. Believe me, it will compel you to come to the realization that not enough films have ambiguity these days.

Read More: Every Movie of Stanley Kubrick, Ranked

The Ending Of Eyes Wide Shut Explained

Nicole Kidman as Alice head tilted smiling

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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"For adult audiences, it creates a mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)" Roger Ebert : rogerebert.com
"[It] turns into a series of haphazard revelations that come to very little." Owen Gleiberman : Entertainment Weekly
"You experience this 159-minute movie at his deliberate pace and from his oddly distanced perspective. The effect is disorienting but mesmerizing." Desson Thomson : The Washington Post
"Every shot and camera angle was selected with great care (...) For those who view cinema as something more substantive than an evening's diversion, the release of 'Eyes Wide Shut' is an event (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)" James Berardinelli : ReelViews
"It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat. Stephen Hunter : The Washington Post
"This is personal filmmaking as well as dream poetry of the kind most movie commerce has ground underfoot, and if a better studio release comes along this year I'll be flabbergasted (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)" Jonathan Rosenbaum : Chicago Reader
"A film that is better at mood than substance, that has its strongest hold on you when it's making the least amount of sense." Kenneth Turan : Los Angeles Times
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20 Years Ago Stanley Kubrick Tormented Tom Cruise to Create a Strange Classic

They don't make 'em like this anymore... why.

1999 was a big year for movies, something we discuss elsewhere on this site as well. But we wanted to take particular note of the Independent's recent write up of Stanley Kubrick's final film .

It's hard to turn the cultural clock back to the late 1990s. There was no streaming yet. As writer Ed Power reminds us, Tom Cruise had yet to jump on Oprah's couch and none of us had seen Going Clear . Stanley Kubrick wasn't just a legend of cinema, he was a working director still making movies.

But as different as 1999 was from 2019, this situation seems like it would be weird at any time:

Idiosyncratic/hermit/creative genius filmmaker pairs with Hollywood's most bankable star and his real-life wife for a movie whose centerpiece is a creepy masked orgy's effects on a marriage.

"the 2001 of relationship movies" - Christopher Nolan

Oh, and it was released on July 16. Like some kind of summer blockbuster.

We have questions!

How Did Eyes Wide Shut Happen?

Kubrick had "long been obsessed" with the source, 'Traumnovelle' or 'Dream Story' which was a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler. The plot is much the same, though it takes place in Vienna in the 20th century. It's a story about adultery or the desire to commit adultery. Having the movie star a Hollywood power-couple at the peak of the tabloid fame was a stroke of pure genius. Or maybe luck.

Or maybe both...

Tom Cruise signed on to work with Kubrick instantly, being a fan of Kubrick's work. Having his wife Nicole Kidman play his wife in the movie was Cruise's idea. Who were Kubrick's first picks for the leading role?

Well in 1973 he'd wanted Woody Allen for the part. You know, Woody Allen and Tom Cruise are always up for the same roles.

There was also the consideration of Steve Martin and later Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Okay, now it's starting to feel familiar to the movie we got.

With Cruise and Kidman in, the budget could balloon and Kubrick could deliver.

It Took a Long Time to Make

"Hey Tom, stick with me, I'll make you a star."

Cruise and Kidman gave Kubrick the ability to be as particular as he likes to be. He recreated Manhattan in the UK because he refused to travel to shoot anywhere else. He was extremely afraid to fly, and this limited the location options for many of his movies.

The Eyes Wide Shut Orgy Scene

Vulture did an oral history of the famous Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene , that gets insights from the many people working on the crew that helped create it. As with all things, Kubrick had a lot of specifics in mind. One story says when he noticed a single lightbulb was out somewhere on set he insisted everyone wait until it was replaced. The body types of the nude figures had to fit certain parameters (nothing surgically altered), and they had to find a way to shoot it so it was 'lyrical' and 'ballet or yoga-like'.

There was also some research involving watching Red Shoe Diaries .

The Eyes Wide Shut party scene is one of the most enduring elements of the movie, but it's worth thinking back on the fact that a movie with this massively strange orgy at its center was, again, a major mid-summer release with Hollywood's top stars.

1999 was different.

The Eyes Wide Shut Meaning

This is certainly one of those movies that critics and fans will reexamine and discuss often, with no clearly obvious meaning. We will all likely continue to do some Eyes Wide Shut analysis every once in a while. There has certainly been plenty written on theories, proposing to be ' Eyes Wide Shut explained'.

