1999 [Eyes Wide Shut]

juliezhou · Guru

1999 [Eyes Wide Shut]

juliezhou · Guru

Hi! i thought you would perhaps like this story; i was just browsing reddit one day and i came across a post about EWS real ending. this guy posted a story; he said his uncle works for Warner Brothers and was at the screening for warner brothers executives. The toy store scene ends. Bill alice and helena are being led outside by two men. the two men who take helena in the -Now ending of ews-. they are takin into a limoousine and driven to the summerton mansion. Alice and helena are taken inside bill is told to wait. He grows impatient and enters the mansion.He comes across a room with an altar too small for an adult, and a pentagram on it. then He finds helena and alice in a room in their underware with a masked man on a bed. oral sex is suggested by the scene. bill gets angry and is taken outside by one of the masked men. the tell him ;you cost us a life, ( mystery woman orgy) so you owe us one.alice joins the man in comforting bill; they basically tell him it is allright, his wife and daughter are now protected. the scene cuts to a party at zieglers wth alice laughing with people. everyone is happy except bill. he walks to a balcony. Realises what has happened to his family. Zoom. Kubrick Stare. jumps over balcony. - Now this is just a story. but it got deleted from rkubrick and rconspiracy. if this story is true, then EWS is not just about relationships. it is about a cult who wants to innitiate bill, his wife and their child for sex purposes. EWS now is seen as an edgy movie about relationships and infidelity. Its really about so much more.

juliezhou · Guru

Oct. 5, 2020

Nicole Kidman Leans Into the Pain

[…]

Q: Celeste in “Big Little Lies” — as well as Grace in “The Undoing” — is a part that requires some sexual boldness, which is common for you but not many other actors at your level. Does the increased judgment you just pointed to mean boldness about sex might become rarer in Hollywood?

A: Look at “Normal People,” though. That was exquisite work from those two actors. I’ve had situations as an actress where, oh my gosh, it was not what I thought it would be. I was probably at the forefront of this: When I went to work with Stanley Kubrick, he was like, I’m going to want full frontal nudity, and I was like, Ahh, I don’t know. So we came up with a great agreement, which was contractual. He would show me the scenes with the nudity before they made it into the film. Then I could feel completely safe. I didn’t say no to any of it. I’d wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be me standing there nude and everyone laughing at me. I was protected, so I got to explore a complicated marriage and the way in which Tom’s character is having those jealous images. I would never think of not wanting the storytelling to be told properly. Having them say, “Once you’re OK with it, great, that’s it” — what a fantastic place to be in as a woman. Please write that correctly, because otherwise, it will be misinterpreted.

Q: Which part?

A: The way in which the contractual agreement that I have with a director allows me to do nudity and sex scenes because I feel safe. Sexuality is over here in a box, and we don’t deal with it. I’m happy to deal with it, but there needs to be a place where you can go, I’m not going to be exploited. Then I’ll go down the road with you. I love the relationship between a director and an actor. When it’s pure, it’s exquisite. And the other actors, when you’re all there doing the work, it’s exquisite.

[…]

Q: When you were talking about your attitude toward your work when you were younger —

A: The labels and exact timing, that gets too logical. It’s not like, “Right here is when it all changed.” The essence of who you are evolves. You implied, well, life is obviously more important than the work, than artistic life, and I was like, is it? I was being provocative with you. The deepest part of being a human for me is the connections. Because that’s what you’re left with. I was watching Philip Seymour Hoffman the other day, and I went, “Thank you for your work.” I watch different actors and films, it’s gut-wrenchingly beautiful. Watching Pacino in “The Godfather.” Looking at what Kubrick left us to ponder. It makes me cry because it’s an offering that goes beyond a life.

Q: You’ve mentioned Kubrick a couple of times now. It’s obvious that working with him on “Eyes Wide Shut” was important for you. But I’ve been wondering about the total immersion and the personal psychological analysis that he asked of you and Tom Cruise as a couple for that film. At any point, in the middle of that, were you at all like, “This is a weird thing we’re doing”?

