Kubrick only made 13 features and three documentaries
in nearly a half century as a filmmaker, but each reflected his perfectionism
and control-freak tendencies. Eyes Wide Shut was no exception.
Everything reflected his imprint: every frame of the
film, the advertising copy, even the time and place of the premiere.
It was all being orchestrated from the grave, because
the legend who had created 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Dr.
Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, and Spartacus
had died four months before.
In But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct, Ken
Kwapis listed several characteristics he had associated with 2001: A Space
Odyssey, only to take issue with them now: Kubrick’s “cold formality, his
mania for one-point perspective composition, the stultifying pace, the
too-cool-for-school Nietzscheanisms.”
But all, to one degree or another, carried over to Eyes
Wide Shut, despite Kubrick’s usual single-minded attempt to make each
succeeding film utterly unlike anything else he had done.
The long preparation period for the movie—not to
mention Kubrick’s death before it could see the light of day—led to all kinds
of speculations, all kinds of stories about what went on while shooting
took place in or near London.
The pre-premiere buzz about Kubrick's first film in over a decade only increased with word that some explicit scenes need to be obscured with computer-generated images to avoid a box office-killing NC-17 rating.
Consider, for instance, the following:
*Stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman expected
to be in England for six months of shooting. But, having signed open-ended
contracts, they ended up staying nearly two years. Nevertheless, as Kidman
told Glenn Whipp in a Los Angeles Times interview earlier this month:
"I would have stayed a third year. Does that mean I'm crazy?"
*The stars were in England so long that their two
children supposedly acquired English accents.
*Post-production lasted almost a year.
* Kubrick joined psychoanalysis sessions with Cruise
and Kidman, urging them to open up in such a way that the line between the
fictional spouses and the actors playing them began to blur.
*Speaking of therapy, that’s how Kubrick got the idea for the movie in the first place, 30 years before its release. He and star-producer Kirk Douglas clashed so much on the set of the mega-budget epic Spartacus that they went for professional counseling together, during which he learned of the novella Traumnovelle (with the title translated as both Rhapsody and Dream Story), by the Austrian modernist writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931).
*Though Schnitzler's tale was set in early 20th-century Vienna, Kubrick decided to set it in late 20th-century New York City--then mostly shot it in London, including recreating exterior Greenwich Village exteriors in Pinewood Studios.
*Kubrick would not allow Cruise and Kidman to share their
notes on scenes, hoping to heighten the alienation and confusion that their
characters, Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, would feel.
*One sequence alone— a 13½-minute billiard room scene
between Tom Cruise and Sydney Pollack—required nearly 200 takes.
* Kubrick made Cruise do 95 takes of just walking
through a door.
* Alan Cumming auditioned six times for
the small role of a hotel clerk.
* Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson filled in when Harvey
Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh could not do post-production work on the movie
because shooting lasted so long and they had prior film commitments.
*Screenwriter Frederic Raphael caused a stir with a
memoir of his collaboration with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, in which he
related the director’s anger when he sent a copy of the script to his agent, as
well as his own frustration over how little of his screenplay made it into the
finished product: “I was there to prepare the way for him to do his stuff.
Anything that was markedly mine was never the stuff he was going to do."
In mid-career, Kubrick gravitated towards low-budget filmmaking that paralleled his own reputation for parsimony.
In the end, his
attempt to hold the line on expenses for Eyes Wide Shut paid off. While
costing $65 million, the movie totaled $162 million in worldwide box-office receipts,
making this the director’s most successful film of his career.
At the same, the provocative nature of the material (especially a masquerade ball) caused the most controversy.
Over a quarter century later, many now see Kubrick's last film, with its depiction of decadent and danger, as prophetic, including Rich Cohen's "Behind the Mask of Corruption" April 2020 retrospective in The Paris Review: "an exposé written in code [revealing] revealed a dynamic that had long played out in sectors of elite society but was not glimpsed until our own age, an age of scandal, the most telling being the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein.
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