The reality is the movie may hold different meanings for different people, and even more so at different times in their lives. That's part of what Christopher Nolan thinks, "Watching it with fresh eyes, it plays very differently to a middle-age man than it did to a young man...it is the 2001 of relationship movies."

On a surface level, it could be about a bourgeoisie couple having a sort of interlude with the world of the super-elite, while also providing commentary on their dynamic with the lower class. Ideas of class and status run throughout the entire movie. Perhaps since it is about a marriage and "ownership" of a spouse and their sexuality, there are other depths to mine meaning-wise.

We can save the Marxist reading of Eyes Wide Shut for another day. Or maybe another website.

The point remains that Kubrick's movies all take big swings at some big ideas. The dynamics at the core of his plots are between humanity and God, society and base nature, heaven and hell... things get DEEP. Which is one reason film-goers and filmmakers alike keep coming back to his work.

Maybe what Eyes Wide Shut means is less critical to understand right now than why we don't see Eyes Wide Shut movies anymore. It wasn't that long ago that movies were about ideas like this, without providing readily available answers, and they could still make money. It was Kubrick's last film, and his most successful (Cruise and Kidman helped...)

So What Happened?

Why don't these kinds of probing odd movies get made on the largest scale anymore? Did the audience for them dry up? Did the existence of the streaming market and a seemingly infinite ocean of 'content' create too much competition?

Did creatives like Kubrick just cease to exist? Did stars like Cruise stop trying to make those kinds of movies because they didn't want to get ulcers?

There are honestly lots of ways to answer these questions. There are also, to be fair, plenty of movies and shows that do probe where creatives like Kubrick wanted to. They just don't get center stage as often.

We're interested in your takes on it.

Source: The Independant

Check Out Sigma’s Slimmed Down 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II Zoom Lens

This new sigma lens gets an upgrade with a slimmer, more economical, follow-up to the brand’s popular standard zoom for your full-frame mirrorless cameras..

The new version of the SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Art also gets some helpful upgrades for enhanced optical performance, AF speed, and operability, as well as the aforementioned slimmed down-ness, which should make the new SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II | Art lens a popular, and very baggable, zoom for any of your full-frame mirrorless camera needs.

Let’s take a look at this updated new lens from Sigma and explore how it could be right for your video projects—as well as of course for any photo gigs that might require a solid hybrid lens.

Introducing the SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II | Art

Featuring an advancement in optical design, this new II version of the SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN features a shortening of the total optical length, as well as a lens barrel that has been made slimmer by downsizing the zoom mechanisms in the lens.

The lens barrel in particular has been downsized by placing buttons and switches now directly on the lens barrel itself. This means that the weight of the lens has been reduced by approximately 10% compared to the previous version. This lightweight focus group with the high-thrust HLA should make autofocus significantly swifter than the original as well.

Sigma notes that aberrations have been highly corrected through advanced optical design which has been made possible by some further technologies in both design and manufacturing. More specifically, sagittal coma flare is heavily corrected to achieve MTF characteristics surpassing those of the highly acclaimed 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN | Art.

A Full-Frame Mirrorless Zoom

This new SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II | Art should be a great option for any videographers shooting full-frame with their mirrorless cameras and looking to have a solid and reliable fixed zoom that should fill in for any on-the-run or documentary-style projects.

Zoom lenses are getting better and better these days (as well as more affordable), so it’s no surprise to see this update from Sigma making this zoom even more functional and lightweight. The SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II | Art is also set to include a close-focusing distance of 6.7 inches (17cm) at the wide end at 1:2.7 magnification which should add to the overall versatility of the lens.

The II also includes a click/de-click and lockable aperture ring along with an additional AF-L button for vertical orientation still or video capture. Plus a zoom lock switch which will disengage when zooming is a nice touch as well.

Price and Availability

The SIGMA 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II | Art is online and available to pre-order with an expected availability set for the end of May 2024. You can check out all of the specs and purchase options below.

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Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 DG DN II Art Lens (Leica L)

Featuring improved rendering performance in a shorter and lighter body, Sigma 's flagship Leica L-mount 24-70mm f/2.8 DG DN II Art Lens deploys an advanced optical design for gains in sharpness, resolution, and portability.

