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What Happened When Stanley Kubrick Took Over Tom Cruise And Nicole Kidman's Careers For Two Years
Cruise And Kidman Moved Their Entire Family To London Just To Make The Movie
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For the last 38 years of his life, Stanley Kubrick didn’t leave England. He created sets to resemble places around the world in the country where he felt comfortable. Even when it came time to film Eyes Wide Shut, set in Kubrick’s birthplace of New York City, he chose to build his own version of the city at Pinewood Studios in London.
To film with Kubrick, Cruise and Kidman had to move their family to London in late 1996. Though Kubrick assured them the film would take no longer than six months to film, Cruise later said he assumed Kubrick was being conservative, and that a much longer process was in store for the couple. In 1996, the family moved into a house near the set, and aside from a few weeks spent living on the set itself, that house is where they’d live for the majority of the film's production.
Kubrick Had Both Stars Confess Their Private Fears About Marriage And Commitment
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When Kubrick worked with actors, he had a tendency to push them to the breaking point to get the performances he wanted. He broke them down to build them up. In order to get Cruise and Kidman into the mental state of a couple on the rocks, he had them confess their own private marital fears and emotions to him, leading the actors to blur the line between their personal lives and those they were portraying on screen.
That kind of honesty is something the two found to be volatile even at the best of times. Kidman later said, "Tom would hear things that he didn't want to hear. 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."
Cruise separately added, "I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up."
A Six-Month Project Ended Up Lasting Nearly Two Years - And Set A Guinness World Record
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What was meant to be a six-month process grew, and stretched, and turned into what must have seemed like a nearly endless job. "Sometimes it was very frustrating, because you were thinking, 'Is this ever going to end?'" Kidman said.
While the couple was filming with Kubrick, Cruise had to pass up offer after offer from studios, and even films that were already scheduled suffered setbacks thanks to the indefinitely prolonged Eyes Wide Shut schedule. The follow up to Mission: Impossible was meant to be released in 1998, but Cruise's commitments in London forced the big-budget sequel to be pushed back two years.
At a LACMA retrospective of Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise clarified that the crew wasn’t exactly chained to the set, and that there was quite a bit of downtime during filming. He noted that they filmed on and off for two years, with various breaks for holidays, during which time Kubrick could review his footage:
Everyone thinks we ended up [filming] for two years. But it wasn’t quite two years. I got there in August and he gave us a month off for Christmas and left about a year and a half later. But we had a lot of vacations in between. Stanley would allow us to break, and that would give him time to evaluate the film and look at the sets. So he knew what people he needed.
Even with the breaks, filming lasted 400 days. This protracted process ended up earning the film a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest constant movie shoot.
Kubrick Directed The Couple Separately, And Wouldn’t Allow Them To Share Notes
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When working with Cruise and Kidman, Kubrick often separated them and gave them different notes in order to get contrasting and disparate reactions. It’s clear from the film’s centerpiece - the bedroom argument that prompts Cruise's character to wander into a strange, increasingly nebulous dream of an evening - that Cruise and Kidman are on different wavelengths.
It may not be as simple as "one's hot, the other's cold," but the discrepancy between the characters' emotional states of mind is discernible - and, from all indications, largely the result of Kubrick deliberately creating that divide. Aside from simply giving the couple different notes, Kubrick forbade the couple from sharing what he’d told them with one another.
The Couple Transformed The On-Set Bedroom Into Their Own, And Even Slept In The Bed
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The meta nature of casting Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as the simmering couple at the heart of the film must have been obvious to Kubrick. Not only would the audience be unable to separate the onscreen couple from their characters, but the actors themselves wouldn’t be able to completely untangle their relationship from the one they were portraying.
To further conflate the characters’ fictional reality and that of the actors portraying them, Kubrick had Cruise and Kidman recreate their personal bedroom on the film’s set. Kidman and Cruise left their clothes on the ground and change on the table. They even slept in the bed. The set was not only meant to feel real - it was meant to feel, for better or worse, like home, rather than something constructed in a studio.
During Six Days Of Kidman's Intimate Scenes, Kubrick Banned Cruise From The Set
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Cruise and Kidman’s bedroom argument is built on the ways men and women view intimacy. Cruise's Bill Harford doesn’t believe women are as apt to have a fling as men, but Kidman's Alice hits him with the harsh reality that women are just as likely to have an affair, even admitting she’d fantasized about sleeping with a man on their vacation.
For the remainder of the film, Cruise's character is wracked with images of his wife being intimate with another man. While filming these grainy black-and-white scenes over the course of six days, Kubrick didn’t allow Cruise on set, and wouldn’t allow Kidman to tell her husband the details of what happened.
They Spent Several Weeks Filming The Pivotal Bedroom Argument Scene
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The bedroom argument is really where sparks fly. After Cruise mansplains infidelity to Kidman, she lets loose a torrent of quiet rage, explaining that she once seriously thought about throwing their marriage away to be with a stranger for a single night.
The scene is only a few minutes long and it’s essentially constructed of three or four shots, but it took multiple weeks to perfect. Day after day, the two hunkered down into the bedroom - which not coincidentally looked quite a bit like their bedroom at home - and argued for hours on end.
