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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

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

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

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Stanley Kubrick

Dr. William Harford

Nicole Kidman

Alice Harford

Sydney Pollack

Victor Ziegler

Marie Richardson

Rade Serbedzija

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

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Eyes Wide Shut is 375 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 77 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Django Unchained but less popular than The Vanishing.

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, 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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Nicole Kidman: Tom Cruise and I were 'happily married' while making 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Nicole Kidman says her relationship with Tom Cruise was in a good place when they made the erotic thriller "Eyes Wide Shut."

The couple was married when they starred together the 1999 film.

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"We were happily married through that," she told The New York Times Magazine when asked about a scene in the film when she gives a long speech about adultery.

"We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We’d rent out a place and go racing at 3 in the morning. I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I don’t have the ability to look back and dissect it. Or I’m not willing to."

Kidman and Cruise, who met on the set of the 1990 sports drama "Days of Thunder," divorced in 2001 after 11 years of marriage . They adopted two children during their union, daughter Isabella, 27, and son Connor, 25.

In 2006, Kidman married Keith Urban and has two children with him, daughters Sunday, 12, and Faith, 9. In April 2006, Cruise and Katie Holmes welcomed a daughter, Suri. The couple married later that year before divorcing in 2012.

Kidman doesn’t talk too often about her previous marriage , though she has said she was "so young" when they tied the knot. At the time, she was 23, and Cruise was 28. Kidman's also been open about how being married to a star of Cruise’s magnitude meant she avoided being sexually harassed .

Kidman, 53, and Cruise, 58, have both had stellar careers, with Kidman collecting an Academy Award for "The Hours" and Cruise earning a trio of Oscar nominations over the years. For Kidman, working with legendary director Stanley Kubrick on "Eyes Wide Shut" is an experience she still cherishes.

"We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set. We would say, 'When is it going to end?' We went over there thinking it was going to be three months. It turned into a year, a year and a half," she said.

"But you go, 'As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time,'" she continued. "Stanley, he wasn’t torturous. He was arduous in that he would shoot a lot."

Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.

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Eyes Wide Shut

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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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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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Tom Cruise Questions Everything in Stanley Kubrick's Final Film

Stanley Kubrick's final film puts Tom Cruise's movie star persona against the ropes in surreal and disarming ways throughout a dreamlike NYC setting.

The Big Picture

• Cruise's role in Eyes Wide Shut challenges his action-hero image, portraying vulnerability and insecurity in a surreal and thought-provoking manner.
• The film delves into male ego, desire, and insecurity, emphasizing the struggle to reconcile reality with unattainable fantasies.
• Cruise's character faces a dark night of the soul, grapples with emotions of shame and guilt, ultimately seeking reconciliation and a quiet domestic life.

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 provocative, controversial, and astonishing contributions to the cinematic art form. The film stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman , at the time married in real life and playing a couple on-screen, as a doctor and his wife who admits she has considered having an affair. The revelation sends Cruise's Dr. Bill Harford into a tailspin through the dead of night in New York City as he wanders around looking for sexual gratification, and seeking a greater sense of control over his own life.

Eyes Wide Shut

A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Was an Interesting Departure From Tom Cruise's Usual Roles

Cruise's 1999 was an interesting point in his career, as he also starred in Paul Thomas Anderson 's Magnolia , which released a few months later. In the years since, he has not appeared in many strictly dramatic roles , opting instead for primarily action oriented films. Two auteurist directors were able to center these challenging, three-hour long, adult dramas around his acting talent, and there are not many other examples of actors who have managed to pull that off in such a short span of time. Although the release year is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, since Eyes Wide Shut was in development for nearly six years and filmed for 400 days –– breaking the record for longest film shoot in history. It is eerie that Kubrick passed away so soon after completing the final edits on the film, considering how lengthy the production was.

Kubrick plays with Cruise's movie star persona in an interesting way, as the Cruise we know as the cocky hotshot in Top Gun or The Color of Money is nowhere to be found, neither is the heroic posture he delivered a few years earlier in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible , a role which has gone on to define his career as he returned to the franchise for the seventh installment in 2023 . Instead, Cruise is up against the ropes. He is lost, vulnerable, and desperate to heal his broken ego. Kubrick puts Cruise in a world where he is vastly in over his head . Even when Cruise is in over his head, he is typically able to craftily maneuver a fighter jet or a motorcycle to speed his way past any conflict, but in Eyes Wide Shut , there are no easy solutions to the problems he is facing.

