Stanley Kubrick’s final film “Eyes Wide Shut,” about a bizarre night-long sexual odyssey, still baffles many. And according to star Nicole Kidman, the legendary director preferred to preseve some of the movie’s mystery.
In a piece she penned for The Hollywood Reporter, Kidman writes that “people have asked me if Stanley ever told us what ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was about — and the answer is no. He didn’t believe in interpretation.”
Kidman also dismisses rumors that the film contributed to the demise of her marriage with then-husband and “Eyes Wide Shut” co-star Tom Cruise.
“People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage — but I don’t really think it was. Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us,” she writes about her relationship with both Cruise and Kubrick. The film came out in 1999 and the couple officially divorced in 2001.
Kidman reveals that Kubrick based Kidman and Cruise’s troubled characters, Alice and Bill Harford, on their real-life marriage. “Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life. Which we weren’t oblivious to, but obviously it wasn’t us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.”
The actress admits she was wary of the movie’s blatant sexuality but felt safe while working with the veteran director. She goes on to say that more “extreme” footage was left out of the finished film.
“Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn’t end up in the movie,” she explains. “I did feel safe — I never felt it was exploitive or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.”
Kubrick was 70-years-old when he died of a heart attack in March 1999, just four days after screening his final cut of “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Kidman said she nearly phoned Kubrick the night before he died: “I remember thinking (he) was frail, and … if I were more intuitive I would have realized that he was not well. One of the worst things … was, I was going to call him and I didn’t. Instead I got a phone call (the next day) saying Stanley was dead. It was one of my great regrets that I didn’t call him that night.”