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Eyes Wide Shut

A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing. A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing. A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing.

• Stanley Kubrick
• Frederic Raphael
• Arthur Schnitzler
• Nicole Kidman
• 1.8K User reviews
• 299 Critic reviews
• 69 Metascore
• 12 wins & 30 nominations

• Dr. William Harford

• Alice Harford

• Nick Nightingale

• Victor Ziegler

• Helena Harford

• (as Peter Benson)

• Ziegler's Secretary

• Sandor Szavost
• (as Sky Dumont)
• (as Louise Taylor)

• Lou Nathanson

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Director's Trademarks: A Guide to Stanley Kubrick's Films

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Did you know

• Trivia Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman signed open-ended contracts. They agreed to work on this project until Stanley Kubrick released them from it, however long that turned out to be.
• Goofs Bill Harford arrives at Rainbow Fashions by taxi from the Sonata Cafe, and, as he talks to Milich, Gillespie's Diner can be been seen across the other side of the street. Earlier in the story, it was seen that Gillespie's is next door to the Sonata Cafe; there's no way he would have taken a taxi just to cross the street.

Victor Ziegler : Listen, Bill. Nobody killed anybody. Someone died. It happens all the time. Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn't. But you know that, don't you?

• Crazy credits The end credits are a slideshow. This is unusual for a film of its time, when many employed rolling end credits.
• Alternate versions The Europeans version is completely uncensored. The orgy scene was partially censored in the American release to avoid an "NC-17" rating. Computer generated people were placed in front of the sexually explicit action to obscure it from view.
• Connections Edited into Hai-Kubrick (1999)
• Soundtracks Musica Ricercata II: Mesto, Rigido e Cerimonale (1950) Performed by Dominic Harlan , piano Written by György Ligeti Published by Schott Musik International GmbH & Co. KG

User reviews 1.8K

• Jul 18, 1999
• How long is Eyes Wide Shut? Powered by Alexa
• What did Leelee Sobieski whisper into Tom Cruise's ear at the costume shop?
• Did Stanley Kubrick have final cut before he passed away?
• How many versions of Eyes Wide Shut are there?
• July 16, 1999 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Warner Bros. (United States)
• Elveden Hall, Elveden, Suffolk, England, UK (interiors: Long Island Mansion "Somerton" where orgy takes place)
• Warner Bros.
• Stanley Kubrick Productions
• Hobby Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $65,000,000 (estimated)
• $55,691,208
• $21,706,163
• $162,283,210

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 39 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, the joke's on him: tom cruise and eyes wide shut.

The New York of “ Eyes Wide Shut ” is a dream of New York—a sex dream about an emotionally and carnally wound-up young man who denies his animal essence, his wife’s, and almost everyone’s. It’s a comedy. Stanley Kubrick ’s movies are comedies more often than not—coal-black; a tad goofy even when bloody and cruel; the kind where you aren’t sure if it’s appropriate to laugh, because the situations depicted are horrible and sad, the characters deluded. 

To make a film like this work, you need one of two types of lead actors: the kind that is plausible as a brilliant and insightful person who trips on his own arrogance (like Malcolm McDowell ’s Alex in “ A Clockwork Orange ,” Matthew Modine ’s Pvt. Joker in “ Full Metal Jacket ,” and Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”); or the kind that reads as a bit of a dope to start with, and never stops being one. The latter category encompasses most of the human characters in “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ”—first cavemen, then cavemen in spaceships, that legendary bone-to-orbit cut preparing us for the end sequence in which astronaut Dave Bowman evolves while gazing up in awe at the re-appeared monolith—and Ryan O’Neal as the title character of “ Barry Lyndon ,” a tragedy about a ridiculous and limited man who bleeds and suffers just like everyone, and is moving despite it all. 

Tom Cruise ’s Dr. Bill Harford in “Eyes Wide Shut” is the second kind of Kubrick hero. He’s is a bit of a dope but takes himself absolutely seriously, never looking inward, at least not as deeply as he should. An undercurrent of film noir runs through most if not all of Kubrick’s films. His first two features, the war fable “Fear and Desire” and the boxing potboiler “Killer’s Kiss,” were stylistically rooted in noir—“Fear and Desire,” like “ Paths of Glory ” and “Full Metal Jacket,” has terse, hardboiled narration, linking it to the most overtly noir-ish Kubrick film, his breakthrough “ The Killing .” The film noir hero tends to be a smart, ambitious, horny guy who lets his horniness overwhelm his judgement. Dr. Bill is a cuckolded film noir patsy turned film noir hero, cheated upon not in fact, but in his own imagination. And, in noir hero fashion, he gets drawn into a sexual/criminal conspiracy, this one involving the procurement of young women for anonymous orgies with rich older men. He’s always one step behind the architects of the plan, whatever it is, and he's never quite smart enough or observant enough to prove he saw what he saw. 

That’s Bill, a cinematic cousin of somebody like Fred MacMurray in “ Double Indemnity ” or William Hurt in “ Body Heat ,” but diminished and driving himself mad, a eunuch with blueballs, prowling city streets on on the knife-edge of Christmas, constantly taunted and humiliated, his heterosexuality and masculinity, indeed his essential carnality, questioned at every turn.

The doctor’s nighttime odyssey (like “2001,” this film is indebted to Homer) kicks off after he smokes pot with his gorgeous young wife Alice ( Nicole Kidman ) and she confesses a momentary craving for a sailor so powerful that she briefly considered throwing away her stable life just to have him. The revelation of the intensity of his wife’s sexual craving for someone other than him (fear and desire indeed) unmoors him from his comfortable existence and sends him careening around the city, where he encounters women who all seem to represent aspects of his wife, or his reductive view of her. They even have similar hair color. And if there are men in their lives—like Sidney Pollack’s Victor Ziegler, who calls Bill to deal with a young woman who overdosed on a speedball while in his company; or Rade Serbedjia’s  Millich, the pathologically controlling and jealous costume shop proprietor who accuses Bill of wanting to have sex with his teenage daughter ( Leelee Sobieski )— They mirror aspects of Bill. It’s surely no coincidence that the masks worn by the orgy participants are distinguished by their prominent (erect) Bills. Bill never actually strays, though. He keeps blundering into situations where sex seems imminent, and yet he couldn’t cheat on Alice even if he wanted to. He’s too bad to be good and too good to be bad. 

It still seems amazing that Cruise, among the most controlling of modern stars, gave himself to Kubrick so completely, letting himself be cast in such a sexually fumbling, baseline-schmucky part, the sort Matthew Broderick might've played for more obvious laughs (Kubrick originally wanted Steve Martin as Bill). Cruise built his star image playing handsome, fearless, cocky, ultra-heterosexual young men who mastered whatever skill or job they'd decided to practice, be it piloting fighter jets, driving race cars, playing pool, bartending, practicing law, representing pro athletes, or being a secret agent. Offscreen, the actor was long suspected of being closeted—a rumor amplified by his hyper-controlling relationships with a succession of public-facing spouses who read, from afar, less as wives than wife-symbols—and he sued media outlets that implied he was anything other than a 100% USDA-inspected slab of lady-loving, corn-fed American beefcake (thus the infamous 2006 “South Park” “ Tom won’t come out of the closet ” scene). 

So it was doubly startling for 1999 audiences to watch Cruise being swatted across the screen from one cringe-inducing psychosexual horror setpiece to the next, each enjoying its own version of a hearty pirate’s laugh at the idea of Cruise playing a butch straight man who dominates every room he’s in; and to witness his onscreen humiliation by homophobic frat boys. That same year, Cruise got an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor in “ Magnolia ,” playing a motivational speaker who admonishes his audience of baying young men to “respect the cock, tame the cunt.”

Cruise is a smart actor with often-excellent taste in material and collaborators; it’s inconcievable that he and his then-wife Kidman would submit themselves to over a year’s worth of grueling, repetitive shoots on Kubrick’s meticulously recreated New York sets in London without understanding what they were in for, at least partially. But what’s really important, from the standpoint of Cruise’s performance, is that he never seems as if he knows that the joke is on Bill. This doesn’t seem like the performance of an actor who has decided not to play his character as self-aware (like, say, Daniel Day-Lewis in “ The Last of the Mohicans ,” playing a character that  Entertainment Weekly ’s Owen Gleiberman described as seeming completely free of 20th century neuroses) but rather a not-too-self-aware actor throwing himself into every scene as if bound and determined to somehow “win” them. This is surely a vestigial leftover of the way Cruise acts in most Tom Cruise films, strutting and bobbing through scenes, getting into trouble, then smiling or talking or flying or running or acrobatting his way out. It’s a mode he can’t entirely turn off, but can only tamp down or allow to be subverted (which is what I think is happening in this movie, and in a few other against-the-grain Cruise performances). It’s as if Cruise travels the full narrative length of Kubrick’s dream trail encrusted by scholarly and journalistic and critical footnotes that have accumulated on his filmography since " Risky Business ." He’s the leading man as Christmas tree, festooned with lights and baubles. 

What perfect casting/what a great performance/what’s the difference? Is there any? Maybe not. Sometimes great casting is what allows for a great performance. John Frankenheimer cast Laurence Harvey , a handsome hunk of wood, as the brainwashed assassin in the 1962 version of “The Manchurian Candidate,” and his inability to tune in to his costars’ emotional wavelength works for the part; it translates as “repressed, tortured, closed off individual,” the type of guy who would be gobsmacked by an ordinary summer romance, to the point where it would constitute the core of a tragic backstory . Harvey’s inexpressiveness becomes a source of mirth when he’s put in the same frame with actors like Frank Sinatra , Angela Lansbury , or Akim Tamiroff, who get a predatory glint in their eye  when they sense the possibility of stealing a scene. They  know how to mess with people and have fun doing it, and poor, friendless Harvey is an irresistible target. and when Raymond expresses delight  that he was, however momentarily, “lovable,“ you can practically see the quote marks  around the word, and it’s as sad as it is hilarious.

Oliver Stone pulled off something similar when he cast Cruise as Ron Kovic in “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” a choice that Stone later said might’ve hurt the film at the American box office because nobody wanted to see the smirking flyboy from “ Top Gun ” castrated by a bullet, wheeling around with a catheter in his hand, cursing his mom and Richard Nixon . The star seeming not-entirely-in on—not the “joke,” exactly, but the  vision  of the movie—made Kovic’s dawning self-awareness of his participation in macho right-wing propaganda all the more effective. Kovic wanted to be like the guys on the recruiting poster, and now he couldn’t stand up and salute the lies anymore, and a lot of his friends were dead, along with untold numbers of Vietnamese. Al Pacino , who was cast in an aborted version “Born” a decade earlier, might not have been as effective as Cruise overall, because while Pacino is an altogether deeper actor, he’s so closely associated with men who have no illusions about how brutal and soul-draining American life and institutions can be. (Marvelous as his performance in “Serpico” is, it doesn’t start to take off until he’s in undercover cop mode, with that beard and long hair and beatnik/hippie energy. In the early scenes where he’s clean-shaven and idealistic, you just have to take Serpico's innocence on faith, because Al Pacino would never be that naive.)

Kubrick, no slouch at casting for affect, was especially good at filling lead male roles with actors who seemed to grasp the general outline of what the director was up to without radiating profound appreciation of the philosophical and cultural nuances. Ryan O’Neal in “ Barry Lyndon ” somehow works despite, or because of, seeming a bit stiff and anachronistic—out of his element in a lot of ways. His anxiety-verging-on-panic at not knowing whether he’s doing a good enough job for Kubrick fits perfectly with the character’s persistent insecurity and imposter syndrome. So does the shoddy Irish accent. 