Tom Cruise Must Face the Fragility of His Ego in 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Dr. Bill Harford seemingly has it all at the start of Eyes Wide Shut , but if you look closer it is not the case. Yes, he is attending an incredibly lavish Christmas party, he seems to have a happy family unit, and he is a successful doctor. However, he feels out of touch at this party, he is disconnected from his wife, and while he is rich, he is realizing there is a more elite class from which he is entirely shut out. Tragic events involving a young woman overdosing while with the party's host, portrayed by Sydney Pollack who previously directed Tom Cruise in The Firm, and the revelatory post-party conversation with his wife lead Cruise on a dark journey through the streets of New York. Each city block or ornate room is given an otherworldly glow thanks to the over-saturation of Christmas lights filling the frame.

The visual choices combined with the ambiguous and surreal tone place Cruise in very unfamiliar settings where he walks a liminal tightrope between dreaming and reality . The discoveries he makes are challenging, as events unfold in such a way that he ends up at a secretive party where a sexual ritual is performed, after an invitation from his friend played by Todd Field , actor-director who would go on to collaborate with Cate Blanchett in TÁR (Blanchett also happens to have a voice cameo appearance in Eyes Wide Shut). This ritual gone awry leads Cruise to some dangerous situations as the individuals involved go to great lengths to stop him from speaking about or acknowledging what had taken place in any shape or form, especially after he seems to uncover that a woman may have been murdered as a part of the ritual.

Whether the disturbing events that play out in the film are meant to be taken at face value, they prove two things to Cruise's character. Either he must accept that his fantasies are so outlandish and embrace his reality where life is a lot more... normal, or these things he aspires to be a part of are far outside what he is capable of handling . This is not only with regard to the sexual encounters he approaches, but also his idyllic perspective on what his marriage should be, or his desire to attain vast wealth and enter into an even higher status than that of a successful doctor. His ego was bruised by his wife's revelation early in the film, but the experiences he seeks out to repair it end up mangling it even further.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Subverts Expectations of a Leading Man

Considering his breakdown toward the end of the film when he realizes his wife knows about the events of the previous days, it is clear Cruise understands he is out of his depth and feels a wide range of emotions including shame, guilt, inadequacy, and fear regarding his future. Cruise's role grapples with one of the greatest fears the male ego can confront, the notion that not even his masculine bravado can control or uncover the thoughts the women in his life choose to keep from him. The insecurity seeps through his performance as it becomes clear how even in marriage there are still things people will keep from each other, and he has no power to challenge that. This is a rare form to see Cruise in , and he handles these outbursts just as well as he handles traversing rooftops at impossible speeds or clinging to the side of airplanes.

Ultimately, Cruise is put through this dark night of the soul and comes out of it in a place where he and his wife can maybe set aside the collision of ego, desire, and insecurity, and enjoy a quiet domestic life together. It is kind of a happy ending... but it's a distorted one , but Cruise allows the opportunity to relinquish all of his troubled experiences over the last few days by accepting the life he has and attempting to reconcile with Kidman in the final moments of the film.

Tom Cruise Inspired Christian Bale's Performance in 'American Psycho'

Kubrick disarms our understanding of what a typical leading man should be through his treatment of Bill Harford's character. Cruise is uncomfortable , weird, and stripped down –– both literally and metaphorically –– in Eyes Wide Shut . This type of role is a challenging one for any actor to play, but especially difficult in the hands of someone with such massive celebrity status that audiences have certain expectations attached to his involvement in a film. Maybe in 1999, it did not seem quite as bizarre (although most definitely still bizarre considering the subject matter dealt with), but in retrospect Eyes Wide Shut is something quite rare for such a towering movie star to tackle with the confidence and image-conscious attitude Cruise brings to the part.