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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.”

Vote now in our Tom Cruise bracket!

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.

Archive @ AmosBarshad

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After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, 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.

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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.

Then husband-and-wife actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman with co-star Sydney Pollack.

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.

Tom and Nicole certainly weren’t shy in Eyes Wide Shut.

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.

Nicole and Tom were on the cover of Time Magazine after the film’s release..

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.

All loved up at the Sydney premiere of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.

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.”

Tom Cruise played a New York City doctor in Eyes Wide Shut.

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

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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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All the Stanley Kubrick movies

1. Fear and Desire

2. Killer's Kiss

Sterling Hayden and Marie Windsor in The Killing (1956)

3. The Killing

4. Paths of Glory

Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis, John Gavin, Charles Laughton, Jean Simmons, and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus (1960)

5. Spartacus

7. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

8. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971)

9. A Clockwork Orange

10. Barry Lyndon

11. The Shining

12. Full Metal Jacket

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

13. Eyes Wide Shut

More to explore, recently viewed.

“I don’t want to embarrass him/ her”: Stanley Kubrick Fired a Mystery Actor From Tom Cruise- Nicole Kidman’s Movie After 2 Days in the Kindest Fashion

T im Blake Nelson, the talented actor known for his roles in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs , who is also set to appear in the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World , has opened up about his experience being cut from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two . Appearing on the Inside of You podcast, Nelson recalled being heartbroken when his role was ultimately cut from the final version of Dune 2.

However, while addressing his heartbreaking cut from Dune: Part Two, Tim Blake Nelson mentioned how his experience bears a striking resemblance to the legendary story of Stanley Kubrick’s compassionate firing of a mystery actor. Nelson discussed how his story runs parallel with Kubrick’s incident of firing an unnamed actor from Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Stanley Kubrick’s Unusual Approach to Firing an Actor from Eyes Wide Shut

Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick , renowned for his perfectionism and attention to detail, has often made headlines for failing to get along with his actors. However, in a shocking twist of events, Tim Blake Nelson revealed a story that showcased Kubrick’s sympathetic side in a difficult situation.

“He was disgusted with it”: Stanley Kubrick Absolutely Hated Working With Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and Their Marriage Made Things Even Worse

Speaking with Inside of You podcast host Michael Rosenbaum, Tim Blake Nelson recalled a story from Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s Eyes Wide Shut , wherein Stanley Kubrick fired an unnamed actor. Revealing how the filmmaker eased the process and fired the actor in the kindest possible way. Narrating the story, Nelson said:

I won’t say the actor’s name, because I don’t want to embarrass him/ her, but it’s such a funny story. I had a friend who went to do Eyes Wide Shut. And he/she was playing a nice role, and did a couple of days and Stanley Kubrick came and knocked on his/her door and took him/her down the hall and put him/her in front of a monitor and said, ‘i wanna show you your scenes’ and showed the scenes.

Showed his/her footage coverage and then proceeded to say, ‘I’m gonna let you go, it’s not working.’ and then he said, ‘it’s not you it’s me’. And this person of course said, ‘yeah, Stanley Kubrick. It’s not me, it’s Stanley Kubrick. Right’.

Narrating the story to Michael Rosenbaum, Tim Blake Nelson then noted how his friend being fired from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut bore a striking resemblance to his own loss of role in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two.

Tim Blake Nelson was Heartbreakingly Edited Out of Dune: Part Two

After sharing his friend’s funny but heartbreaking story of losing their role in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 movie, Tim Blake Nelson proceeded to discuss how the sentiment echoed with his own experience of being cut out of Dune 2 . According to MovieWeb , Nelson was hired to play a role in Denis Villeneuve’s magnum opus, which fans speculated to be of Count Fenring.

Hollywood’s Most Criminally Underrated Actor Tim Blake Nelson Reportedly Joins Dune: Part 2, Finally Gets the Recognition He Deserves

Although nothing about his role was disclosed, it was eventually edited out of the film since Denis Villeneuve exceeded the movie’s runtime. Therefore, speaking on the podcast, Nelson noted that although he realized that the director “ had to cut it ” to shorten the Dune 2 ’s runtime down to 2 hours and 46 minutes, he was still heartbroken .