Decades later, Ben Affleck in “ Gone Girl ” pulled an “Eyes Wide Shut”—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that director David Fincher pulled it by casting him. “The baggage he comes with is most useful to this movie,” Fincher told  Film Comment . “I was interested in him primarily because I needed someone who understood the stakes of the kind of public scrutiny that Nick is subjected to and the absurdity of trying to resist public opinion. Ben knows that, not conceptually, but by experience. When I first met with him, I said this is about a guy who gets his nuts in a vise in reel one and then the movie continues to tighten that vise for the next eight reels. And he was ready to play. It’s an easy thing for someone to say, 'Yeah, yeah, I’d love to be a part of that,' and then, on a daily basis, to ask: 'Really? Do I have to be that foolish? Do I have to step in it up to my knees?' Actors don’t like to be made the brunt of the joke. They go into acting to avoid that. Unlike comics, who are used to going face first into the ground.” 

Fincher subsequently poked fun at Affleck, in DVD narration and interview comments delivered in such a deadpan-vicious way that you couldn't tell if Fincher was venting in the guise of a put-on or doing an elaborate comedic bit. Either way, the gist was that Affleck was convincing as an untrustworthy person because he was himself untrustworthy. "He has to do these things in the foreground where he takes out his phone and looks at it and he puts it away so his sister doesn’t see it," Fincher said. "There are people who do that and it’s too pointed. But Ben is very very subtle, and there’s a kind of indirectness to the way he can do those things. Probably because he’s so duplicitous." Thus does the inherent untrustworthiness of Ben Affleck as both actor and person (according to Fincher, whether he's kidding or serious) become the framework for the entire performance's believability. This is a guy whose performance as an innocent man is judged by the media and public and immediately found lacking, and the character proves to be so much dumber than his conniving, vengeful wife that when the final scene arrives, we laugh at how inevitable it was. A more subtle, likable, deep leading man might've have ruined everything. Fincher needed a meathead who was funny and had read a few books, and who seemed to have a sixth sense for how to hide a cell phone from his sister.

This is similar to the idea of Kubrick cuckolding Cruise with an anecdote and sending him all over New York in search of satisfaction and insight that never quite, er, comes (although there’s a hint of hope in that final scene). On top of that, Affleck is an actor who is effective within a narrow range but will never be thought of as a chameleonic or particularly delicate performer—somebody who can play the subtext without overwhelming the text, or who can seamlessly integrate the two so that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. 

That might be why Affleck disliked working with Terrence Malick , a highly improvisational filmmaker who deals in archetypes and symbols, and expects actors to devise a character while he’s devising the film that they’re in. Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt can do that; Affleck really can’t. The difference between Affleck and somebody like Pitt (or DiCaprio) is the difference between an old-fashioned square-jawed leading man-type, like Rock Hudson or Gary Cooper or Alan Ladd, who tried to stick to the words and hit the marks and color within the lines, and somebody like James Dean or Marlon Brando or Dennis Hopper , who treated every page as potential raw material for a collage they hadn’t thought up yet. That’s why Dean and Hudson played off each other so beautifully in “Giant”—Dean with his tormented Method affectations and odd expressions and voices, and Hudson playing the guy he’d been told to play, while often seeming puzzled or horrified by whatever Dean was doing opposite him, as if he’d been placed in the same room with a badger or wild boar and told “Now the two of you sit down and have a nice lunch while we film it.” 

I like to think of Cruise in “Eyes Wide Shut” as Rock Hudson turned loose in a Stanley Kubrick neo-noir dream, and not just for the obvious reasons. He’s in there angrily and desperately trying to win something that cannot be won, explain things that can’t be explained, and regain dignity that was lost a long time ago and will never come back. He keeps flashing his doctor’s ID as if he’s a detective (another film noir staple) working a case, and people indulge him not because they truly regard the ID as authority but because Bill’s intensity is just so damned odd that they aren’t sure how else to react. It’s hilarious because Bill doesn’t know how ridiculous it all is, and how ridiculous he is. He’s a movie star who lacks the movie star’s prerogative. Only by surrendering to the flow and accepting defeat can he survive. Only his wife, an awesome force unlocked in one moment, can save him. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film Colossus

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Eyes Wide Shut explained

Welcome to our Colossus Movie Guide for Eyes Wide Shut . This guide contains everything you need to understand the film. Dive into our detailed library of content, covering key aspects of the movie. We encourage your comments to help us create the best possible guide. Thank you!

What is Eyes Wide Shut about?

Eyes Wide Shut is about the rehabilitation of a marriage, and the mentality required to do so. Bill thinks he completely understands his relationship with his wife Alice, and believes is just as faithfully obedient as himself. But as he learns, neither he nor Alice are strong enough to push away every urge. After Alice confesses she once dreamt of sleeping with a naval office, Bill embarks on an Odyssean journey through New York City. Out of jealousy, he is desperate to live out what Alice only dreamed of.

This is a key in-road to understanding Eyes Wide Shut : it’s all a dream . Well, maybe not literally a dream. But in the symbolic movie sense, Bill’s entire adventure is laden with outrageous, otherworldly moments that force him to pretend to be someone he isn’t. As somebody who held an absurd illusion about his marriage, he understandably employs a radical approach in the opposite direction. Instead of being eternally faithful to his wife, he intends to cheat. But much like his idyllic view of marriage, his cynical one is full of lies and mirages.

Going from one extreme to the other, Bill must understand how empty these radically opposing ends are. He must experience a sort of personal hell upon hearing his wife’s story, as he must understand that his wife is more complicated than the cookie-cutter mold he’s envisioned; and he must experience an outwardly hell in the form of secret societies that hold orgies, as he must see how people like Ziegler have no passion for sex. Bill must come back to the middle where his wife is waiting, desperate to form a deeper connection that allows them to see one another for who they truly are.

Movie Guide table of contents

The ending of eyes wide shut explained, the themes and meaning of eyes wide shut.

• Why is the movie called Eyes Wide Shut?

Important motifs in Eyes Wide Shut

Questions & answers about eyes wide shut.

• Tom Cruise – Dr. William “Bill” Harford
• Nicole Kidman – Alice Harford
• Sydney Pollack – Victor Ziegler
• Todd Field – Nick Nightingale
• Marie Richardson – Marion Nathanson
• Sky du Mont – Sandor Szavost
• Rade Šerbedžija – Mr. Milich
• Thomas Gibson – Carl
• Vinessa Shaw – Domino
• Fay Masterson – Sally
• Alan Cumming – Hotel Desk Clerk
• Leelee Sobieski – Milich’s daughter
• Leon Vitali – Red Cloak
• Julienne Davis – Amanda “Mandy” Curran
• Madison Eginton – Helena Harford
• Abigail Good – Mysterious Woman
• Gary Goba – Naval Officer
• Based on – Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnizler
• Written by – Stanley Kubrick | Frederic Raphael
• Directed by – Stanley Kubrick

Eyes Wide Shut was famously Stanley Kubrick’s last film, as he died weeks before the film’s release—which was a strange pill to swallow for many. Critics trashed the film as indulgent and passive, while casual moviegoers found the movie’s dream-like style and apathetic tone elusive. Even fans who were used to seeming impersonality of Kubrick’s films may have been taken aback by the movie’s cold, almost observational approach to Bill Harford’s mental torture. Film critic James Naremore put it perfectly when he said that Kubrick’s unique style gives “a sense of authorial understanding without immersion, as if volcanic, almost infantile feelings were being observed in a lucid, rational manner.” This approach reached its apex in Eyes Wide Shut .

Especially through the final word of the film—a truly jarring moment that leaves you wondering what the movie’s about. The movie ends with Bill and Alice walking through a department store with their daughter Helena while Christmas shopping. They are fresh from a night of no sleep, during which Bill confessed all his transgressions—from the orgy to the hooker to his potential involvement with a woman’s murder. The energy is awkward between them, as they force smiles while Helena excitedly runs around picking up toys. Finally, Bill stops them to ask what they should do next, what Alice is thinking about everything that happened.

Here’s the conversation that follows:

Alice: “Maybe, I think, we should be grateful. Grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” Bill: “Are you sure of that?” Alice: “Am I sure? Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.” Bill: “And no dream is ever just a dream.” Alice: The important thing is, we’re awake now. And hopefully…for a long time to come. Bill: Forever. Alice: Forever? Bill: Forever! Alice: Let’s not use that word, you know? It frightens me. But I do love you. And, you know, there’s something very important that we need to do as soon as possible. Bill: What’s that? Alice: Fuck.

There’s a lot to unpack in that dialogue. But as we go through it line by line, we can understand what exactly the ending of Eyes Wide Shut is trying to say, and how it brings clarity and catharsis to the movie’s themes and motifs .

Notice how Bill isn’t the one to begin the conversation—this lines up with everything we’ve learned about him. After everything he has laid upon Alice the previous night, he finds himself in a comatose state. Alice may have confessed her desire to commit infidelity, but it was only a fantasy and never acted upon. Bill, on the other hand, very much desired to commit adultery and went through the steps of doing so. But his impotence is key here. Bill asserts authority at every turn, flashing his doctor’s license, believing he should have access to anything (say, information about where Nick Nightingale is staying) or anyone (say, hookers at a mass orgy). But Bill is repeatedly thwarted and denied sex. He is constantly at the expense of others; a pawn in powerful men’s elaborate game. When brought before the man in the red cloak, Bill isn’t heroic, but frozen. He is, through and through, a passive person who lives a privileged life. He believes his is important because he’s a wealthy doctor—he isn’t. And he believes his marriage is thriving because both he and his wife are eternally devoted to one another—they aren’t.

Alice is truly the strong foundation of the relationship. She loves Bill for his tenderness, but she also feels sad about Bill’s undying adoration. He is not someone, as we see in the movie, who commands or dictates or influences. He is, sadly, a small man surrounded by powerful ones, a husband who views his marriage as black and white unlike his wife. Perhaps the one act that would assuredly give Bill some machismo is sleeping with another woman, and even there he fails and is emasculated.

So, it makes sense that Alice must start this conversation. She’s able to make sense of their dramatic situation, to put all their feelings into words in a manner Bill could not. And she’s able to recognize something very simple and truthful about Bill’s sins: sex never came to fruition. Bill wanted to have sex, and perhaps would have been able to do it if he were a stronger man. But, in the end, his adventure had the same air as Alice’s fantasies: it was nothing more than a dream.

This explains the ghostly tone throughout the film: the dead air, the long pauses, the parrot-like repetition of thoughts; the washes of red and blues, the masks concealing people’s faces, the constant lack of understanding. This feeling is most unmistakable during the scene where the man in the red cloak demands that Bill strip down. Bill’s reaction is one of utter bewilderment, and his face constantly suggests, “What the hell have I gotten myself into? Who are these people?” Yet, like a dream, he’s pulled right back into the world, compelled to decipher its every element.

In this sense, you can view Bill’s Odyssean adventure as just that: a dream. Movies often serve as allegories for the universal truths of life, with the situations serving as the infrastructure for life’s most common dilemmas, with the characters accentuating certain fears and desires, with the aesthetic adding color and commentary to it all. So, we can think of Bill’s crazy journey as a purely internal one that reflects his desire to gain a sense of authority, to even the playing field with his wife. It’s all very childish and not very well thought out—a knee-jerk reaction that sends him down an absurd road with dire consequences.

Perhaps Alice is able to recognize this. Perhaps she’s able to look past the reality of her husband’s sins and look deeper to his imperfections, to the pure sadness within.