Although the film remains one of his most challenging and controversial, it is also one of the best outings Cruise has given as an on-screen performer. Some actors may have an easier time riding a motorcycle off a cliff for a film than getting into the right head space to portray such a vulnerable person. As the Mission: Impossible series continues, and Cruise shows no signs of slowing down his life as an action-junkie, we can hope he might return one day to a film as surreal, complicated, and thoughtful as Eyes Wide Shut.

Eyes Wide Shut is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+

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Why Stanley Kubrick Kept Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman Separate On Eyes Wide Shut

It's no secret that Stanley Kubrick could be an extreme filmmaker. His cast and crew would often be pushed to their limits to achieve the obsessive perfectionism present in his work. Such was the case for what would end up being the director's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut."

The erotic drama centers on New York doctor William Harford ( Tom Cruise ), who, after learning of his wife Alice's (Nicole Kidman) displeasure with their relationship, embarks on a night-long journey that leads him to a mysterious masked cult with provocative intentions. Given that Cruise and Nicole Kidman were a real couple at the time, Kubrick sought ways to build wariness between them to instill believability in their characters. His solution: keep them as separate as humanly possible. 

His efforts varied in their extremeness, from directing each performer individually to getting Kidman to shoot nearly a week's worth of imaginary sex scenes for what amounts to little more than a handful of William's paranoid thoughts. To top it off, the actors weren't allowed to discuss their characters with each other, even when performing some of the film's more intense moments. These strange experiences and more earned "Eyes Wide Shut" a distinct — and unfortunate — honor.

Eyes Wide Shut's difficult shoot holds a world record

While "Eyes Wide Shut" is celebrated for possessing everything that makes Stanley Kubrick's work so revered, the movie's production exemplified what made working with the director so tumultuous. The filmmaker's extreme efforts to perfect his vision would result in the final product securing a troublesome place in film history. 

"Eyes Wide Shut" began filming in November 1996, with most anticipating the shoot to last no more than six to eight months. As time passed, that outlook proved to be a little more than optimistic. Further predictions of the production ending in July 1997 were similarly shut down as filming continued in earnest. The movie finally finished in June 1998, wrapping up an arduous 15-month-long shoot. This resulted in the film receiving the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot of all time, a distinction it still holds.

As can be imagined, the grueling production came with a fair share of painful experiences ( Cruise got an ulcer working on "Eyes Wide Shut" ). Actors intended to have minor roles, such as Alan Cumming and Vinessa Shaw, stayed in the production significantly longer than expected. Meanwhile, Harvey Keitel became so frustrated after performing nearly 70 takes of walking through a door that he stormed off the set, with Sydney Pollack taking over his part. 

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

Senior Entertainment Reporter, HuffPost

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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Screen Rant

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

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

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

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

Related: Every Stanley Kubrick Movie Ranked, Worst To Best

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cruise And Nicole Kidman Face The Brunt Of Scathing Comments From Eyes Wide Shut Screenwriter

91-year-old screenwriter Frederic Raphael does not hold back in his new book.

During their relationship, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman appeared together in three films: Days of Thunder , which marked the beginning of their romantic involvement , Far and Away , and Stanley Kubrick 's final film, Eyes Wide Shut . Even after more than twenty years, Eyes Wide Shut 's intriguing and provocative nature continues to fuel frequent discussions, primarily due to its unique and captivating storytelling and its daring portrayal of sexual content. Now Frederic Raphael, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the 1999 erotic drama, has taken aim at the pair of Hollywood icons in his latest book Last Post , unleashing a scathing attack on the actors.

Now 91, Raphael's book revisits his tumultuous experience working with the late Shining director on the enigmatic film, which starred Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman in one of her best performances . In his book which is structured like imaginary letters to people who impacted his career, the screenwriter writes to Kubrick, accusing the Top Gun: Maverick actor (along with the late director's wife Christiane Harlan and her brother Jan Harlan) of attempting to erase his contributions to the movie's final version and even tampering with his Wikipedia page. In the book, via the Daily Mail , he alleges:

I have never been called a liar by anyone as I have been by the Harlan clan and by Tom Cruise, egocentric control freak to whom I have never spoken.

After filming wrapped, the screenwriter accuses the actor of attempting to manipulate him with a job offer. He also took a dig at the Mission: Impossible star's association with Scientology, suggesting that the actor's need for control extended beyond the film set. With no hesitation, Raphael alleges:

He [Cruise] did offer me a job though, soon after you finished shooting; the better to have me on a leash, no doubt. In his turn, he too seems to need the control he finds in Scientology.