I was supposed to be in [Dune: Part Two]… Of course, one always wonders as an actor whether if you just been a little bit better then they wouldn’t have been able to slice that part out.

And so there’s a part of me that’s saying, ‘yeah right, Denis Villeneuve. It’s that the movie was too long, it wasn’t that I f*cked the performance up’. I love Denis, I had a great time, and I hope I get to do something with it again. And I’m just glad. I would still go over and do the part, just for being directed by him, and filmed by Greg Frasier and working with Josh Brolin. I would go do it again, even knowing that I was cut out of it, ’cause I had a great time.

Tim Blake Nelson mentioned filming the scene for Dune: Part Two , only to be left “ heartbroken ” when his role was ultimately cut from the final version. But despite his disappointment, Nelson expressed understanding and admiration for Villeneuve’s vision, stating that he had a great time shooting the scene and holds no hard feelings towards the director .

So, in the end, Nelson’s revelation bears a striking resemblance to the story of Stanley Kubrick’s firing of the mystery actor from Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman ’s Eyes Wide Shut .

Dune: Part Two will be available to stream on Max from May 21.

Eyes Wide Shut is available on Prime Video.

Tim Blake Nelson in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs | Annapurna Television/Netflix

Stanley Kubrick Played a Crucial — And Secret — Part in Making This James Bond Film

In a mere four hours, Kubrick brought this beloved Bond entry to life.

The Big Picture

Roger Moore's James Bond films are some of the campiest in the franchise, except for The Spy Who Loved Me .
Stanley Kubrick's practical lighting assistance saved The Spy Who Loved Me from budget issues.
Kubrick's daughter Katharina also helped to design the dental prosthetics for the iconic Bond villain, Jaws.

While each actor who has portrayed James Bond has their share of defenders, Roger Moore ’s tenure as the character tends to get the least amount of credibility among serious fans of the franchise. The films starring Sean Connery and Daniel Craig tended to reflect the more serious tone of Ian Fleming ’s original source material, but Moore’s films were rather campy and silly; some of Moore’s later installments verged into downright comedic territory. The one exception to this trend is Moore’s role in the 1977 classic The Spy Who Loved Me , a film that merged action, romance, and espionage into one of the coolest spy movies ever made. While director Lewis Gilbert was a veteran of the franchise, The Spy Who Loved Me received some unexpected assistance from Stanley Kubrick .

Kubrick was at the height of his powers in the late 1970s. A Clockwork Orange had engendered serious controversy when it debuted in 1971, but nonetheless served as evidence that Kubrick could tackle divisive source material and connect it to modern issues. Similarly, the practical filmmaking techniques he utilized in the production of the historical epic Barry Lyndon scored him serious praise and several Academy Award nominations. While his cinematic interests seemed divorced from something as commercial as the Bond franchise, Kubrick's secret assistance on The Spy Who Loved Me helped cement it as one of the saga’s best entries.

The Spy Who Loved Me

James Bond investigates the hijacking of British and Russian submarines carrying nuclear warheads, with the help of a K.G.B. agent whose lover he killed.

Stanley Kubrick Helped Design 'The Spy Who Loved Me'

Based on Fleming’s 1962 novel of the same name, The Spy Who Loved Me follows Bond as he teams up with the Russian spy XXX ( Barbara Bach ) in order to prevent the ruthless billionaire Karl Stromberg ( Curd Jürgens ) from launching devastating weapons that could eradicate the world’s infrastructure. Stromberg plans to build a new civilization in its place, and hides his powerful missiles in an underwater facility where he conducts his evil experiments. Although the Bond franchise has gone aquatic with Thunderball , The Spy Who Loved Me experienced difficulties shooting the scenes in Stromberg’s lair. The aging cinematographer Claude Renoir had difficulty seeing , making it challenging for Gilbert to shoot the film’s climactic action sequences.

Production designer Ken Adam recognized that The Spy Who Loved Me needed serious assistance from an industry veteran if the film was to be saved. As the rest of the crew panicked, Adam decided to reach out to Kubrick for assistance. The two had previously vowed to never work with each other again after their tumultuous filming of Barry Lyndon . While Adam was apprehensive about bringing someone as argumentative as Kubrick on the set of a Bond film, he recognized that the practical lighting used in Barry Lyndon indicated Kubrick could find a way to save The Spy Who Loved Me . Kubrick attended the set of The Spy Who Loved Me for three to four hours to provide insights on how to light the final set piece. While his involvement was kept a secret, it arguably saved The Spy Who Loved Me from going significantly over budget and missing its intended release date.