Her sexual fantasy sent Bill into a pit of despair—much further than she ever dreamed. She knew she needed to express her sexual desires to wake Bill up, to open his eyes, to make him see her for who she truly is. As we discussed in the themes section, marriages thrive on honesty and understanding. This means being accepting of your partner’s flaws and their susceptibility to change. And she knew that Bill’s idyllic vision of her and their marriage wasn’t an honest one—it was a facade. An idea. A dream of a better life.

And what else would a disillusioned man do but radically push his disillusion in the opposite direction? To deal with the destruction of his idyllic marriage, he went on an adulterous voyage out of pure jealousy. It’s exactly what a broken man would do. He is nothing without Alice, and it seems she recognizes that in these moments.

In this light, that first line makes a lot of sense: “Maybe, I think, we should be grateful. Grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” Is she sure of that? Sort of. “Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.”

Here, we see Alice respecting the mystery of life. She was ready to have sex with the naval officer, even if it meant ending her marriage and losing her daughter. It would have been completely self-destructive and stupid—yet, she was ready to do it. Bill’s adventure was every bit as self-destructive and stupid. But Alice recognizes the undeniable allure that pulled him in. Is it OK that he tried to cheat on her? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe it’s better to recognize that this awkward feeling grips us all, that it’s really fucking hard to be faithful in a marriage, that making a relationship work for years on end requires you to accept that some wishes and desires just don’t really make much sense.

Alice stands as a heroic figure alongside Ziegler, who tries to explain away Bill’s odyssey with simple facts: Mandy wasn’t murdered, and in fact “got her brains fucked out” after Bill left; and Nick wasn’t killed, but instead put on a plane to Seattle where he is currently “banging Mrs. Nick.” Ziegler wishes to remove all mystery and wonder from sex; to open Bill’s eyes to the reality of his sad situation, to reveal that he was never in control.

But Alice says just the opposite. In a movie where sex is both the most desired thing in the world and painstakingly absent and barren, she gives sex the intensity it deserves. These thoughts, these fantasies consume men and women who are trying to make marriages work, and it’s upon them to draw distinctions. Bill may have tried to cheat on Alice, but he didn’t necessarily want to cheat on Alice. He was compelled by a force greater than himself, drawn into a farcical night that very well could have played out as a comedy of errors in any other film. (A note here: Kubrick did envision Eyes Wide Shut as a comedy for many years, envisioning someone like Steve Martin or Bill Murray in the lead role.)

This helps us understand Bill’s next line: “And no dream is ever just a dream.” This isn’t a question, but a realization. Ziegler may have opened Bill’s eyes to his small status, but Alice opened his eyes—opened his mind—to the beauties and complexities of marriage. Where Ziegler wishes to simplify, Alice strives to rebuild; to bring clarity to their relationship, to their shared love. In this moment, as we discussed in the title section, Bill’s eyes are wide open .

And it’s important that his eyes stay open. There’s no talk about “forever,” because forever isn’t realistic. But it is realistic to try as hard as you can, to recognize and accept the flaws in your partner, to form an undeniable connection with your partner that cannot be replicated with anyone else. And what better way to do that than to…well.

Stanley Kubrick’s personal connection to Eyes Wide Shut

For all of the wild and fantastical places that Kubrick’s movies go, Eyes Wide Shut is his most ordinary in its depiction of married life. While at times the colors and speech patterns feel dream-like, the story at the film’s core is a very personal one that Kubrick had envisioned telling for years. Understanding some of these facts about his life will aid our analysis of the film.

Kubrick first read the movie’s source material, “Dream Story” (the German translation was “Traumnovelle”) by Arthur Schnitzler, back in the early 1960s. The novella focuses on a couple, Fridolin and Albertine, with a young daughter in 20th-century Vienna. The couple exchanges stories about their sexual fantasies, which strikes Fridolin with jealousy. In rebellion, he makes it his mission to have sex with a younger woman. Much like the movie, he repeatedly fails in doing so: after a number of near-sexual encounters, including a visit to a masked orgy, he returns home from this “senseless night with its stupid unresolved adventures.” The book ends with Fridolin apologetically confessing his crazy night to Albertine. Just as the couple reaffirms their love in the wee hours of the morning, they hear their daughter’s laughter as she wakes up in the next room.

This material sparked both interest and fear in Kubrick, who struggled for several years to find the right partner. Kubrick was married three times, and his marriage to his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, was especially troubling and trying—which undoubtedly drove his interest in the film. His third, however, to Christiane Harlan, was lovely and brought catharsis to his life—which is what likely kept him from making the movie for so many years. Back in 1962 when Kubrick wanted to make “Dream Story” after Lolita , Kubrick said (this is according to Tom Cruise) Christiane begged him not to. “Don’t…oh, please don’t…not now. We’re so young. Let’s not go through this right now.”

Over the years, Kubrick wanted to make the movie several more times, but never found the right moment. Towards the end of his life, however (Kubrick would die mere weeks before Eyes Wide Shut ‘s release), he must have felt confident enough in his marriage, in he and Christiane’s love, to finally find the humanism within the darkness that is Eyes Wide Shut ‘s story. We see that humanity, the promise of a better future, in the final moments of the film .

But in order to achieve the ending’s beautiful life-affirming catharsis, Kubrick first had to explore the complications of marriage that haunted him for years through Bill’s Odyssean journey in Eyes Wide Shut . It helps that he enlisted a real-life celebrity couple—Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who themselves were overexposed and experienced turmoil at the hands of the press—to play Bill and Alice.

As Kubrick often did, he psychologically evaluated his actors—but much more so than he ever had before. He became incredibly intimate with Cruise and Kidman over the course of Eyes Wide Shut ‘s insanely long 16-month shooting schedule. “[Kubrick] knew us and our relationship as no one else does,” said Kidman, and that, he got to know her “better even than [my] parents.”

This connection between director and actors was crucial, as Eyes Wide Shut became intimately attached to Kubrick’s personal life. As David Mikics wrote in the biography “ Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker “:

This intensity declares the crucial role that Eyes Wide Shut played in Kubrick’s psyche, as if the movie were the enfolded meaning of his life. Kubrick’s identification of himself with Bill was clear. Young Stanley had imagined becoming a doctor like his father. Like Bill, Kubrick was polite rather than flirtatious with women, but driven to sexual fantasy. The Harfords’ apartment was modeled on the Kubricks’ own on the Upper West Side in the early sixties, when Kubrick first wanted to make Dream Story. Eyes Wide Shut, a slow ritual of a movie, was designed to free Kubrick from the obsession with control that it also embodies, to provide a release into renewed relationship with the wife who had been at his side for four decades, with Tom and Nicole standing in for Stanley and Christiane. David Mikics, “Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker”

The strength required to make marriage flourish

The result of Kubrick’s obsession with the themes of “Dream Work” and his close relationship with Kidman and Cruise is a film that takes a deep look into the troubles people face in marriage—and the resulting beauty that’s found on the other side of such trauma. Take Bill, who is completely naive about his wife’s sexual inclinations and unwavering faith. When Alice asks Bill if he had sex with the two models at Ziegler’s party, Bill is indignant and defensive, claiming he is eternally loyal to his wife. And then he makes the mistake of stating that women are not ruled by desire like men, who which she responds with “If you men only knew…”

She then tells, in excruciating detail, of her fantasy with the naval officer. “I thought that if he wanted me, even if it was for only one night, I was ready to give up everything. You, Helena, my whole fucking future.” Bill has envisioned a cookie-cutter version of his life where faithfulness is never questioned. But, as anyone who has experience with long-term relationships would know, that is simply not a reality. on set, Kubrick even toyed with Cruise by shooting Kidman’s sex scenes with the naval officer on days when Cruise was absent, firmly placing the actor in Bill’s shoes. The entire dynamic between director and his actors informs the film’s entire mood, feel, aesthetic.

Alice, on the other hand, only purports strength regarding her sexual urges and condescension towards Bill’s naivete. When recounting her fantasy with the naval officer, she sounds so sure of herself and her sexual inclinations. However, it becomes clear she is troubled by her flirtation with martial destruction, which causes her to cry in Bill’s arms after she wakes up from a vivid dream about an orgy.

As Mikics notes, “Kidman’s acting here is full of expert grace notes that conceal as much as they reveal. She is by turns absorbed, defiant, charged with mockery, and, as she puts it, tender and sad.” Alice pushes Bill to recognize her as a complicated human being with flaws and jagged edges, and not simply as the idyllic, eternally faithful wife. Yet, as we learn in the end, she finds immense power in lifelong love and friendship.

This pushes Bill to live out the sexual encounter that Alice only dreamed about, which in turn gives Eyes Wide Shut an ethereal feel. He descends into unknown territory; a realm that attempts to become a realized version of Alice’s mere fantasies. Yet, despite his efforts, Bill never actually has sex with anyone else—it all remains a dream; a vision of what turmoil could potentially befall this married couple. Their fantasies about extramarital affairs present dire consequences, such as the cloaked men who about to strip Bill bare and possibly kill him, or the dozens of men who cause Alice’s fit of laughter during a dream.

It’s a symbolic representation of Bill and Alice’s disconnect, or their inability to communicate and deepen their love this far into their marriage. With Christmas around the corner, with their daughter growing older, the pressure to form a deeper connection is palpable. This tension reaches its breaking point when Bill confesses his transgressions to Alice, which triggers the movie’s cathartic end when Alice makes a commitment to improving their marriage.

Viewing Eyes Wide Shut as a comedy

There is a famous trope in Hollywood called “the comedy of remarriage,” which usually focuses on a couple whose relationship is on the rocks. It was a classic formula used in such movies as The Philadelphia Story and The Awful Truth , and is even utilized these days by films like It’s Complicated . Outrageous, slapstick scenarios consume couples who are trying to fix (or end) their relationship. Witty, rapid-fire dialogue consumes their hectic lives as they march away from each other, only to find each other in the end and realize why they got married in the first place. Believe it or not, Kubrick had a version of this sub-genre in mind when considering actors back in the 1980s, as he heavily sought out comedians like Steve Martin.

As you can see, Eyes Wide Shut became something very different. The movie very much uses the structure of a comedy of remarriage, but carries an entirely different tone. The situations Bill finds himself in are just as crazy, but the energy practically zapped away. There is a cold, dense atmosphere to the chilling settings that surround Bill and Alice as they go through a rough patch in their marriage. In truth, you could very well view Eyes Wide Shut as a comedy—a much more biting, tenacious one than either Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges would ever muster.

So how does this help us understand the meaning of the film? Well, think of it more as a way to watch the movie. Pretend everything you see is supposed to be…funny. It’s black comedy, sure. But it’s funny. Perhaps even funny in the way that Dr. Strangelove is funny, as it’s supposed to serve as commentary for a grander societal problem. Where Dr. Strangelove tacked the stupidity of war, Eyes Wide Shut is much more humanistic in its depiction of the human struggle in marriage. None of this is supposed to be funny…but it is pretty funny in movies like His Girl Friday or The Palm Beach Story . Through the lens of “comedy,” we can view Bill’s night out as a ridiculous cavalcade of nonsense that forces him to understand the importance of connecting with his wife.

Why is the movie called Eyes Wide Shut ?

Frederic Raphael, who helped Kubrick write the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut , did not like the title of the film. In his memoir about working with Kubrick, he revealed he had pitched the “much better” title The Female Subject —which, when you consider the enigmatic and visuals-focused Kubrick, who was first and foremost concerned with poetically capturing the human condition, this on-the-nose title likely did not appeal to him.