A: No. This is where the fallacy is: We loved working with him. We shot that for two years. 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. 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. But you go, As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time. Stanley, he wasn’t torturous. He was arduous in that he would shoot a lot. But I’d sit on the floor of his office and talk, and we’d watch animal videos. He said animals were so much nicer than human beings. Though I do remember we were watching a wildlife thing where you saw the lion going after an antelope, and he could hardly watch it. Interesting, isn’t it?

Q: You know how in “Eyes Wide Shut” you have that monologue in which your character is talking about infidelity and says to Tom’s character, “I was ready to give up everything”? That speech is all about emasculation and emotional aggression. If you’re acting those scenes with the person to whom you’re married, and doing it as part of this immersive process, can it open up negative feelings that later you maybe wish you hadn’t opened?

A: That fits the narrative that people came up with, but I definitely didn’t see it like that. We were happily married through that. 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/05/magazine/nicole-kidman-interview.html

juliezhou · Guru

Nicole Kidman Says Stanley Kubrick “Was Mining” Her Marriage to Tom Cruise for Eyes Wide Shut

In an interview with the LA Times, Kidman reveals that Kubrick asked “a lot of questions” over the two years she worked on his final film with her ex-husband: “There were ideas he was interested in.”

By Chris Murphy

July 16, 2024

Life imitates art. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise apparently learned this firsthand over the two years they spent working on the 1999 cult classic Eyes Wide Shut with iconic director Stanley Kubrick. In an interview with the LA Times to mark Eyes Wide Shut’s 25th anniversary, Kidman revealed that Kubrick was directly inspired by her marriage to Cruise as he shaped the story of Bill and Alice, the central couple in the psychosexual drama: “I suppose he was mining it.”

Kidman married Cruise in December 1990, and Cruise filed for divorce in February 2001. As Hollywood’s It couple of the ’90s, they sparked intense speculation and scrutiny around their relationship. Toward the end of their marriage, Kidman and Cruise signed on to star in what would wind up being the final film from the legendary Kubrick, director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. Eyes Wide Shut stars Kidman and Cruise as a married couple trapped in a psychosexual pas de deux, complete with a masked ball, a secret society, and, infamously, orgies.

Kidman told the Times that she believes Kubrick used aspects of her actual relationship with Cruise to shape Bob and Alice. “There were ideas he was interested in,” she said in the interview. “He’d ask a lot of questions.” At the same time, Kidman maintained that Kubrick “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,’” she said. “Because one person could feel ganged up on. But he was aware of that and knew how to manage us.”

Cruise and Kidman shared a trailer during filming. “We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer. Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, ‘You’re not each getting a trailer. We can’t afford it,’” said Kidman. She noted that Cruise had the smaller part of the trailer and would often be rehearsing or unwinding by playing video games. ”That was when [Minesweeper] was big. So there was a lot of that,” she said.

And there was a lot of work. According to Kidman, Eyes Wide Shut was largely shaped in the rehearsal process, because they rehearsed for an awfully long time. The film would ultimately take two years to complete. “When Tom and I first started with Stanley, it was at his home, and we didn’t even go over to the sets at Pinewood [Studios],” she said. “Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, Are we ever going to start? And we just wouldn’t start. We were getting comfortable with each other, comfortable enough to throw out ideas.”

When asked what aspects of her actual personality blended with Alice’s, Kidman was clear: her boldness. “I’m quite up-front, and Alice becomes quite up-front, particularly when she was stoned…although that wasn’t me when I was stoned. I was just naturally like that. Up-front.” So was Kidman Method acting by lighting up while filming Eyes Wide Shut? Not quite. “Oh, I smoked when I was younger. But it definitely wasn’t of interest then,” she told the Times. You don’t have to go Method when you can rely on sense memory.