How the Hell Did a Classic James Bond Movie Get Pussy Galore Past Censors?

'the spy who loved me' is the most mature roger moore bond movie.

Moore’s first Bond film Live and Let Die was a stylistic detour from the rest of the series, but didn’t necessarily prove him to be a perfect fit for the character. His subsequent film The Man With the Golden Gun was a significant disappointment in which Moore was overshadowed by Christopher Lee ’s performance as the villain Scaramanga. However, The Spy Who Loved Me proved that Moore was capable of being in a more serious Bond film. While Moore still gets to fire off some iconic one-liners, the film reckons with the brutal nature of the espionage world as Bond and XXX reflect on their conflicting loyalties. A moment when Bond admits to killing a Soviet agent that XXX had fallen in love with includes some of his best acting in the entire franchise.

In addition to the more nuanced writing, The Spy Who Loved Me had the epic scope and scale of a Kubrick movie. The Bond films had always featured impressive gadgets and vehicles, but The Spy Who Loved Me featured a climactic face off between Bond and Stromberg’s forces that marked a significant step up in the franchise’s ambition. Despite the increased spectacle, The Spy Who Loved Me was still a very personal and grounded adventure that didn’t treat Bond’s heroism as superficial. Subsequent Moore films like the space bound adventure Moonraker and the bizarre finale A View to a Kill simply turned Bond into a caricature.

Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Helped Create an Iconic Bond Villain

Kubrick may have helped save an iconic sequence in The Spy Who Loved Me , but it wasn’t the only contribution that his family made to the franchise . Kubrick’s daughter Katharina helped to design the dental prosthetics for the villain Jaws , played by Richard Kiel . While Stromberg was a brilliant and ambitious villain , he didn’t necessarily present a physical threat to Bond; however, Kiel’s imposing physicality and gnashing teeth proved to be one of the most terrifying henchmen in the Bond franchise’s history. Bond’s fights with Jaws are the rare moments when he actually feels vulnerable; Kiel added intensity to the film that helped balance the tone.

There was rarely any serious connective tissue between the Bond films in Moore’s run, but Jaws became such a popular character that Kiel reprised his role in Moonraker . While Moonraker is a far less serious Bond movie than the novel it was based on , Kiel was able to salvage his scenes in the film by turning Jaws into an unexpected ally to Bond. His signature metal teeth remain one of the most iconic villainous designs in the entire franchise.

The Spy Who Loved Me is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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Warner Bros. Spends Big: ‘Joker 2’ Budget Hits $200 Million, Lady Gaga’s $12 Million Payday, Courting Tom Cruise’s New Deal and More

By Tatiana Siegel

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In January, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy jetted to London to connect with the new crown jewel of the studio, Tom Cruise . The three met to identify a film that would kick off their nonexclusive “strategic partnership.” Sources say a raft of possibilities were discussed, including an “Edge of Tomorrow” follow-up and Quentin Tarantino ’s “The Movie Critic,” which currently isn’t set up with a distributor and has Warner Bros., like every major studio, salivating.

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“The strategy at Warner Bros. right now and the reason they made some of these big star deals is they’re basically playing with other people’s money,” says one insider. “They’re shopping for Quentin or Cruise with the notion they can use it as a shiny object that is going to be additive when Zaslav sells the company.”

That time may be approaching. In April, Warner Bros. Discovery can entertain offers to buy, sell or merge with a studio like NBCUniversal, as many on the lot believe will happen. That’s when the two-year lock-up period expires as part of the 2022 deal that united WarnerMedia and Discovery. All of the recent moves, from a first-look pact with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap to the quest to land Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” follow-up are akin to painting a house before it hits the market.

And this is one splashy renovation. The budget for Todd Phillips’ musical “Joker” sequel — one of De Luca and Abdy’s first green lights — has ballooned to about $200 million, a significant bump from the $60 million cost of the first film. Sources say Joaquin Phoenix is getting $20 million to reprise his role as the clown prince of crime, while Lady Gaga is taking home about $12 million to play Harley Quinn. “Joker” took in more than $1 billion, but musicals are tricky. Case in point: Warners lost $40 million on last year’s “The Color Purple,” according to sources. Though that one can be blamed on the previous regime.