Kubrick instead opted for metaphorical title that’s a play on words. The common phrase is “eyes wide open,” meaning you are aware of your surroundings. But adding “shut” implies that you couldn’t be more unaware of your surroundings. The “eyes wide” part implies you are very confident in your views, but the irony is that you don’t understand anything at all.

This echoes the scene when Bill implies that women are not ruled by their desire like men are—which causes Alice to have a laughing fit. “If you men only knew…” she says before telling Bill of her sexual fantasies about the naval officer. Bill believes that his marriage is sound, that he and Alice are unflinchingly devoted to one another. But Alice was ready to give up her entire life—her marriage, her financial security, her daughter—for a one night stand.

And as Bill will soon find out, he’s more that willing to become adulterous purely out of jealousy. His wife never even cheated on him, but the fact that she thought about it is enough for him to go against his seeming virtues. Bill thought he saw he and his wife a certain way—until Alice forced his eyes open. And in a way, Bill has opened Alice’s eyes as well, as she sees how her candidness about her sexual fantasies drives Bill to horrifying lengths.

As David Mikics notes in his biography “ Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker, ” the director likely sought to echo Ben Franklin’s famous quote with the title Eyes Wide Shut : “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.” This statement implies that people are always changing. You, of course, want to be sure about the person you’re marrying; you want to see them for who they are and what they can add to your life. But you must also understand that everybody goes through both minimal and monumental changes. Humans are complicated creatures, and our path towards fulfillment and catharsis is ever-changing. To make a marriage last, to extract as much as you can from your partner, you need to be accepting of your partner’s ebbs and flows—all their whims, all their flaws.

After Bill’s eyes have been opened to the emptiness of sexual escapades, and after Alice’s eyes have been open to what pain she caused her husband, they’re able to see one another for who they truly are. Bill, a successful and rich doctor who thinks of himself as an important figure, is emasculated by both his wife and the people in power, destroying his perception of both his personal life and the larger world around him; and Alice is able to recognize that Bill’s tenderness brings comfort that a one-night stand could never fulfill, that his undying devotion can become fragile without love in return. After they open their eyes and see themselves in a new light, they’re able to recognize the next step their relationship desperately require to move forward, to gain new meaning and clarity after years of marriage.

Bill Harford is a man who thinks he’s much bigger than he is. A large part of this movie deals with his emasculation, at the hands of both his wife and the powerful men at the orgy. Bill, who flashes his doctor’s license like it’s a police badge, constantly tries to prop his ego and imply importance. But it’s all a facade. He might as well be wearing a costume, a mask—which is exactly what he wears at the orgy to convey that he belongs with this crowd.

As we’ve discussed throughout this guide, much of Bill’s Odyssean adventure has a dream-like feel. And that’s because the movie explores the fantasies and desires we often reflect upon during a marriage, but rarely ever act upon. In this strange world, Bill is never himself. He’s trying to be someone he’s not—someone vengeful, someone commanding. But the powerful men at the orgy hold the true power when they threaten to strip him naked. And Alice holds the true power when she reveals herself after Bill casts an idyllic obedient-wife persona upon her. In both cases, Bill is trying to cast a specific image, to be in control of his surroundings. But, sadly, that isn’t him. He’s merely posing as someone else( which helps explain the symbolic shot of Bill’s mask resting on the pillow next to Alice). And the entire movie serves to unveil his mask and open his eyes— wide open .

Powerful men

An important theme in Eyes Wide Shut is the futility of rebellion. A common trope in Kubrick’s movies, including A Clockwork Orange , Dr. Strangelove , and Lolita , a character’s “master plan” almost always fails, or is sidetracked by the greater powers that be. An inverse of the typical hero’s journey, Kubrick’s films aim to reveal the cold, stark reality of living. We often feel like we’re in control, would like to believe we’re in control, but deep down know that we have no control over what happens to us. The universe is too random, too cruel to allow for a carefree existence.

In Eyes Wide Shut , Bill learns this the hard way through the powerful men who run an orgy. Bill, who believes himself to be a rich and important man, shows up to the orgy with the password “fidelio” like he belongs there. But he is instantly spotted. He showed up in a taxi while everyone else came in a limo. His energy is awkward, and his responses are forced. Immediately, these powerful men—who are much more rich and important than Bill will probably every be—can suss him out.

Essentially, these powerful men, who for the most part remain nameless and hidden, serve as powerful forces in the universe. Bill’s night has dream-like qualities and never quite feels like reality. He wants to believe he’s part of this crowd…but really, he doesn’t belong here at all. These are the men who make decisions, who decide your fate. They are pulling the strings behind the curtain. And you’re just a pawn in their game.

Who is the man in the red cloak?

Seemingly, the answer to this one lies in the credits: the actor Leon Vitali is listed as the man in the read cloak. This is somebody we never see in the movie. Which means we never know who the man in the red cloak actually is.

As Rob Ager points out in his video , we see Vitali’s name in the newspaper article about the prostitute that died of a drug overdose that Zeigler shows to Bill at his mansion. At the end of the article about the dead hooker, it details that the hooker had an affair with a London fashion designed named Leon Vitali. So, essentially, Vitali—who was Kubrick’s personal assistant for years—is playing a much more powerful version of himself (this could be viewed as a bit of an inside joke on Kubrick’s part). This implies that the woman who saved Bill had an intimate relationship with the man in the red cloak, which may have been why Bill was singled out in the first place.

So, question answered. Right?

Well, as with any Kubrick film, the answer may not be that simple. Vitali the actor may have very well been the physical presence underneath the cloak, which is why he’d get the credit. But that doesn’t mean his character was underneath the cloak. Many believe that all signs, in fact, point to Ziegler.

One point in this theory’s favor is Mandy, the woman who almost overdosed in the bathroom at Ziegler’s house. While this woman is played by a different actress (Julienne Davis) than the one credited to the masked prostitute (Abigail Good), the woman in the mask who saves Bill, that doesn’t necessarily mean—as would have been the case with Ziegler/Vitali—that it’s the same character . But, in my opinion, that requires you to do too much stretching to make this theory work.

The other points of this theory are in this vein. For instance, people believe Ziegler’s red pool table is meant to convey he’s the man in the read cloak—which, if you ask me, feels too simplistic for someone like Kubrick. The man in the red cloak had an English accent, while Ziegler does not. Perhaps he was concealing his voice, but once again, this requires you to invent reasons to make a theory work.

Basically, I think Leon Vitali is the fashion designer. Ziegler tells Bill that if he “knew half the people who were there, he wouldn’t sleep so good,” which means these are powerful men with intense connections. Give how famous Vitali is as a fashion designer in the world of Eyes Wide Shut , it signals that this society of men is very powerful and well established. It would be in Kubrick’s best interest to just let us know Vitali was the man in the red cloak because it helps clarify the themes and motifs of the movie. To me, it’s that simple.

Who is the masked girl that saved Bill?

Many people theorize that Mandy, the prostitute who almost overdosed in Ziegler’s bathroom, is actually the woman in the mask. This is conflicting, because the actress credited as the woman in the mask, Abigail Good, is different than the actress who played Mandy, Julienne Davis. As we discussed in the red cloak section , this theory requires us to believe that different actresses could be playing the same woman just to throw us off.

I personally don’t buy this theory. It’s fun to play detective with Eyes Wide Shut , a movie that has so much going on. People do the same thing with movies like The Shining . But as a big Kubrick fan who’s read a lot about him, he’s never struck me as someone who hides a bunch of clues and misleads an audience. His movies are more visual-heavy, yes, and don’t rely upon dialogue to convey ideas. So I don’t think it’s much worth reading into this one.

I think it’s more prudent to consider the masked woman’s symbolic presence, as she represents Bill’s inner-conscious during his night out. Out of spite and jealousy, Bill is desperate to turn his wife’s fantasy about the naval officer into a reality. Bill weasels his way into the orgy and pretends that he belongs here—but we all know he doesn’t. He is a small man trying to re-masculate himself after hearing his wife’s fantasy. The masked woman only temporarily satisfies his ego, only to once again emasculate him and send Bill back home where the real work needs to be done.

What does Milich’s daughter whisper to Bill?

If you turn the subtitles on, you can actually find the answer to this question. At the Rainbow costume shop, Milich’s daughter whispers, “You should have a cloak lined with ermine.” Ermine fur comes from a weasel, and that statement has a double meaning.

On a literal plot level, it’s a fancy material for coats, which would help Bill blend in at the orgy scene filled with powerful men (since he himself is not a very powerful man). But on a symbolic level, this labels Bill as a weasel—an impostor who sly sneaks into an event in order to prop up his ego.

Well done, Kubrick. Well done.

Now it’s your turn

Have more unanswered questions about Eyes Wide Shut ? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!

Travis is co-founder of Colossus. He writes about the impact of art on his life and the world around us.

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Reader Interactions

August 18, 2023

I have always thought “Eyes Wide Shut” has a structure similar to that of “A Clockwork Orange”. Both movies have a first part that shows the main character interacting with other characters – then a transformative event – then a second part where the main character meets all the same characters under different circumstances.

In the former, Bill meets Mandy, Ziegler, a female patient who tries to seduce him, a street hooker, Milich and his daughter, and his old friend, the piano player. Then he goes through the trauma of the orgy. After that, he tries to relocate the piano player (but can’t), tries to revisit the street hooker (but finds out that she now has AIDS), revisits Milich and his daughter (but it’s now apparent that Milich is pimping her out) revisits the female patient (who treats him differently because her husband is now present), revisits Ziegler (who reveals himself to be one of the powerful men at the orgy), and possibly revisits Mandy (who may be the dead girl at the morgue).

In the latter, Alex already knows his droogs, who beat up an old bum, fight a rival gang, and rape a writer’s wife. Then goes through the trauma of prison and the experimental mind control treatment. After being released, he encounters the same bum (who now beats him up), a pair of cops (who are one of his old droogs and one of the rival gang members) and the writer (who’s wife died from the rape and is now out for revenge).

Did you ever notice this structural similarity?

August 23, 2023

Great point! The more and more I read and write about Kubrick, the more I see these kinds of similarities across his work. He seems obsessed with demystifying the human experience–breaking us simple humans down to our fragile, mortal core. The structure you’ve noted speaks to that, I believe. Our characters experience something surreal, otherworldly. They feel big and powerful. And then reality comes crashing back.

December 1, 2023

Something I noticed immediately when I watched the movie is that when Bill walks in to a character named Marion’s house, he makes his way to Marion’s room, and before he does, there is a greeter, and he shows the card and asks how things are going and walks inside. Later, Marion’s husband, who I think also might be a doctor or something else, walks in to the house the exact way Bill did. Same walk, same greeting, pretty much the same everything. Which also further proves that Bill isn’t as important as he thinks he is because there are others just like him.

March 31, 2024

This isn’t a response but a question as well. In movies, we all know that the camera always shows us what we need in order to understand everything….even if shot in a way that may not seem important at the time we are watching. I have never gotten a real response to what kind of ritual was being performed when Bill enters the so-called party that required a password. A ritual held on an important holiday (at least in America ), and seemed rather dark and what was the man in the middle of the circle with the censor chanting? What was the circle of nude maidens representative of as they were chosen, then the man performing said ritual stomps his sword once on the floor. It just seems like there is more meaning to it than the answers or lack of explanations I have gotten up to this point.

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20 Eye-Opening Facts About Eyes Wide Shut

By meredith danko | jul 15, 2020, 4:00 pm edt.

In the late 1990s, stories about what was happening on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s already-secretive film Eyes Wide Shut constantly made headlines. Everyone wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes with real-life celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and the 15-month shoot only intrigued people more. Finally, the film was released on July 16, 1999—more than four months after Kubrick had passed away. While there is still a lot we don’t know about the movie, here are 20 things we do.