Raphael questions Kubrick’s intention of capitalizing on the real-life passion and authenticity between the Hollywood power couple, implying that their real-life marriage might not have translated as convincingly as expected on-screen. He continues:

Was there something just a touch naïve in your idea that casting a married couple as a married couple would enable you to put ‘the truth’ on the screen? One thing you can be pretty sure of: whatever any conjugal duo may disclose in public about their relationship, they rarely let any crucial cat out of the bag. Did you honestly suppose Cruise and Kidman were bound in genuine passion, rather than embraced in a careerist merger?

Following the film's 1999 release, Kidman and Cruise's marriage ended, and a few years later, the Australian actress tied the knot with Keith Urban in 2006.

While much of Frederic Raphael's criticism was directed towards Kubrick and Cruise, he also aimed a sharp remark at the Cold Mountain actress, questioning her star power and lack of successful films up to that point. He imagines writing to Kubrick: 

Kidman has been a star for many years for many people: can you think of a single movie of hers you wanted to see again?

Coincidentally, Kidman's on-screen success soared in the years following Eyes Wide Shut , culminating in an Academy Award win for her remarkable portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours . Additionally, she graced the silver screen in blockbuster hits like Moulin Rouge! And one of the greatest one-off horror movies of all time , The Others , solidifying her status as a major Hollywood star.

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Despite the accusations and animosity between Frederic and the two Hollywood A-listers, both Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have remained busy in their careers. Cruise is currently celebrating the success of yet another box office hit, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part I , which had a solid opening week . Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman can be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldana in Taylor Sheridan's latest series, Special Ops: Lioness , a show available for viewing with a Paramount+ subscription .

Make sure to check out our 2023 movie release schedule to plan your next trip to the cinema. 

Ryan graduated from Missouri State University with a BA in English/Creative Writing. An expert in all things horror, Ryan enjoys covering a wide variety of topics. He's also a lifelong comic book fan and an avid watcher of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. 

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Nicole Kidman reflects on marriage to Tom Cruise while making ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Nicole kidman and tom cruise were married from 1990 to 2001.

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Nicole Kidman is looking back on her marriage  to Tom Cruise .

At one point in time, Kidman, 53, and the “Top Gun” star, 58, were among Hollywood’s A-list couples  -- and now she's opening up about their relationship while they filmed “Eyes Wide Shut” in 1999. The pair play a married couple mired by infidelity in the film.

Kidman told the New York Times  -- in an interview published on Monday -- that she and Cruise were “ happily married ” when asked if she had harbored any “negative feelings” about their marriage during that time.

"We would go go-kart racing after those scenes,’’ recalled Kidman. “We’d rent out a place and go racing at 3 in the morning. I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I don’t have the ability to look back and dissect it. Or I’m not willing to."

NICOLE KIDMAN RECALLS MOVING TO U.S. AFTER FALLING IN LOVE WITH TOM CRUISE: 'I ALWAYS MAKE CHOICES FOR LOVE'

Nicole Kidman divorced Tom Cruise in 2001. During their 10-year marriage, the former pair adopted Isabella Jane (born 1992) and Connor Anthony (born 1995).  (AP, File )

Kidman and Cruise adopted two children, Isabella, now 27, and Connor, now 25, before their split in 2001. She would move on to marry country music star Keith Urban in 2006 and welcomed two daughters, Sunday, 12, and Faith, 9.

Meanwhile, Cruise would have another daughter, Suri, now 14, from his six-year marriage to Katie Holmes.

NICOLE KIDMAN OPENS UP ABOUT ADOPTED KIDS WITH EX TOM CRUISE

Kidman told the Times that she always aimed to keep the kids’ lives private. A source told People magazine in July 2018 that Cruise “loves all his children. And each of them has a right to their own story.”

Later that year, in November 2018, Kidman told Australia’s WHO magazine , “I’m very private about all that.”

“They are adults. They are able to make their own decisions. They have made choices to be Scientologists and, as a mother, it’s my job to love them,” she explained. “And I am an example of that tolerance and that’s what I believe — that no matter what your child does, the child has love and the child has to know there is available love and I’m open here."