There were more moments in Eyes Wide Shut drawn from Kidman’s actual life and personality. “I suppose that was why he cast me. That mischief, that provocative nature, he found that out and it got more imbued into Alice,” said Kidman. Another prime example is when Alice slips out of a dress standing up, leaving her standing in the buff in black heels. “The scene where I drop the dress…that was me. That wasn’t written. That was my dress from my closet,” said Kidman. “‘This is how I take off the dress, Stanley.’ Because I had a lot of clothes, we weren’t paying to buy clothes. And Stanley had come over and I was showing him all these beautiful dresses. That’s how that happened.”

Kidman admitted that she hasn’t seen Eyes Wide Shut in full since its first screening. (Kubrick died of a heart attack six days after showing the final cut of the film.) But during her recent AFI tribute, which she attended with her husband, Keith Urban, and their teenage daughters, Sunday and Faith, she watched the scene in which Alice gets properly stoned. While Kidman was quick to say that she wouldn’t be watching the full movie with her kids anytime soon, she was happy with Sunday’s reaction to the scene.

“She said, ‘Mom, that was good,’” Kidman said. It was so good that Kidman may even join the scores of fans who have turned Eyes Wide Shut into an unofficial holiday movie: “Maybe I’ll watch it at Christmas,” she said with a laugh. Ho ho ho!

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/nicole-kidman-says-stanley-kubrick-was-mining-her-marriage-with-tom-cruise-for-eyes-wide-shut?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhtwitter&utm_content=null

juliezhou · Guru

Cruise opens up about working with Kubrick

Roger Ebert July 15, 1999

LOS ANGELES -- Tom Cruise had just flown in from Australia and he was tired and a sad. Sad because he was talking about the new Stanley Kubrick movie, and Stanley wasn't there to pitch in.

"I haven't really talked about the movie, you know," he said. "The pressure of going through this without Stanley being there also. Stanley who was gonna do everything, you know, suddenly..."

Dying, last March, just four days after a completed version of "Eyes Wide Shut" was screened for Cruise and his wife Nicole Kidman, who were the co-stars, and for Robert Daly and Terry Semel, the top executives at Warner Brothers.

"Nic had laryngitis from her play," Cruise said, remembering his feelings after seeing the first cut of the movie they'd spent three years on. "She couldn't talk, so she was writing notes to me as I was talking to Stanley over the phone from New York. We were so excited and proud. Then I had to fly off to Australia. I was meeting with John Woo, and we had a month of pre-production on the new movie. Nic was gonna follow with the kids. I got in on Saturday. Stanley and I were supposed to talk on Sunday. He'd call me in the middle of the night. You're asleep? No, Stanley, what's up? Instead I got a call from Leon, who worked with him for many years and said, 'Tom, Stanley Kubrick has passed away'."

Cruise paused and toyed with a glass of mineral water. We were talking on Sunday, the day after the Los Angeles preview screening of "Eyes Wide Shut."

"Well, he had made 13 perfect visions, Stanley Kubrick, and I'm just proud to have been part of it."

Like all of Kubrick's films, "Eyes Wide Shut" was made in strict secrecy. Rumors flew about the picture. It was about Cruise and Kidman as two sex therapists. It was hard-core porn. It was...

"Stanley would just say, let them keep talking," Cruise smiled. "Now it's such a relief to actually be able to discuss the picture. It's also--it's strange. It has a bittersweetness. At night, you hear Stanley's voice..."

The film has sex as its subject matter, along with trust, fidelity and jealousy. But the Cruise character never has sex with anyone during the movie, and that sets up the movie's final line of dialog, a punch line that will gain a certain immortality. He plays a rich Manhattan doctor. He and Kidman have one child. She tells him a story one night about how she was so filled with lust for a strange man that she would have left everything--husband, home, child--just to have sex with that man. The story fills him with anger and jealousy, and he sets out on a dangerous odyssey through the sexual underworld, which leads to a masked orgy in a country estate. A wealthy friend of his seems to be involved, and there is the possibility that dread secrets lurk just beneath the surface.