1. Eyes Wide Shut is based on a 1926 novella.

Eyes Wide Shut is loosely is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle ( Dream Story ) , which was published in 1926. Considering that the movie takes place in 1990s New York, it is obviously not a direct adaptation, but it overlaps in its plot and themes. “[The book] explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality,” Kubrick said . “The book opposes the real adventures of a husband and the fantasy adventures of his wife, and asks the question: is there a serious difference between dreaming a sexual adventure, and actually having one?”

2. Production on Eyes Wide Shut began in 1996.

By then, Kubrick had been holding onto the rights to Traumnovelle —which screenwriter Jay Cocks purchased on his behalf, in order to keep the project under wraps—for nearly 30 years. Kubrick had planned to begin working on the film after making 2001 : A Space Odyssey , but then got the opportunity to adapt A Clockwork Orange .

3. The studio pushed Stanley Kubrick to cast A-list names.

Terry Semel, then-head of Warner Bros., told Kubrick , “What I would really love you to consider is a movie star in the lead role; you haven't done that since Jack Nicholson [in The Shining ].”

4. Stanley Kubrick wanted to cast Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

Kubrick liked the idea of casting a real-life married couple in the film, and originally considered Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. (He also liked the idea of Steve Martin .) Eventually, he went with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were married from 1990 to 2001.

5. London stood in for New York City.

Though the film is set in New York, it was filmed in London. In order to construct the most accurate sets possible, Vanity Fair reported that Kubrick “sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines.”

6. Some of the shots in Eyes Wide Shut required no set at all.

In order to give the movie a dream-like quality, the filmmakers used an old-school method of shooting—and a treadmill. “In some of the scenes, the backgrounds were rear-projection plates,” cinematographer Larry Smith explained . “Generally, when Tom’s facing the camera, the backgrounds are rear-projected; anything that shows him from a side view was done on the streets of London. We had the plates shot in New York by a second unit [that included cinematographers Patrick Turley, Malik Sayeed and Arthur Jafa]. Once the plates were sent to us, we had them force-developed and balanced to the necessary levels. We’d then go onto our street sets and shoot Tom walking on a treadmill. After setting the treadmill to a certain speed, we’d put some lighting effects on him to simulate the glow from the various storefronts that were passing by in the plates. We spent a few weeks on those shots.”

7. Eyes Wide Shut holds a Guinness World Record.

The film has a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest constant movie shoot, with a total of 400 days , which was a surprise to the cast and crew. Cruise and Kidman had only committed to six months of filming. The extended shoot was a lot to ask of Cruise in particular, who was at the height of his career. He even had to delay work on Mission: Impossible II to finish Eyes Wide Shut . He didn’t seem to mind though. “We knew from the beginning the level of commitment needed,” Cruise told TIME . “We were going to do what it took to do this picture.”

8. The script for Eyes Wide Shut kept changing.

According to Todd Field , who portrayed piano player Nick Nightingale (and is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker in his own right), “We’d rehearse and rehearse a scene, and it would change from hour to hour. We’d keep giving the script supervisor notes all the time, so by the end of the day the scene might be completely different. It wasn’t really improvisation, it was more like writing.”

9. Tom Cruise developed ulcers while shooting Eyes Wide Shut .

“I didn't want to tell Stanley," Cruise told TIME . “He panicked. I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up. You try not to kick things up, but you go through things you can't help.”

10. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman slept in their characters' bedroom.

In order to reflect their real-life relationship, Cruise and Kidman were asked to choose the color for the curtains in their on-screen bedroom, where they also slept .

11. The apartment featured in the movie was a re-creation of Stanley Kubrick's.

According to Cruise , “The apartment in the movie was the New York apartment [Stanley] 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.”

12. Stanley Kubrick temporarily banned Tom Cruise from the set.

Given his penchant for accuracy, it’s quite possible that Kubrick wanted to stir up some real-life jealousy between his stars in order to help them embody their characters. In a fantasy sequence, Kidman’s character has sex with another man, which motivates the rest of the film’s plot. Kubrick banned Cruise from the set on the days that Kidman shot the scene with a male model. They spent six days filming the one-minute scene. Kubrick also forbid Kidman from telling Cruise any details about it.

13. It took 95 takes for Tom Cruise to walk through a doorway.

Six days for a one-minute scene is nothing compared to the time Kubrick had Cruise do 95 takes of one simple action: walking through a doorway. After watching the playback, he apparently told Cruise, “Hey, Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star.”

14. Security on the set was tight.

Aside from Kubrick, Kidman, Cruise, and their tiny crew, no one was allowed on the set, which was heavily guarded. In May 1997, one photographer managed to capture a picture of Cruise standing next to a man that the photographer thought was just an “old guy, scruffy with an anorak and a beard.” That man was Kubrick, who hadn’t been photographed in 17 years. After the incident, security on the set was tripled.

15. Paul Thomas Anderson spent some time on the set.

One person Cruise did manage to sneak onto the set was his future Magnolia director, Paul Thomas Anderson. While there, Anderson asked Kubrick, “Do you always work with so few people?” Kubrick responded, “Why? How many people do you need?” Anderson then recalled feeling “like such a Hollywood a**hole.”

16. Stanley Kubrick makes a cameo in the movie.

He’s not credited, but the film’s director can be seen sitting in a booth at the Sonata Café.

17. Stanley Kubrick died less than a week after showing the studio his final cut of Eyes Wide Shut .

Kubrick died less than a week after showing what would be his final cut of the film to Warner Bros. No one can say how much he would have kept editing the film. One thing that was changed after his death: bodies in the orgy scene were digitally altered so that the movie could be released with an R (rather than an NC-17) rating. Although many claim that Kubrick intended to do this, too. "I think Stanley would have been tinkering with it for the next 20 years," Kidman said . "He was still tinkering with movies he made decades ago. He was never finished. It was never perfect enough.”

18. By the time Eyes Wide Shut was released, a dozen years had passed since Stanley Kubrick's last directorial effort.

Eyes Wide Shut came out a full 12 years after Kubrick’s previous film, 1987's Full Metal Jacket .

19. Eyes Wide Shut topped the box office during its opening week.

The film earned $30,196,742 during its first week in release, which was enough to take the box office’s number one spot—making it Kubrick’s only film to do so.

20. Tom Cruise didn't like Dr. Harford.

One year after the film’s release, Cruise admitted that he “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.”

An earlier version of this article ran in 2015.

Tom Cruise Questions Everything in Stanley Kubrick's Final Film

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The Big Picture

• Cruise's role in Eyes Wide Shut challenges his action-hero image, portraying vulnerability and insecurity in a surreal and thought-provoking manner.
• The film delves into male ego, desire, and insecurity, emphasizing the struggle to reconcile reality with unattainable fantasies.
• Cruise's character faces a dark night of the soul, grapples with emotions of shame and guilt, ultimately seeking reconciliation and a quiet domestic life.

On July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick 's greatly anticipated final film, Eyes Wide Shut , was released. Kubrick passed away a few months before the movie came out, and it remains one of the auteur's most provocative, controversial, and astonishing contributions to the cinematic art form. The film stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman , at the time married in real life and playing a couple on-screen, as a doctor and his wife who admits she has considered having an affair. The revelation sends Cruise's Dr. Bill Harford into a tailspin through the dead of night in New York City as he wanders around looking for sexual gratification, and seeking a greater sense of control over his own life.

Eyes Wide Shut

A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Was an Interesting Departure From Tom Cruise's Usual Roles

Cruise's 1999 was an interesting point in his career, as he also starred in Paul Thomas Anderson 's Magnolia , which released a few months later. In the years since, he has not appeared in many strictly dramatic roles , opting instead for primarily action oriented films. Two auteurist directors were able to center these challenging, three-hour long, adult dramas around his acting talent, and there are not many other examples of actors who have managed to pull that off in such a short span of time. Although the release year is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, since Eyes Wide Shut was in development for nearly six years and filmed for 400 days –– breaking the record for longest film shoot in history. It is eerie that Kubrick passed away so soon after completing the final edits on the film, considering how lengthy the production was.

Kubrick plays with Cruise's movie star persona in an interesting way, as the Cruise we know as the cocky hotshot in Top Gun or The Color of Money is nowhere to be found, neither is the heroic posture he delivered a few years earlier in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible , a role which has gone on to define his career as he returned to the franchise for the seventh installment in 2023 . Instead, Cruise is up against the ropes. He is lost, vulnerable, and desperate to heal his broken ego. Kubrick puts Cruise in a world where he is vastly in over his head . Even when Cruise is in over his head, he is typically able to craftily maneuver a fighter jet or a motorcycle to speed his way past any conflict, but in Eyes Wide Shut , there are no easy solutions to the problems he is facing.

Tom Cruise Must Face the Fragility of His Ego in 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Dr. Bill Harford seemingly has it all at the start of Eyes Wide Shut , but if you look closer it is not the case. Yes, he is attending an incredibly lavish Christmas party, he seems to have a happy family unit, and he is a successful doctor. However, he feels out of touch at this party, he is disconnected from his wife, and while he is rich, he is realizing there is a more elite class from which he is entirely shut out. Tragic events involving a young woman overdosing while with the party's host, portrayed by Sydney Pollack who previously directed Tom Cruise in The Firm, and the revelatory post-party conversation with his wife lead Cruise on a dark journey through the streets of New York. Each city block or ornate room is given an otherworldly glow thanks to the over-saturation of Christmas lights filling the frame.

The visual choices combined with the ambiguous and surreal tone place Cruise in very unfamiliar settings where he walks a liminal tightrope between dreaming and reality . The discoveries he makes are challenging, as events unfold in such a way that he ends up at a secretive party where a sexual ritual is performed, after an invitation from his friend played by Todd Field , actor-director who would go on to collaborate with Cate Blanchett in TÁR (Blanchett also happens to have a voice cameo appearance in Eyes Wide Shut). This ritual gone awry leads Cruise to some dangerous situations as the individuals involved go to great lengths to stop him from speaking about or acknowledging what had taken place in any shape or form, especially after he seems to uncover that a woman may have been murdered as a part of the ritual.

Whether the disturbing events that play out in the film are meant to be taken at face value, they prove two things to Cruise's character. Either he must accept that his fantasies are so outlandish and embrace his reality where life is a lot more... normal, or these things he aspires to be a part of are far outside what he is capable of handling . This is not only with regard to the sexual encounters he approaches, but also his idyllic perspective on what his marriage should be, or his desire to attain vast wealth and enter into an even higher status than that of a successful doctor. His ego was bruised by his wife's revelation early in the film, but the experiences he seeks out to repair it end up mangling it even further.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Subverts Expectations of a Leading Man

Considering his breakdown toward the end of the film when he realizes his wife knows about the events of the previous days, it is clear Cruise understands he is out of his depth and feels a wide range of emotions including shame, guilt, inadequacy, and fear regarding his future. Cruise's role grapples with one of the greatest fears the male ego can confront, the notion that not even his masculine bravado can control or uncover the thoughts the women in his life choose to keep from him. The insecurity seeps through his performance as it becomes clear how even in marriage there are still things people will keep from each other, and he has no power to challenge that. This is a rare form to see Cruise in , and he handles these outbursts just as well as he handles traversing rooftops at impossible speeds or clinging to the side of airplanes.

Ultimately, Cruise is put through this dark night of the soul and comes out of it in a place where he and his wife can maybe set aside the collision of ego, desire, and insecurity, and enjoy a quiet domestic life together. It is kind of a happy ending... but it's a distorted one , but Cruise allows the opportunity to relinquish all of his troubled experiences over the last few days by accepting the life he has and attempting to reconcile with Kidman in the final moments of the film.