Some argue that spending big is essential when releasing movies in theaters.

“There’s only so much top talent in Hollywood, and it’s very competitive and stretched thin because a lot of talent have deals in streaming,” says Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations. “If theatrical is going to work, you need the A-lister like Tom and Leo, and Warner Bros. is spending what they need to spend to keep this talent.”

But executives across town believe Warners’ math sometimes doesn’t add up, with the studio decried as fiscally irresponsible. The Anderson film, for instance, was greenlit with a $115 million budget, according to sources. Underscoring the gamble, none of the director’s movies has crossed $80 million at the box office. His latest, 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” made $33 million worldwide. Even with Cruise’s star power, “Magnolia” only mustered $48.5 million. (It was De Luca, then a New Line exec, who convinced Cruise to play “Magnolia’s” misogynistic self-help guru.) The pair are said to be less pumped about another auteur’s latest: Bong Joon Ho ’s “Mickey 17.” In January, Warner Bros. pulled the $150 million Robert Pattinson sci-fi starrer from its schedule and then moved it to 2025. A Warner rep insists: “There is, of course, enthusiasm for it.”

As merger mania draws near, De Luca and Abdy seem unwilling to push back on talent asks. But apparently they did just that during the Coogler-Jordan negotiations. The director and star wanted 25% of first-dollar gross to split and two guaranteed theatrical release slots for future films. Both deal points were nixed.

Despite the pressure to acquiesce to demands from top talent, De Luca and Abdy can still say no.

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
'Eyes Wide Shut': El gran misterio de Stanley Kubrick cumple 20 años
Stanley Kubrick "Eyes Wide Shut"
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick dirigindo Tom Cruise durante as gravações de "De Olhos
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