It's all based on a book, Traumnovelle, by Arthur Schnitzler--a book Kubrick didn't want them to read. The book was a starting point, not a destination. Kubrick worked obsessively on every scene, rehearsing, rewriting, involving Cruise, Kidman and the other actors in discussions about motives. I got the sense that the movie evolved from the collaboration; one reason for the secrecy might have been that Kubrick himself didn't know for sure what the movie was finally going to be about.

"Stanley had worked on this and thought about it for about 28 years," Cruise said. "The apartment in the movie was the New York apartment he and his wife Christianne lived in. He recreated it. The furniture in the house was furniture from their own home. Of course the paintings were Christianne's paintings. It was as personal a story as he's ever done. When he first wanted to do it, it was after 'Lolita' (1962) and Christianne told me she said, 'Don't...oh, please don't....not now. We're so young. Let's not go through this right now.'

"They were young in their marriage, And so he put it off and put it off. He was working on "A.I." [a planned film involving artificial intelligence] and was waiting for the technology to get to where he needed it. So he put that on hold, and it was just the perfect time to do this project."

Sometimes, Cruise said, it was just the three of them in a room. Kubrick would send the crew away. There was no deadline. They had all the time in the world.

"The crew wasn't ever there when we were rehearsing. We'd rehearse and he'd rewrite and he'd say, 'Well, what would you guys do here?' or 'What happened here?' And without talking about what the scene was about, you know, we'd discuss details of behavior or dialog. 'What makes sense?' he would say. And finally, 'Okay, well, that makes sense.' We'd rehearse and he'd rewrite and it got to the point that it was in your bones. Just in your bones."

What was your feeling, I asked, about that article in The New Yorker by Frederic Raphael, the co-author of the screenplay? It was an article that painted a harsh portrait of Kubrick as a self-hating megalomaniac.

Cruise made a face. "He wouldn't have written it if Stanley had been alive. Opportunistic. Self-serving. Inaccurate. I don't know that man at all and I've never met him. It's been interesting seeing how people have behaved afterward."

This was Cruise's first newspaper interview about the movie, although he had talked a few weeks earlier to a team from Time magazine. As he spoke, it was like listening to him relive his thoughts. They didn't come out in neat sound bites, like the typical movie star interview where everything has been said a dozen times before. Cruise has obviously been through a deep creative experience, and was only now surfacing and looking at it more objectively.

"I'm glad Nic and I didn't make this movie in the first or second year of our marriage," he mused. "The stuff we were talking about, confronting together with Stanley, was volatile and intense. The characters are very much at odds. When you're talking about jealousy or raw emotions that bring men to their knees at times, it can be crippling."

Everyone who has worked with Kubrick returns with stories of perfectionism, of the same shot being taken dozens of times, of days spent on a single scene.

"But it was funny," Cruise said, "how he was truly optimistic about the schedule. I'd show up on the set and we'd find ourselves singing a song, goofing around, and we'd rehearse the scene, and he'd ask, 'What are we gonna shoot the rest of the week?' And I'd say, 'Oh, Stanley, please don't say that!' Because at the end of the week, we'd still be working on that same scene, and he would laugh at himself."

The small crews meant less pressure, Cruise said.

"Stanley bought time when he made a movie. He was not at the mercy of a studio. I'm used to working. I'll work 15 hours a day and I'll work very hard to try to make something work. But if he felt that I was tired or the scene wasn't working, he never panicked. He knew he had the time. No matter what, he could always go back and take time to fix it. He never locked himself in."

Despite all the rumors about the film, I said, your character never has sex with anyone. It's not a movie about sex but about what sex represents.

"Sex itself wasn't what interested Stanley. The movie's about many things but especially the dynamic of a relationship that's affected by the raw emotions of obsession and jealousy. About how one little event in your life can take you off into such debilitating emotions."

When your character goes to the address where the orgy is being held...

"I think he was driven by his emotions," Cruise said. "He didn't want to go back home. He was absolutely driven by what his wife said to him. He was heading right for Dante's Inferno . He's consumed by the image of his wife he has created in his mind."