Tom Cruise Inspired Christian Bale's Performance in 'American Psycho'

"Impressive, very nice."

Kubrick disarms our understanding of what a typical leading man should be through his treatment of Bill Harford's character. Cruise is uncomfortable , weird, and stripped down –– both literally and metaphorically –– in Eyes Wide Shut . This type of role is a challenging one for any actor to play, but especially difficult in the hands of someone with such massive celebrity status that audiences have certain expectations attached to his involvement in a film. Maybe in 1999, it did not seem quite as bizarre (although most definitely still bizarre considering the subject matter dealt with), but in retrospect Eyes Wide Shut is something quite rare for such a towering movie star to tackle with the confidence and image-conscious attitude Cruise brings to the part.

Although the film remains one of his most challenging and controversial, it is also one of the best outings Cruise has given as an on-screen performer. Some actors may have an easier time riding a motorcycle off a cliff for a film than getting into the right head space to portray such a vulnerable person. As the Mission: Impossible series continues, and Cruise shows no signs of slowing down his life as an action-junkie, we can hope he might return one day to a film as surreal, complicated, and thoughtful as Eyes Wide Shut.

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Eyes Wide Shut at 15: Inside the Epic, Secretive Film Shoot that Pushed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to Their Limits

By Amy Nicholson

Kubrick’s obsession with secrecy so infected his cast and crew that no one has ever spoken about it in detail. The day-to-day life on set can only be inferred from facts and hints. The most major fact: Eyes Wide Shut was exhausting. Kubrick had asked Cruise and Kidman to commit to six months. When they landed in London in the fall of 1996, the couple fully expected to return to Hollywood by spring. Instead, they stayed on through the summer, fall, and another Christmas. Filming wrapped in January of 1998, but in May they were summoned back for more months of reshoots. Altogether they’d spend 15 months on Eyes Wide Shut, the Guinness World Record for the longest continual film shoot.

“Stanley had figured out a way to work in England for a fraction of what we pay here,” explained Sydney Pollack, who joined the cast as the corrosive tycoon Victor Ziegler after the extended shooting forced original actor Harvey Keitel to cry uncle and drop out. “While the rest of us poor bastards are able to get 16 weeks of filming for $70 million with a $20 million star, Stanley could get 45 weeks of shooting for $65 million.” Though every six months Cruise spent in London cost him another $20 million film he wasn’t making—plus he had the fledgling Cruise/Wagner production company to oversee—he swore to the press he had no qualms about his extended art house sabbatical.

“I remember talking to Stanley and I said, ‘Look, I don’t care how long it takes, but I have to know: are we going to finish in six months?’” said Cruise. “People were waiting and writers were waiting. I’d say, ‘Stanley, I don’t care—tell me it’s going to be two years.’”

Kubrick is legendary for his perfectionism—to reconstruct Greenwich Village in London, he sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines. But his approach to character and performance was the opposite. Instead of knowing what he wanted on the set, he waited for the actors to seize upon it themselves. His process: repeated takes designed to break down the idea of performance altogether. The theory was that once his actors bottomed-out in exhaustion and forgot about the cameras, they could rebuild and discover something that neither he nor they expected. During The Shining, he’d put Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall through 50 takes to figure out what he wanted, causing Duvall to have a nervous breakdown. For Eyes Wide Shut, given his stars’ extreme pliancy and eagerness to please, Kubrick went further, once insisting that Cruise do 95 takes of walking through a door.

“In times when we couldn’t get it, it was just like, ‘Fuck!’” admitted Cruise. “I’d bring it upon myself because I demand a lot of myself.” But what he never asked—at least, not openly in the press—was if there was an “it” Kubrick wanted him to get. After all, a director who demands 95 takes could be exacting—or conversely, he could be ill-prepared and uncommunicative. Cruise’s overpreparation had served him well in the past. Not here. He got an ulcer, and tried to keep the news from Kubrick. At its core, the Cruise/Kubrick combination seems cruel: an over-achieving actor desperate to please a never-satisfied auteur. The power balance was firmly shifted to Kubrick, yet to his credit, Cruise has never complained.

Kubrick defenders—Cruise included—insist the legend was fully in command. “He was not indulgent,” Cruise insisted to the press. “You know you are not going to leave that shot until it’s right.” Yet it’s hard not to see indulgence when even small roles demanded prolonged commitment, like starlet Vinessa Shaw’s one-scene cameo as a prostitute, which was meant to take two weeks and ended up wasting two months. Adding to the peril, Kubrick also refused to screen dailies, a practice Cruise relied on. “Making a movie is like stabbing in the dark,” the actor explained. “If I get a sense of the overall picture, then I’m better for the film.” Cruise couldn’t watch and adjust his performance to find his character’s through line—a problem exacerbated by the amount of footage the director filmed. For most of the cast, who appeared only in one or two moments, they had only to match the timbre of their character’s big moment. But Cruise alone is in nearly every scene and had to spend the shoot playing a guessing game. Not knowing which of his mind-melting number of takes would wind up in the film, he still had to figure out how to shape a consistent character from scene to scene. Given Kubrick’s withholding direction and the exponential number of combinations that could be created from his raw footage, it’s understandable if the forever-prepared actor found himself adrift.

Adding to the actor’s peril was the part’s personal and emotional risk. Kubrick decided to find his story through psychoanalyzing his stars, prodding Cruise and Kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret. “Tom would hear things that he didn’t want to hear,” admitted Kidman. “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.” The line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred. The couple slept in their characters’ bedroom, chose the colors of the curtains, strewed their clothes on the floor, and even left pocket change on the bedside table just as Cruise did at home.

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“As an actor, you set up: there’s reality, and there’s pretend,” explained Kidman. “And those lines get crossed, and it happens when you’re working with a director that allows that to happen. It’s a very exciting thing to happen; it’s a very dangerous thing to happen.” Added Cruise, “I wanted this to work, but you’re playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up.” At least the two actors had an auditory cue to distinguish fact from fiction: on camera, Kidman changed her Australian accent to American. But there was also external tension pressing down on their performances as both actors—especially Cruise—were media savvy enough to recognize that audiences would project Bill and Alice’s unhappiness on their own marriage, which was already a source of tabloid fodder. Even during the course of filming, the couple had to successfully sue Star magazine for writing that they hired sex therapists to coach them.

Kubrick’s on-set wall of secrecy even divided Cruise and Kidman. To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, Kubrick would direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a handsome naval officer—an imaginary affair that haunts Bill over the course of the film—Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. Not only did he ask the pair to pose in over 50 erotic positions, he banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband’s tension by telling him what happened during the shoot.

Co-star Vinessa Shaw would eventually admit Kubrick had exhausted the once-indefatigable actor, confessing that compared to Cruise’s “gung ho” first months of shooting, by the end, “He was still into it, but not as energetic.” Still, when gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote that the Eyes Wide Shut set was miserable, Cruise quickly fired back a letter insisting that his and Kidman’s relationship with Kubrick was “impeccable and extraordinary. […] Both Nic and I love him.” Added actor and director Todd Field, on set for six months to play the pivotal role of the piano player Nick Nightingale, “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.” However, Cruise’s devotion to Kubrick’s massive mystery masterpiece would prove damaging to his screen image.

Good vs. Right

It’s hard to love Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford. He’s closed off and slippery, a cipher whose choices don’t make consistent sense. What personal history screenwriter Frederic Raphael had included in the original drafts—Harford’s strained relationship with his father, his guilt over his prurient interest in female anatomy—Kubrick had purged from the script, leaving Cruise to play a shallow voyager who only serves to lead the audience on an odyssey of sexual temptation. Also on the page but deleted from the final film is Bill’s explanatory voice-over that invited the audience to understand his feelings. Worse, Kubrick deliberately shunned including the Tom Cruise charisma fans expected in his performance, raising the question of why he cast Cruise at all. Why ask the biggest star in the world to carry your film and then hide his face under a mask for 20 minutes?

Though this is a story of sexual frustration—an emotion Cruise had played with conviction in Born on the Fourth of July —and jealousy, which is just the darker twin of Cruise’s signature competitive streak, his performance in Eyes Wide Shut feels flat. He’d done vulnerability better in Jerry Maguire and had captured neutered paralysis a decade and a half before in Risky Business. Yet in nearly all of Eyes Wide Shut ’s key emotional moments—his wife confessing to her first and second psychological “betrayals,” his patient’s daughter professing her love over her father’s corpse, nearly kissing a call girl’s corpse in the morgue, being unmasked at the orgy—Cruise’s face is stiff and visibly unfeeling, almost as if he never took the mask off at all.

Cruise’s blankness makes Eyes Wide Shut take on an element of kabuki theater, the art form where emotional perception—not projection—is key. The whole film feels like an exercise in theatricality, as though Dr. Bill is not a person but a prop. This isn’t a movie about a human possessed with distrust and jealousy—it’s a movie about distrust and jealousy that simply uses a human as its conduit. With Cruise hidden in a mask and robe, the intention is to hide his individuality in the service of a larger ritualistic machine. Even in his scene with the impossibly sweet prostitute played by Vinessa Shaw, their conversation about how much cash for which physical acts doesn’t spark with lust but limps along like the characters themselves are merely performers recognizing that this is the negotiation that is supposed to take place. “Do you suppose we should talk about money?” he asks—it’s as if their whole conversation is in air quotes.

To critique Tom Cruise’s performance in Eyes Wide Shut, it’s important to distinguish between good and right. Measured against any of his previous screen roles, his acting reads as terrible. It’s artificial, distant, and unrelatable. However, the terribleness of his performance translates into a tricky logic puzzle. On-screen, we’re given only one take of the 95 attempts that Cruise shot. If Kubrick was a perfectionist who demanded Cruise repeat himself 95 times on the set, and in the editing room rejected 94 of those takes, then the “terrible” take Kubrick chose must be the take that Kubrick wanted. What feels flat to the audience must have felt correct to the director, so even though it’s hard to appreciate Cruise’s performance, at least one person must have thought the chosen take was perfect: Stanley Kubrick. And for Cruise, a perfectionist himself who was determined to make his master happy, we’re forced to defend the “badness” of his performance by recognizing him as an excellent soldier following orders.

Yet critics under the sway of thinking that the great Kubrick could do no wrong and Cruise, the popcorn hero, could do little right, blamed the actor for the director’s choices and groaned that “Our forever boyish star just can’t deliver.” The irony, however, is that in 45 years of filmmaking, Kubrick had never asked his actors to deliver. His films had earned Oscar nominations for their acting only twice: Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus (1960). In his much shorter career, Cruise himself had earned as many Oscar nods. That fact alone speaks to the limited value the director placed on acting—to Kubrick, his cast was merely a tool for his vision and individual performances subservient to his intimidating authorial style. Kubrick’s disinterest in actors is evident even in *Eyes Wide Shut’*s credits, which despite including two directors (Pollack and Field) and two great character actors (Alan Cumming and Rade Serbedzija) filled the rest of its cast with new faces and 10th-billed TV actors. As much as Cruise wanted Eyes Wide Shut to prove, yet again, that he could act, Kubrick clearly had scant interest in giving him the opportunity.

Cruise made himself vulnerable before Kubrick and his devotees, but instead of being rewarded for his emotional and financial sacrifice, audiences dismissed his performance as callow. He couldn’t even ask his by-then dead-and-buried director for support. Eyes Wide Shut ’s fallout wasn’t flattering: he was blamed for the film’s failure, and the tabloids took a savage interest in his marriage, which would last only two more years. Yet Cruise continues to defend his two years of hard work. “I didn’t like playing Dr. Bill. I didn’t like him. It was unpleasant,” admitted Cruise a year later in the only public criticism he’s ever given. “But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn’t done this.”

