It has been 25 years since Nicole Kidman uttered the last word in the final film of legendary director Stanley Kubrick, the posthumously released exploration of the mysteries of marriage and relationships, Eyes Wide Shut.
Speaking with The Los Angeles Times, the actress looks back on working with the filmmaker on the 1999 drama, which she calls “a career in itself,” and its record-breaking production length.
Eyes Wide Shut, based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, took 400 days to shoot in the late 1990s and began while Kidman was still in her 20s; her co-star and then-husband Tom Cruise was arguably Hollywood’s hottest star. The shoot began, as Kidman recounts in the new interview, with the couple spending a lot of time with Kubrick — a living legend but one who demanded they not “put him on a pedestal.” The three became comfortable enough with one another that the two actors were comfortable throwing in ideas and improvising during filming, she says.
But was Kubrick delving into the couple’s marriage to extract their lauded performances?
“I suppose he was mining it,” Kidman says. “There were ideas he was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions. But he had a strong sense of the story he was telling. I do remember him saying, ‘Triangles are hard. You have to tread carefully when it’s a triangle.’ Because one person could feel ganged up on. But he was aware of that and knew how to manage us.”
Kubrick’s rejection of a hierarchy during the shoot and demand that the three be on the same level — “that kind of [hierarchical] thinking hinders the creative process” Kidman recalls him saying — had a couple of other rules: no immediate “no” answers and no asking the director “why” the characters are doing or saying anything.
“He didn’t want sycophants. … And everyone has to wait at least 10 seconds before they say no to an idea. I heard that, and I’m in my 20s, and I’m like, ‘OK. It’s on.’” she reveals. “It was experimental, like making student films in Australia.”
Speaking about the film and her character, wife and would-be adulteress Alice, Kidman seems to be able to conjure up her thoughts on who Alice is and why she regales her doctor husband with a spiteful monologue about her near-temptation into adultery that sparks the film’s plot as he’s left devastated over what his marriage has been and what it could become.
“Human beings are devastating,” Kidman says. “And you don’t ever have real access to somebody’s thoughts. You may know someone. And you may not. It’s not the things we may want to hear, but it’s deeply honest.”
It was nearly two-and-a-half years after the Eyes Wide Shut shoot began that Kubrick screened a cut for Kidman, Cruise and some Warner Bros. executives. He died six days later. Given that it was such a lengthy production, one which took Kidman off the market in Hollywood for years just as her career was beginning, would she do it all again?
“I would have stayed a third year,” she says. “Does that mean I’m crazy?”