We see that fantasy image in monochrome, as he imagines his wife making love to the stranger she described. Then, at the orgy, surrounded by masked and hooded figures and nude women, he sees pure lust unbridled by morals, conduct--even personalities. It was that scene that created the movie's problems with the MPAA Code and Ratings Administration, which gave the film an "R" rating only after certain images at the orgy were masked by digitally-created figures who are superimposed between the viewer and some of the action.

"Stanley was concerned through editing," Cruise said, "that certain shots would get an NC-17. Stanley committed to an R rating." But it's an adult movie.

"Listen, at 16 I would have been interested in seeing what Stanley Kubrick had to say. I think I was seven years old when my father took me to '2001.' He felt that he wanted an R for the movie. He committed to an R for the picture and he felt that the changes would affect the form but not the content."

The Cruise character glides from one room of the chateau to another, in long, unbroken, elaborate shots. To cut out the offending images would destroy the exquisite rhythm. Therefore, blotting them out with digital additions was the only alternative.

When both versions of the famous 65-second scene were shown at the preview, I said, a lot of people didn't like the strategy.

"Well, it's a shame if people feel that. But it doesn't change the content of the movie. Not a frame is touched on this, except just in form. I think when audiences see the movie, that won't be an issue for them."

Well, it might be, since for Kubrick form and content and style are all so closely linked. Isn't it a shame, I said, that America is the only country with no workable adult category? So that everything has to be cut and squeezed and compromised to get the R rating?

"With the NC-17--there are papers that won't run NC-17 ads, television stations that won't have NC-17 promos..."

But wouldn't a Kubrick picture with Tom Cruise be just the opportunity to overturn all that?

"You're preaching the converted here. But Stanley made the decision, you know. He wanted this and there's nothing I could have done."

Did he say he would add digital figures in the forefront?

"Yes, that's what he was exploring when he was in the editing process and what he discussed. He didn't wanna cut into the shots, but he felt that if he took the digital effects and just covered, you know...because he wanted to deliver an R rating."

But when he was shooting it, obviously he thought it was an R rating, because otherwise he would have had real people standing there instead of adding digital figures later.

Cruise sighed. "There aren't any real rules with the MPAA, you know. There aren't any rules like, 'Look, you can say three swear words or 16 swear words, but you can't have fornication in various positions, blah, blah, blah.' He worked very hard on that sequence. What's really even more important in this scene is the people in the masks watching. His composition is stunning."

I agreed, and said something about how there'd someday be a director's cut on video.

"But this is Stanley's cut," Cruise said. "I would not have supported anything that Stanley hadn't approved or didn't want. There's absolutely no way that would have happened. I mean, before he died, we went through a lot of details about how the movie was going to be released, how he wanted things handled, where he wanted the print developed. All of these issues. Stanley did everything. Only Stanley."

https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/cruise-opens-up-about-working-with-kubrick

juliezhou · Guru

Nicole Kidman on marriage, marijuana and the making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut

By Glenn Whipp

Columnist

July 16, 2024

Eyes Wide Shut” was Stanley Kubrick’s final film. He died four months before its release. It took its stars — Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Hollywood’s most famous couple — off the market for nearly two years, as what was supposed to be a six-month shoot stretched on indefinitely, to the point where Kidman seriously began to wonder: Is this ever going to end?

Not that she was in any hurry to leave.

“I would have stayed a third year,” Kidman tells me. “Does that mean I’m crazy?”

The protracted buildup led to wild speculation and curiosity about the movie, which had been teased as a “story of sexual jealousy and obsession.” When it was finally released on July 16, 1999, the response was muted, tinged with disappointment. But its reputation and its mysteries have deepened over the years. Christopher Nolan calls it “the ‘2001’ of relationship movies.” He is not entirely wrong.

All year we’ll be marking the 25th anniversary of pop culture milestones that remade the world as we knew it then and created the world we live in now. Welcome to The 1999 Project, from the Los Angeles Times.