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Eyes Wide Shut

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Kubrick's intense study of the human psyche yields an impressive cinematic work.

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Stanley Kubrick

Dr. William Harford

Nicole Kidman

Alice Harford

Sydney Pollack

Victor Ziegler

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Rade Serbedzija

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• Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999

Throughout the week, The Ringer will celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the best years in movie history and argue why some films deserve to be called the best of ’99. Here, two of our writers make the case for Stanley Kubrick’s psychosexual portrait of a marriage.

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Share All sharing options for: Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999

Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Here, Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman discuss the final film of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut.

Adam Nayman: In thinking about how we could make the case that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was—and remains—the best movie of 1999 (a very good year for movies, according to our Ringer colleagues and pretty much everybody else), I thought it’d be good to start somewhere a bit unexpected: with just how funny it is. I know that saying “[Weird Movie X] is actually a comedy” to make other people feel bad for not getting it is an annoying move. But Eyes Wide Shut is laugh-out-loud hilarious, on purpose. I was 18 years old when it came out, and I have vivid memories of it being treated as a pop-cultural punch line—as something to make fun of.

I understand why this happened: it’s a strange, arty, deliberately stylized movie that uses dream logic to address challenging themes of love, commitment, male vanity, and the fear of death; it speaks the language of symbolism and metaphor; Kubrick’s death earlier that year meant it carried a lot of pressure as his last will and testament; it has a lot of topless women. And, for the only time in Kubrick’s career, he worked with movie stars who were more famous than he was. The media scrutiny on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s troubled marriage, and whether spending a grueling 400 days on a movie set shooting a drama about jealousy and infidelity damaged it further, predictably reframed the conversation about the film around celebrity, instead of cinema. Even more predictable was the way that critics of all kinds acted like horny teenagers—or accused Kubrick of being a horny teenager—when the movie premiered.

“Now we get the fucking laughing fit, right?” snaps Cruise’s Bill Harford during an early, pot-fueled argument with Kidman’s Alice, and I wish I could just play that clip every time I read or hear somebody say that Eyes Wide Shut is a movie to laugh at. It’s a movie to laugh with , and the scene where Cruise and Kidman get tetchy with each other in their underwear is Exhibit A. Alice’s case of the giggles is in response to her husband’s statement that she would “never be unfaithful to him,” an idea that she goes on to demolish over the course of an amazing, five-minute monologue that serves as the true beginning of the movie’s story and that sets “Dr. Bill” off on a series of nighttime adventures fueled by paranoid jealousy.

The comedy starts with the opening shot, which holds on Alice’s naked, statuesque body just long enough for us to get an eyeful before cutting away. Right off the top, Kubrick establishes a comic rhythm of interruption. (Another example: The stately Shostakovich waltz that plays over the credits is revealed as emanating from the Harfords’ own stereo—I don’t know why, but the shot of Cruise turning the music off strikes me as something out of Mel Brooks). These are little, witty touches; for a more spectacular example, check out the way that Kubrick and cinematographer Larry Smith turn the argument between Bill and Alice into a sophisticated sight gag. By the end, Alice is doubled over with laughter, at which point the film’s elegant Steadicam perspective gets supplanted by a bobbing, handheld camera—the image becoming destabilized right along with our (anti?)hero’s self-confidence as a husband, lover, and master-of-the-universe alpha male. After all, the larger joke about Eyes Wide Shut is that it’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie in which Tom Cruise can’t get laid (Maverick and Jerry Maguire didn’t have that problem). We’re going to have to talk at some point about whether or not Eyes Wide Shut is a movie about men—Stanley Kubrick included—gawking at women, but can we start by discussing how it is also, in a very serious way, a movie about women laughing at men? Or are you going to make fun of me for even suggesting such a thing?

Manuela Lazic: I will, in fact, laugh at you for suggesting this, but not because I disagree, and not with a full-hearted laugh. Imagine I’m doing something a little sadder—a little like Alice’s own laugh at her husband, perhaps—because of course women have to laugh at men in Eyes Wide Shut. But that’s never all they do. Alice has to get stoned before she can laugh in her husband’s face with so much frame-shattering, camera-disorienting abandon. Because if Eyes Wide Shut really is about men, it is also, more specifically and as you said, about how men perceive women—and there’s nothing really funny about that. Rewatching that pot-smoking scene, I was struck by how angry, sad, and exposed Alice gets when she starts to giggle.

While the pot helps her to open up, laughter functions here (as it often does) like a self-defense mechanism for Alice to protect herself from feeling as upset as she should. Earlier in the film, she has a similar interaction with the suave Hungarian stranger who tries to get her into bed at Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party. Here again, she is wasted (this time on champagne). Alcohol and drugs get Alice to both reveal herself and peel away at the arrogance of the men around her, which perplexes both Bill and the stranger. She may remain silent during most of the Hungarian’s talk, but she is smiling at his terrible double entendres the entire time, and ultimately leaves him hanging.

As a woman who has suffered through such eye-roll-inducing talk from men, I was astonished by Alice’s decision to take this attempted seduction with a smile. But Alice’s approach isn’t testimony to Kubrick writing this character through a male misogynistic lens. On the contrary, it is the presentation of one of the few options that women have when confronted with the ludicrous vanity of men (my reaction would have been overt anger, disdain, and immediate flight).

When Alice is faced with this behavior again, this time from her husband, the smile she offered the Hungarian turns into full-blown laughter, before she explains with literally sobering seriousness what lies behind the smile. It’s a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking moment because Alice really wishes Bill could understand that she, too, has desires.

For me, the funniest sections of Eyes Wide Shut are those when Bill is seen reflecting on his discovery of female desire, often when he’s in his car and Kubrick’s camera zooms in on his terrified eyes. In this alone time, he finally gets to explore his interiority and use his imagination (in other words, he gets to think!) instead of “acting” in and on the world. He is clearly disturbed by this new exercise. Alice, by contrast, is used to questioning her thoughts (like when she developed an intense crush on a naval officer during a family holiday, and couldn’t decide whether she wanted him to leave their hotel or take her away) and exploring the world through dreams. In fact, Bill’s deep dive into an underworld of performative sex, and life-threatening curiosity on the streets of New York and outside the city, is clearly paralleled by Alice’s abstract but not so unintelligible dreams: Unlike her husband, who has to physically move through space to find himself in situations that challenge his beliefs, Alice uses her brains to confront the truth about her perfect-seeming marriage.

I love this idea, and I love how Kubrick deploys it through this masterpiece. He manages to show how women’s need to rely on their interiority to live in the world is at once a blessing and a terrible example of inequality between the sexes. Right after Alice tells him about her longing for that naval officer, Dr. Bill receives a call and has to go to the bedside of a patient who just died. There, he meets the man’s daughter, Marion, who suddenly tells Bill that she loves him and that she doesn’t want to move to Chicago with her soon-to-be husband. Bill has been the love of her life all along. The moment is both hilarious and terrifying, thanks in great part to Marie Richardson’s explosively emotional performance as Marion, but also because of how this scene has been contextualized by Alice’s monologue (and because Richardson has been styled to look a bit like Kidman).

Kubrick, in his usual ironic, on-the-nose way, has followed Alice’s tale of overwhelming desire with an example of that very feeling in the person of Marion, for Bill to directly experience it himself. Here, he is the naval officer, and Marion is Alice: With her thoughts alone (“Marion, we barely know each other,” says Bill, needlessly), Marion has already built a relationship with the object of her desire. The scene becomes simultaneously funnier and more heartbreaking when Marion’s fiancé shows up and Bill says goodbye, leaving Marion to her fate as a wife and a misunderstood and desirous person—just like Alice has become.

Another undeniably funny thing about Eyes Wide Shut is its style. Each crossfade feels a little off but in a Kubrickian way—they have a calculated tonal significance, meant (I think!) to highlight the artificiality of the world Bill evolves in. The camera’s fluidity recalls The Shining ’s long tracking shots in the deserted hotel of Jack Torrance’s mind. Yet Eyes Wide Shut is much weirder than The Shining (yes, such a thing seems possible to me): The obviously fake New York streets! The Wu-Tang Clan reference! The Chris Isaak song! Do you agree that this film is strangely clunky? And do you think it is clunky for good reason, beyond the difficult shoot? What makes this stiffness compelling? And do you think this film’s style has been influential?

Nayman: I’m going to have to go to the judges on those Wu-Tang references; according to the internet, Eyes Wide Shut is actually Illuminati propaganda filled with subliminal imagery. I would, of course, happily watch a Room 237 –style essay about Eyes Wide Shut ’s hidden messages, except that there probably isn’t quite enough ambiguity in the film to support it. I like that you called Kubrick’s irony “on-the-nose,” because it is, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t also suggestive and complicated (as you have already described in the scene with Marion, although you left out the part about Marion’s fiancé being a visual doppelgänger for Bill, played by Thomas Gibson, which means there’s one degree of separation between one of the best American films of the ’90s and Dharma & Greg ).

As for style, I think it’s more that Eyes Wide Shut extends and refines techniques and motifs dating back to its director’s earliest work; it’s almost like a greatest hits album. For instance, that late shot of Alice, fast asleep with the mask on the pillow beside her, is a direct reference to a shot from Kubrick’s (excellent) sophomore feature, Killer’s Kiss . That movie is also evoked by the presence of those creepy mannequins in the sex shop where Leelee Sobieski appears as a 21st-century version of Lolita , right before Bill goes to the mansion that looks like the Overlook Hotel ... but I’d better stop before this turns into Room 237 II after all.

I’d agree that Eyes Wide Shut is aggressively artificial, and that the phoniness of its Manhattan setting is crucial: to quote that other modern deconstructed-rom-com masterpiece They Came Together , it’s like New York City is a character in the movie—a weirdly untrustworthy one. Kubrick’s carefully color-coded version of the world’s most photographed city—all of those blue filters and all the Klimt-style gold at the edge of the frame—is not just a case of aesthetic flexing but a cue to understand that we’re somewhere between the literal and the figurative. Eyes Wide Shut is not interested in building up a sense of everyday reality; its architecture is the rickety constructions of the subconscious.

The German title of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle , on which Eyes Wide Shut is based, translates to “A Dream Story,” and it’s that slightly tranced-out quality—of events experienced with “eyes wide shut”—that I think Kubrick finally perfected here after deploying it more sparingly in his earlier movies. The tracking shots in The Shining (and Full Metal Jacket ) are hypnotic, but in Eyes Wide Shut , the effect of all that serene, gliding camera movement is to submerge the viewer in layers of aspirational fantasy. Bill and Alice’s high-rolling life is a dream, and then, as we discover, there are even deeper layers underneath, both in terms of what the characters desire and also the topography of their New York. One hint to what the movie is doing as far as dreaming goes, lies in the—again, quite hilarious—way that Bill, for all his wealth and social status, moves through the movie as an almost completely passive figure, especially after the revelation of Alice’s imagined infidelity. In almost every scene, he ends up repeating or parroting the dialogue of other characters, as if he has no ideas of his own.