VIDEO

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Waltz No 2 from Jazz Suite

COMMENTS

Eyes Wide Shut
Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 American erotic mystery psychological drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick.It is based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler, transferring the story's setting from early twentieth-century Vienna to 1990s New York City.The plot centers on a physician who is shocked when his wife (Nicole Kidman) reveals that she ...
Eyes Wide Shut
Rent Eyes Wide Shut on Fandango at Home, or buy it on Fandango at Home. Kubrick's intense study of the human psyche yields an impressive cinematic work. After Dr. Bill Hartford's (Tom Cruise) wife ...
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Official Trailer
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What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut 100 Times
Yes, 100 times. Photo: Warner Bros. 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 ...
Why 'Eyes Wide Shut' Is the Best Film of 1999
Stanley Kubrick's last work, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, is a psychosexual portrait of a marriage, a dreamscape, and it's damn funny too ... this is a movie in which Tom Cruise ...
Eyes Wide Shut' Movie Facts
The film earned $30,196,742 during its first week in release, which was enough to take the box office's number one spot—making it Kubrick's only film to do so. 20. Tom Cruise didn't like Dr ...
13 Facts You May Not Know About Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'
Fifteen years ago, on July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," opened nationwide. Setting records for the longest shoot in movie history, it was an excruciating labor 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.
Eyes Wide Shut
On July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick's final film opened in theaters. The legendary director of The Shining and Lolita had teamed up with the most famous married couple in Hollywood, [Tom Cruise ...
Eyes Wide Shut, 20 years on: how does Stanley Kubrick's last ...
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 ...
Tom Cruise Questions Everything in Stanley Kubrick's Final Film
On July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick's greatly anticipated final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released.Kubrick passed away a few months before the movie came out, and it remains one of the auteur's most ...
Eyes Wide Shut Ending, Explained
Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's final feature and the director's most dreamlike movie, ending on an ambiguous note. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star in the movie as Bill and Alice, an ...
The Joke's On Him: Tom Cruise and Eyes Wide Shut
The New York of " Eyes Wide Shut " is a dream of New York—a sex dream about an emotionally and carnally wound-up young man who denies his animal essence, his wife's, and almost everyone's. It's a comedy. Stanley Kubrick 's movies are comedies more often than not—coal-black; a tad goofy even when bloody and cruel; the kind where ...
Eyes Wide Shut: 20 years on, Stanley Kubrick's most notorious film is
I t was the fastest "yes" Tom Cruise ever uttered. Late in 1995, the world's biggest movie star travelled by helicopter to Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire. Waiting on the expansive lawn ...
'Eyes Wide Shut': The Absurd Magic of Stanley Kubrick's Last Film
Anmol Titoria. October 9, 2016. Released in 1999, months after the death of the indomitable, legendary filmmaker behind it, 'Eyes Wide Shut' was, and remains, to multiple viewers, one of Kubrick's most confounding projects. One of the most blatant reasons for the mixed response to the film is the general prognostication of what the film ...
The Ending Of Eyes Wide Shut Explained
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 ...
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut is a film directed by Stanley Kubrick with Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Marie Richardson .... Year: 1999. Original title: Eyes Wide Shut. Synopsis: A doctor (Tom Cruise) becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter after his wife (Nicole Kidman) admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met and chastising him for dishonesty in not ...You can watch Eyes ...
20 Years Ago Stanley Kubrick Tormented Tom Cruise to Create a Strange
Tom Cruise signed on to work with Kubrick instantly, being a fan of Kubrick's work. Having his wife Nicole Kidman play his wife in the movie was Cruise's idea. Who were Kubrick's first picks for the leading role? Well in 1973 he'd wanted Woody Allen for the part. You know, Woody Allen and Tom Cruise are always up for the same roles.
Sex, Death, and Kubrick: How 'Eyes Wide Shut' Changed Tom Cruise's Career
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. ... Within two years of the movie's release ...
Eyes Wide Shut streaming: where to watch online?
Synopsis. After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, 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.
Eyes Wide Shut: What you never knew about the Stanley Kubrick movie
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 ...
Eyes Wide Shut: What The Mask On The Pillow Means
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 ...
Eyes. Wide. Shut. 1999 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming
Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It is based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler, transferring the story's setting from early twentieth-century Vienna to 1990s New York City. The plot centers on a physician ( Tom Cruise) who is ...
All the Stanley Kubrick movies
1955 1h 7m Approved. 6.6 (26K) Rate. Ready to catch a train to his hometown, a washed-up boxer tells us about the strange and twisty events that happened to him the past couple of days. Director Stanley Kubrick Stars Frank Silvera Irene Kane Jamie Smith. 3. The Killing. 1956 1h 24m Approved.
"I don't want to embarrass him/ her": Stanley Kubrick Fired ...
Nelson discussed how his story runs parallel with Kubrick's incident of firing an unnamed actor from Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.
Stanley Kubrick Played a Crucial
Thriller. James Bond investigates the hijacking of British and Russian submarines carrying nuclear warheads, with the help of a K.G.B. agent whose lover he killed. Release Date. July 7, 1977 ...
Warner. Bros Spending Spree: Joker 2 $200 Million Budget, Tom Cruise Deal
Warner Bros. Spends Big: 'Joker 2' Budget Hits $200 Million, Lady Gaga's $12 Million Payday, Courting Tom Cruise's New Deal and More. By Tatiana Siegel. Getty/Michael Buckner. In January ...

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20 Eye-Opening Facts About Eyes Wide Shut

1. Eyes Wide Shut is based on a 1926 novella.

2. Production on Eyes Wide Shut began in 1996.

3. The studio pushed Stanley Kubrick to cast A-list names.

4. Stanley Kubrick wanted to cast Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

5. London stood in for New York City.

6. Some of the shots in Eyes Wide Shut required no set at all.

7. Eyes Wide Shut holds a Guinness World Record.

8. The script for Eyes Wide Shut kept changing.

9. Tom Cruise developed ulcers while shooting Eyes Wide Shut .

10. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman slept in their characters' bedroom.

11. The apartment featured in the movie was a re-creation of Stanley Kubrick's.

12. Stanley Kubrick temporarily banned Tom Cruise from the set.

13. It took 95 takes for Tom Cruise to walk through a doorway.

14. Security on the set was tight.

15. Paul Thomas Anderson spent some time on the set.

16. Stanley Kubrick makes a cameo in the movie.

17. Stanley Kubrick died less than a week after showing the studio his final cut of Eyes Wide Shut .

18. By the time Eyes Wide Shut was released, a dozen years had passed since Stanley Kubrick's last directorial effort.

19. Eyes Wide Shut topped the box office during its opening week.

20. Tom Cruise didn't like Dr. Harford.

13 Facts You May Not Know About Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'

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