Kidman and I have talked about the film many times over the years. With “Eyes Wide Shut” marking its 25th anniversary, it felt like a good occasion to deepen the discussion.

You told me once that Kubrick jettisoned a scene in “Eyes Wide Shut” that you had spent six weeks filming. What scene?

Maybe that was an exaggeration. [Laughs.] It was the scene with Tom and I where I start by smoking the spliff in bed and where I laugh and deliver the long monologue. That took many weeks. A lot of that was rehearsing in the bedroom and then him not liking what we’d done. So we ended up reworking it, constructing it as we went along. There was no need to rush. Stanley would never go over budget. What he bought was time.

How did that scene evolve?

Just a lot of talking. When Tom and I first started with Stanley, it was at his home, and we didn’t even go over to the sets at Pinewood [Studios]. Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, “Are we ever going to start?” And we just wouldn’t start. We were getting comfortable with each other, comfortable enough to throw out ideas. For that scene, we improvised the beginning of it through the rehearsals.

Did you feel like he was mining your own marriage to inform the relationship between Bill and Alice?

I suppose he was mining it. 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.

Did you ever feel ganged up on?

No. But there’s something about being a woman in that equation, too. And Stanley liked women. He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character.

So you’re having these conversations, getting to know each other, and he’s shaping the script. What part of yourself did you bring to Alice?

My boldness. I’m quite up-front and Alice becomes quite up-front, particularly when she was stoned ... although that wasn’t me when I was stoned. I was just naturally like that. Up-front.

How much experience in being stoned did you bring to the role?

Oh, I smoked when I was younger. But it definitely wasn’t of interest then.

I remember reading somewhere that Kubrick told you something like, “Remember, Nicole. The key to the scene is that Alice is stoned.”

And I probably would have said, “Of course, Stanley. Yeah. Got it.”

The great thing about him is that he told us, “Don’t put me on a pedestal.” That’s the No. 1 rule. Because when we came to his house, we were like, “Oh, my God. The great Stanley Kubrick.” And that kind of thinking hinders the creative process. He didn’t want sycophants. He told us to throw ideas out. 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.” It was experimental, like making student films in Australia.

That boldness comes through when Alice is dancing with the Hungarian guy who’s trying to seduce her.

“I’m maaaaarried.” I love when I’m shaking my finger at him. All that wasn’t scripted. It came out of rehearsing.

She draws out a lot of words while she’s dancing with him.

I’ve definitely been drunk on champagne, so I knew how to do that. [Laughs.] And I’m sure I’ve said “I’m married” to different people at different times, so that’s good too.

Meanwhile, Bill is hitting on the two young models, which Alice sees. Before that bedroom scene, she grabs the joint from a Band-Aid box and she looks at herself in the vanity mirror. There’s definitely a sense that she’s about to start something. She’s ready for a confrontation.

Mmm-hmmm. To dig around. But these were conversations we never had with Stanley, what you and I are doing now.

He didn’t like burrowing into the scenes?

“Why” was the most irritating question to him. It is to a lot of directors. I remember saying it to Philip Roth [author of “The Human Stain,” adapted into a 2003 film starring Kidman] and him going, “Don’t ever ask me that.” Then he gave me a signed copy of the book that he had inscribed, “Why not?”

So Kubrick would just get what he wanted by wearing you down?

I don’t know how he would get it. But in that scene, I suppose that was why he cast me. That mischief, that provocative nature, he found that out and it got more imbued into Alice. The scene where I drop the dress ... that was me. That wasn’t written. That was my dress from my closet. “This is how I take off the dress, Stanley.” Because I had a lot of clothes, we weren’t paying to buy clothes. And Stanley had come over and I was showing him all these beautiful dresses. That’s how that happened.

Are you aware of how that monologue [Alice telling Bill, “If you men only knew” and then revealing her sexual fantasy about the naval officer] has taken on a life of its own? Frank Ocean used the whole thing in “Love Crimes.”

Get out! Are you kidding me? I love that. Thank you, Frank Ocean!