Nicole Kidman looked back on her relationship with Tom Cruise in an interview with the New York Times published on Monday. (Getty)

NICOLE KIDMAN ON MARRYING TOM CRUISE AT 23

Added the "Big Little Lies" star: "I think that’s so important because if that is taken away from a child, to sever that in any child, in any relationship, in any family — I believe it’s wrong. So that’s our job as a parent, to always offer unconditional love.”

“I have to protect all those relationships. I know 150% that I would give up my life for my children because it’s what my purpose is,” she said.

TOM CRUISE, NICOLE KIDMAN'S DAUGHTER BELLA POSTS RARE SELFIE

“Eyes Wide Shut” was one of the last films esteemed director Stanley Kubrick worked on before he died at age 70, shortly after its completion.

NICOLE KIDMAN REVEALS HER 'MASSIVE GRIEF' AFTER HAVING A MISCARRIAGE DURING HER MARRIAGE TO TOM CRUISE

"We loved working with him. We shot that for two years," Kidman said of her and Cruise’s time working on the film together in the NYT interview. "We had two kids and were living in a trailer on the lot primarily, making spaghetti because Stanley liked to eat with us sometimes. We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set."

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Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick

Cinematographer:

Larry Smith

Stanley Kubrick was nominated numerous times on the film circuit for awards for Best Director and Best Foreign Film

• Tom Cruise as Dr. William Harford
• Nicole Kidman as Alice Hartford
• Vinessa Shaw as Domino
• Julienne Davis as Mandy
• Sydney Pollack as Victor Ziegler
• Marie Richardson
• Leelee Sobieski
• Abigail Good as Masked Mysterious Woman at Party
• Rade Serbedzija

Production Design

• Leslie Tomkins

Costume Design

• Marit Allen

Tom Cruise Once Told Fans To 'Get A Life' After Vanity Fair Asked About His Divorce From Nicole Kidman

• Tom Cruise once told fans obsessed with his divorce from Nicole Kidman to "get a life".
• Cruise remained respectful towards Kidman, stating she knows why their marriage ended.
• Nicole Kidman was offended when asked about her ex-husband Tom Cruise in an interview.

During Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's marriage, the duo was the biggest power couple. Since Cruise has headlined many movies that made a fortune and Kidman is a blockbuster veteran , it makes sense that they were such a big deal.

In Cruise's case, part of the reason he is so successful is how careful he is about his image. After all, Cruise has strict rules about how he looks in public and he makes sure everyone knows about his most dangerous stunts . However, Cruise once let his frustrations get the best of him when he told people who obsessed over his divorce from Kidman to "get a life".

This article will reveal why Tom Cruise told people who ask him about Nicole Kidman to "get a life" . Following that, the article will reveal the question about Cruise that outraged Kidman .

Tom Cruise Told Fans Obsessed With His Divorce To "Get A Life"

In January 2002, Tom Cruise was profiled by Vanity Fair. While this was far from the first time Cruise had been the subject of an article like that, this piece is noteworthy due to its timing. A little less than a year earlier, Cruise filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman. Due to the timing of that event, Cruise was asked about his divorce and he told obsessed fans to mind their own business .

“I don’t care if it piques people’s interest. Honestly, people should mind their own damn business. And get a life of their own . . . . My personal life isn’t here to sell newspapers.”

Before Cruise got to the point where he seemed to vent his frustrations, Vanity Fair's interviewer Evgenia Peretz asked him a very personal question. "Why did you and Nicole decide to end it?"

When Vanity Fair's profile was published, that was a question that millions of people wanted answered. However, Cruise quickly made it clear that he wouldn't divulge anything specific about what led to his divorce at that time.

“She knows why, and I know why. She’s the mother of my children, and I wish her well.”

Do Nicole Kidman's Daughters Have A Relationship With Her Older Adopted Kids?

According to Vanity Fair's article about Cruise, the movie star spoke "curtly" when he refused to say what led to his divorce. Cruise then went on to say that the best thing for him to do at that time was to move on with his life .

“And I think that you just move on. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that with anything. Things happen in life, and you do everything you can, and in every possible way, and there’s a point at which you just sometimes have to face the brutal reality.”