Both Actors Were Completely, And Willingly, Subservient To Kubrick Throughout
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After establishing himself as a major box office draw in the 1980s, Cruise spent the '90s working with auteurs on films that were somewhat left of center - rather than just churn out easy movie-star projects. He allowed directors like Cameron Crowe, Brian DePalma, Oliver Stone, and Paul Thomas Anderson to use his star power to their own specific ends. When viewing Cruise’s career through that context, it’s no surprise that he not only wanted to work with Kubrick, but wanted to give himself over to the director completely.
Kidman was also reverential toward Kubrick’s work. She remembers skipping school to see A Clockwork Orange in the theater and fondly recalled seeing The Shining on a date. Long after the release of Eyes Wide Shut, Kidman put her feelings in unequivocal terms: “I didn’t care what the story was, I wanted to work with Stanley.”
The two actors did whatever was required of them. Kidman undresses multiple times on screen and Cruise is put through all manner of indignities, from having his wife verbally rip him apart to being tossed into the middle of a fray between Japanese businessmen and an Eastern European shop owner.
They rehearsed incessantly, delivered the same lines and the same scenes over and over again, take after take, for weeks on end - and without much resistance. Actor Todd Field, who plays pianist Nick Nightingale in the film, recalled, “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.”
Cruise Developed An Ulcer During Filming
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The two-year filming process pushed everyone to their breaking point. However, Cruise's character appears in most of the film's scenes, meaning he was put through Kubrick's specific paces far more than anyone else. Cruise wanted to please Kubrick, a director he’d looked up to since he was a child, so he didn’t argue when he was asked to perform tasks like, say, walking though a door 95 times until Kubrick got what he wanted.
Cruise’s commitment to achieving anything Kubrick required ended up giving the actor an ulcer, something he hid from the director. Cruise later explained, "In times when we couldn't get it, it was just like, 'F*ck!' I'd bring it upon myself because I demand a lot of myself."
Rumors Ran So Rampant During Production That The Couple Sued 'Star' Magazine
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Throughout the production of Eyes Wide Shut, rumors were flying about what was going on during the filming process. Some believed the film was about a pair of therapists who were sleeping with their clients, or that Cruise and Kidman would be having intimate relations on screen. One rumor even suggested Cruise would be wearing a dress for a portion of the film.
Gossip about Kidman and Cruise’s personal life became something of a tabloid sensation during the production. The couple sued Star magazine over the claim that they hired sex therapists to help them get into the groove on set.
Aside from firing off lawsuits at tabloids, Cruise took to responding to pieces of gossip that got particularly under his skin. After a gossip columnist wrote that Kubrick was running a “miserable” set, Cruise lept to his director's defense, publicly insisting Kubrick was “impeccable and extraordinary... Both Nic and I love him.”
The Withholding Kubrick Exhausted And Frustrated His Stars
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No matter how much Kubrick's subject matter or tone shifts from film to film, there are a number of constants: wide compositions, impeccable set dressing, and scenes being performed by characters who’ve been asked to do the same thing over and over again until their words and actions are virtually alien. Scenes could go on until Kubrick figured out what he wanted, and rather than tell the actors what he was looking for, he had them figure it out while the cameras were rolling.
Kubrick’s directorial style of withholding his wants wore on everyone - especially Cruise. Both Cruise and Kidman have said that Kubrick allowed his cast and crew to watch the dailies, but the sheer amount of footage Kubrick filmed made it impossible to figure out what the director wanted. With a lack of character notes, Cruise and Kidman were forced to play out their scenes like a strange guessing game.
Cruise Found The Character Of Dr. Harford ‘Unpleasant’
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For most of his career, Cruise has played inherently likable characters. Even if they’re abrasive jerks, like the cocky hotshot in Top Gun, they’re really cool jerks that people can’t help but enjoy. That’s not the case in Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise plays Dr. Bill Harford, a man who’s bored with his family and jealous of the hypothetical man his wife dreamt about.
He’s a blank mask, an unfeeling and arrogant man who uses his status as a doctor to push his way through the world. While Kidman is repentant about briefly fantasizing about other men, Cruise’s character is nasty to the people he meets, sees women as objects, and does everything in his power to ruin his relationship. Speaking about the role, Cruise says of his time as Harford, “I 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.”
Kubrick’s Passing Has ‘Tainted The Experience’ For Both Actors In Retrospect
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Neither actor feels like the audience was able to see Kubrick’s full vision in the existing cut of Eyes Wide Shut, which was ultimately released after Kubrick's passing. The director took a long time to film his movies, but he spent even longer meticulously putting them together in the editing bay. When Kubrick made Cruise walk through a doorway nearly 100 times, it wasn’t to simply satisfy an urge - he was looking for something specific and was content to keep going until he found it.
Eyes Wide Shut exists in a state that many don't consider truly finished, given Kubrick's untimely passing during post-production. That leaves both Cruise and Kidman with lingering doubts about what they spent two years working on, and whether it was worth it to challenge their marriage for a piece of art that, technically, could never fully be realized.
A week after delivering a finished cut of the film - which is to say, his first pass at a finished cut - Kubrick suffered a heart attack. Cruise and Kidman found out about the director’s passing when they called to give him notes on the film, having viewed it twice. Kidman admits: “Trying to define it, without Stanley here, is... It’s tainted the experience a bit for Tom and me.”