When I watched the movie again recently, I was taking notes and wrote, “Bill’s a s—.” I think Alice had been holding a lot and this scene was her —

Poking him. Or maybe it opens him up.

Well, that revelation devastates him.

But human beings are devastating. 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.

James Joyce has that short story that I had already read before “Eyes Wide Shut” where something is found out within 15 seconds that literally destroys the marriage there on the spot, even though it was a very good marriage. Because it was based on what they thought each person was. And then it’s like, “You were never the person I thought you were.”

Stanley always said animals are far more honest than humans. I remember we were watching a wildlife show on lions and the lion went in and ferociously attacked. He was upset by that, but also said, “Well, at least animals are more readable. You know what their motives are.”

Did you agree with him?

No! I’d tell him, “That’s not true!” [Laughs.] And he‘d say, “Nicole. Nicole.” But I like to have a more hopeful sense of humans, which I’d always try to argue in my youthful enthusiasm.

You have the last word in the last Stanley Kubrick movie. [After Alice tells Bill there’s something they “need to do as soon as possible,” he asks, “What’s that?” She answers with one word.]

And it’s a pretty good word. [Laughs.] And that came out of the rehearsal process too. When you watch it, it’s great because it’s a base, primal thing to do. But I’ve never thought of that. I have the last line in the final Stanley Kubrick movie. No one has ever said that to me. That’s a career in itself. I’ll take it.

What do people say to you when they talk about the movie?

They want to know what it was like to spend that much time making it, which I understand. It was two years of our lives! [Laughs.] I remember Sydney Pollack when he arrived, telling us, “I’m only going to be here for about three days. And it seems like we got the scene today.” And Tom and I just looked at each other, going, “Mmm-hmmm. Sure, Sydney.”

You didn’t tell him? You figured he’d discover the truth soon enough?

No. It was like [brightly], “Welcome!” By the end, we’re learning how to make pasta because he’s a great cook, Sydney. Stanley would come to our trailer, we’d eat. In the little kitchen in our trailer, Sydney would make this unbelievable artichoke pasta with [Parmigiano-]Reggiano and this incredible olive oil and roast chicken.

We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer. Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, “You’re not each getting a trailer. We can’t afford it.” Tom had a smaller area because he was running stuff. And he’d play video games. That was when [“Minesweeper”] was big. So there was a lot of that.

Are you aware that watching “Eyes Wide Shut” has become a Christmas movie ritual for some?

Sheesh. That’s an odd Christmas movie! [Laughs.] Well, there’s so many layers to all of his films, which is why we keep coming back to them.

Do you think the finished film was his final cut?

Oh, yeah. He had been editing it for 18 months. It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough time. He was very happy with it. For him to show it to us, that is huge, if you know Stanley. And the Warners people were there. He wasn’t going back to the drawing board.

Have you ever seen it again since that initial screening in March in New York, shortly before he died?

I’ve seen bits of it. But I’ve never watched it all the way through. [Pause.] Maybe I’ll watch it at Christmas. [Laughs.]

It’s not a film you’re going to sit down and watch with your daughters, is it?

Definitely not. At the AFI [Life Achievement Award] tribute, they saw the scene where I get stoned. They showed that and I was like, “Ooooh. Golly. OK.” I sat next to my daughter, Sunday, watching that.

Did she say anything to you?

She said, “Mom, that was good.” And then they showed that scene in “Birth,” the one you and I talked about, and she said, “That was really good.” And I watched that scene and thought, “Wow. That was really good.” And I never do that.

You probably hadn’t seen that in ages either.

People watching their own films feels slightly odd to me. I’m OK celebrating directors because it’s their work. But my own little part of it, it’s like [groans]. But if you’re a director, it’s lovely to hear that you’re proud of it. So I’m very, very proud of it. I say that to you, Stanley up there, if you’re listening to me. He knows that anyway.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024-07-16/the-1999-project-eyes-wide-shut-nicole-kidman-tom-cruise-standley-kubrick-sydney-pollack