For a reporter to reach the heights of being employed by Vanity Fair and chosen to profile Tom Cruse, they have to be the kind of person who wants answers. With that in mind, it isn't overly surprising that Vanity Fair's writer didn't leave the subject after Cruise stated he was trying to move on.

Instead, Peretz stated that Cruise's comments made it seem like an event happened that led to the former A-list couple's divorce. However, Peretz also told Cruise that she recognized he may just be telling her to mind her own business.

Nicole Kidman Was Outraged To Be Asked About Her Marriage To Tom Cruise

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In response to both of those sentiments, Cruise restated that Kidman knows what happened, and he only wants the best for his ex-wife.

“No. I mean, she knows why, and she is the mother of my children, and I wish her well,”

At that point in the interview, Cruise told people obsessed with his divorce to "get a life". The last thing that Peretz asked Cruise which was related to his divorce was whether he looked back at the experience of making Eyes Wide Shut with Kidman differently. Cruise simply stated that nothing about that experience had changed.

How successful was Eyes Wide Shut financially and how was it reviewed, according to The Numbers and Rotten Tomatoes?

“The experience was the experience. I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that way. I don’t. I’ve gone through everything. It was what it was.”

Nicole Kidman Was Outraged By Being Asked This Tom Cruise Question

In 2021, Nicole Kidman starred in Being the Ricardos and her acclaimed performance later netted her an Oscar nomination. That film focused on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's relationship behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. When The Guardian interviewed Kidman about the movie in 2021, she was asked a question about Tom Cruise that offended the beloved actor.

Nicole Kidman Admitted To "Fears And Insecurities" Amid Plastic Surgery Rumors Backed By Doctors

When Kidman was asked about how Being the Ricardos portrayed Ball and Arnaz's relationship, she gave a thoughtful answer.

"This film says you can make an extraordinary relationship thrive and leave remnants of it that exist forever. Yeah, that’s really gorgeous. You can’t make people behave how you want them to, and sometimes you’re going to fall in love with someone who isn’t going to be the person you spend the rest of your life with. And I think that’s all very relatable. You may have kids with them. You may not, but they were very much in love.”

In response to Kidman's answer, The Guardian's interviewer asked if she was bringing up her failed marriage to Tom Cruise. While the article doesn't reveal how that question was posed, the writer assures it was asked with "exquisite care".

Still, according to The Guardian's writer, Kidman "chokes just a little" at the suggestion before completely denying she was referring to Cruise. “Oh, my God, no, no. Absolutely not. No. I mean, that’s, honestly, so long ago that that isn’t in this equation. So no.”

Tom Cruise filed to end his marriage to Nicole Kidman in February 2001 which means they split up two decades before The Guardian interview. Kidman went on to marry Keith Urban in June 2006, which means the interview also took place more than 15 years after she got remarried.

After quoting Kidman, The Guardian's article states that she was "angry" to be asked about Cruise. The fact that Kidman called out the interviewer's question as "almost sexist" proves how outraged the actor was .

“And I would ask not to be pigeonholed that way, either. It feels to me almost sexist, because I’m not sure anyone would say that to a man. And at some point, you go, ‘Give me my life. In its own right.’”

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Katie holmes may have had more than one reason to end her tom cruise marriage.

by Kristyn Burtt

Kristyn Burtt

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Marty Rathbun, a former member and outspoken critic of the organization, discussed how he was ordered by David to “facilitate the breakup” of the former power couple. The head of Scientology didn’t love the influence Kidman had over Cruise, a sizable donor to the church, while they were filming Eyes Wide Shut.  The Top Gun star reportedly distanced himself from David despite their close friendship. Rathbun alleged that an “aggressive campaign” began to rope Cruise back into the church and away from Kidman. Not only did it end their marriage, but Rathbun claimed that Connor and Isabella were “re-educated” by Scientology, which only caused a greater rift with Kidman. It was a scenario Holmes actively tried to avoid. 

While Holmes’ divorce may appear to be simple from the outside, the layers to her secret exit were much more complex. And while the Church of Scientology continues to deny any allegations, it appears Holmes made the right decision for her and Suri.

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