I truly love Cruise’s performance, and I think that it makes for an interesting contrast with his Oscar-nominated work the same year in Magnolia. There, as Frank “T.J.” Mackey, Cruise weaponized his clean-cut, sex-symbol status to play a guy peddling penis worship (“ respect the cock ”) to a millennial-incel audience. As Magnolia went on, we saw the scared, grieving little boy inside the persona. In Eyes Wide Shut , Cruise’s characterization is less sentimental, because Bill isn’t psychologically damaged or in need of redemption. He’s a cipher, and considering the significance of masks in the movie’s design—with the selection of Venetian masks in particular evoking a long history of literary and theatrical eroticism—the way that Kubrick uses Cruise’s flawless visage as a mask for Bill’s insecurity and lack of imagination is ingenious.

Obviously, in a movie filled with double entendres and body doubles, the infamous secret-society sequence with the guests all decked out in masks is meant to parallel Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party, with the difference being that Bill goes to the latter alone, as a bachelor. I don’t know if you want to talk about what goes on the mansion, but if Eyes Wide Shut is a “dream story” what does it mean that a 20-minute sequence set at an orgy plays out like such an absurd and embarrassing nightmare?

Lazic: One cannot talk about Tom Cruise without bringing up the idea of masks and disguise—and, tangentially, the realm of dreams. As you say, Kubrick uses Cruise’s perfect face as a veil in and of itself, and therefore a signifier of falseness: There’s nothing perfect lying beneath his perfect features. This is similar to how the actor’s visage was employed three years prior by Brian De Palma, the master of the body double himself, in the first Mission: Impossible film. There, Cruise used masks to deceive his traitors and alter reality. But of course, the most existentially disturbing mask that Cruise ever wore was the facial prosthetic his character David Aames was offered after his accident in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 psychological epic Vanilla Sky —or was he? “It’s only a mask if you treat it that way,” says one of the doctors, but David can no longer pretend that this smooth, consistent, standard face is his.

Just as this disappointing substitute for a face takes David into a nightmarish version of his life in which he is not handsome and doesn’t get the girl, Dr. Bill’s Venetian mask transports him to a dark place where other people, as you say, keep their protective camouflage and force him to show his real face, humiliating him.

This scene in the mansion is so deliciously cringe-worthy because it is such an overblown, tongue-in-cheek yet disturbing abstraction of what Bill is experiencing out in the world, after he finds out about female desire. His experience at this sordid party is a grotesque, dreamlike copy of his aborted adventure with Domino (also the name of a type of Venetian mask, of course!), a sex worker played by Vinessa Shaw who picks him up, takes him to her place, has to decide herself what she will do for him, and eventually can’t even get to it because he soon chickens out. She even feels too sorry for Bill to want his money. Just like he stands on the outside looking in at orgies at the secret gathering, Bill can’t participate in this superficial sexual masquerade with Domino. He’s too aware of his own pretense and of this woman’s selfhood. Kubrick makes Bill’s discomfort in Domino’s tiny room just as crushing as his shame when the cloaked cult unmasks him, because they are essentially the same sensations.

After his wild—or anti-climactic, considering he only got to have a look at things—night at the mansion, Bill searches for answers in Ziegler, his boss, played by Sydney Pollack. Their small talk when Bill enters his superior’s expensive office is as absurd as it gets, until Ziegler snaps: He comes clean to Bill, explaining that he too was at the secret meeting, but also, and more importantly, that the shaming ceremony that Bill was subjected to, including the suggested sacrifice of a woman for his sake, was “all staged to scare the shit out of [him].”

At last, the masks finally come down, and casting Pollack as Ziegler proves perfect. With his hyper-naturalistic acting style and gregarious manner, the legendary actor-director is the polar opposite of Cruise’s ideal looks—it is no coincidence that, from very early on in the film, Ziegler reveals his drug-fueled sexual activities to Bill. In this film, Pollack’s down-to-earth appearance is aligned with Ziegler’s bone-chilling honesty. Again, Kubrick parallels this scene with another one, set out in the world: Bill goes looking for Domino, but instead of finding her at her apartment, he meets her roommate, who kills the explicit sexual tension between them by announcing that Domino has been diagnosed with HIV. Did Domino really have the virus? Did she even exist? Although Bill didn’t end up having sex with her, he shivers when he learns how close he came to danger, and the entire chapter feels like a Fatal Attraction –esque cautionary tale about what men do to prove their masculine prowess to themselves. With Ziegler and Domino, Bill is twice denounced for trying to keep on the mask of male sexual vanity and control.

I love that scene with Pollack because it feels like Kubrick revealing his tricks in the clearest, most direct way he ever has. What follows is one of the most astounding, delectable, and moving displays of discomfiting a man I’ve ever seen in cinema (in the same category, see Phantom Thread and most other Paul Thomas Anderson movies). That’s what is truly funny to me: how weepy Bill gets when he sees the mask on his pillow, and how Cruise says “I’ll tell you everythiiiiiiing”!

How do you think this character arc fits in Kubrick’s filmography? Do you think Bill has really gotten the message by the end, or is Kubrick again being sarcastic about Bill’s newfound willingness to understand his wife? I find that the Barbie doll that their daughter Helena picks up at the toy store in the last scene, interrupting their conversation, may be a sign of things to come for her, and for women in general …

Nayman: I think “I’ll tell you everything” is funny too, although the hard cut to Kidman’s face the morning after—with those dreamy blue filters swapped out for some harsh natural light—is probably the most emotional moment in the movie for me, the one where the script, the actors, and the filmmaking combine to allow for authentic fragility amid the satire and sarcasm, and to address the “real” transgressions that have been coded into Bill’s adventures. I refuse to offer a definitive interpretation of whether or not Bill did a “bad, bad thing” either during Eyes Wide Shut ’s duration or at some other point in his marriage to Alice; the point is how we see him given every opportunity to do so and failing mostly because of external circumstances rather than any moral imperative (again, this is a movie in which Tom Cruise definitively fails to get laid).

The scene where Bill visits the morgue and sees the corpse of the woman who “saved” him during Ziegler’s orgy—gazing at her as she lies naked on the slab, her body exposed and her eyes wide shut—anticipates the morbid cruelty of Pollack’s monologue, which is all about concealing the truth, about the seduction of repression. It’s also, quite literally, about staring death in the face. That’s why when we see Bill reading a copy of the New York Post with the big-type headline “LUCKY TO BE ALIVE” (an image that used to be my Twitter avatar), it plays, like so much of Kubrick at his best, two ways: it’s a grim sight gag that also hints at the mind-set Bill is about to bring home with him as a husband and father.

Dr. Bill’s newfound willingness to communicate with his wife is sincere, and as a result, it’s funny: the two things don’t cancel each other out but instead are heightened in tandem. In the scene in the Macy’s, he insists on using a very particular “F-word” to suggest a solution to their marital impasse—“forever.” This is a significant idea given the context of Kubrick’s career: a lusting for immortality (for some kind of “forever”) is always tied to male protagonists in his films, whether it’s Barry Lyndon yearning for an aristocratic title that he can pass on to his son, or Jack Torrance in The Shining telling his son he wants to stay at the Overlook “forever and ever and ever” (presumably all by himself, after he’s done butchering his wife and son). In sharp contrast to his attitude in the early scenes, where he took both Alice and her fidelity for granted, Bill now clings to the renewed promise of enduring domestic bliss. Alice, though, counters with an F-word of her own, offering a more provisional solution to the problem at hand—and getting the last dirty word in Kubrick’s entire career. In the end, Alice wants exactly the same thing as her husband, and in giving him a piece of her mind, she rescues Eyes Wide Shut from the kind of bleak, ambiguous ending that was typically Kubrick’s stock in trade. It’s a happy ending, right?

Lazic: It’s funny that you should ask me that because the last time you did, it was about Phantom Thread —and I think these two endings are comparable. Plus, I’m pretty sure Phantom Thread will go down as the best movie of 2018 the same way that Eyes Wide Shut is obviously no. 1 for 1999.

Nayman: Yes, that was the thing that we were setting out to prove several thousand words ago, I think we did it. Anyway, go on.

Lazic: There is a sense of mutual delusion at the end of PTA’s film, as the couple finds a perverse system to repeat ad infinitum in order to stay satisfied with each other. But of course, who’s to say that neither of them will ever get tired of mushroom omelettes? The ending of Eyes Wide Shut is more down to earth, thanks to Alice’s pragmatism. Even though there’s a similar sense of Alice wanting Bill “flat on [his] back, helpless, tender, open, with only [her] to help,” the difference is that she wants him in that position not to overpower him, but to have sex with him, and “as soon as possible” rather than regularly. Her ambitions aren’t as big as Alma’s in Phantom Thread , perhaps because she refuses to work that hard at saving her marriage: She won’t be having crazy dreams and laughing in his face every time he needs to settle down a little just to remind him that she, too, is a person with desires and not just a perfect spouse. “Now we’re awake, forever” is a line that could have been uttered by PTA’s hopeful, mad couple, even as they begin a dreamlike (or nightmarish?) existence together. Alice, with her sense of reality in check, now has her eyes wide open. She has no patience for mindfucks.

In This Stream

1999 movies week: a celebration of the best year in film.

• Make the Case: Why ‘Three Kings’ Was the Best and Most Predictive Movie of 1999
• ‘Being John Malkovich’ Was a Head Trip Masterpiece—and the Best Film of 1999

How Much Kevin Costner Stands to Win or Lose on ‘Horizon’

The summer content road trip, ‘the bad news bears’ (1976) with bill simmons and van lathan.

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Eyes Wide Shut: 20 years on, Stanley Kubrick’s most notorious film is still shrouded in mystery

On its 20th anniversary, ed power reflects on a film that was unflinching in its insights into sexuality and brusque about matters of the heart – to a degree unthinkable in mainstream entertainment today, article bookmarked.

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I t was the fastest “yes” Tom Cruise ever uttered. Late in 1995, the world’s biggest movie star travelled by helicopter to Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire. Waiting on the expansive lawn was director Stanley Kubrick , who’d lived semi-reclusively in the 18th-century pile since 1978. So began their great adventure together making Eyes Wide Shut , the eternally divisive psycho-sexual meditation released 20 years ago in the UK this week.

A still potent mystique hangs over Eyes Wide Shut. That’s partly down to the subject matter. When the glamorous wife ( Nicole Kidman ) of a successful doctor (Cruise) confesses the desire she felt for a stranger months previously, he plunges down a whirlpool of jealousy.

Over the course of a single hallucinatory evening, Dr Harford embarks on a tour of the murkiest recesses of the human heart. He fends off the daughter of a patient only just passed away, almost hires a manic pixie dream girl prostitute and then blunders upon a masked orgy. It’s nightmarish. The audience is never entirely clear whether what’s happening is real or a dive into Harford’s green-eyed dream-life.

All of that would be enough to ensure its notoriety. Yet the allure of Eyes Wide Shut also surely flows from the degree to which death intrudes on a film about sex. Kubrick suffered a fatal coronary before its release. Just six days previously, he had screened his final cut for Cruise and Kidman.

Eyes Wide Shut, along with all that, appeared to foreshadow the unravelling of Cruise and his co-star Kidman’s outwardly luminous marriage. They divorced in August 2001 – almost exactly two years since the project’s release.It seemed ominous and more than a coincidence. Had Kubrick’s caper put a stake through the heart of their relationship?

Such were the questions lurking in the future as Cruise, grinning like the matinee idol he was, sat down to a long lunch with Kubrick at Childwickbury in 1995. The conversation was mostly trivial. They discussed their shared passions: vintage cameras, planes, the New York Yankees. Cruise told Kubrick how seeing the director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at age six had blown his mind. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What is life? What is space? What is existence?” (Some of us will have had the same experience watching Top Gun .)

“He was just waiting, alone in a garden,” Cruise remembered of meeting Kubrick. “He walked me around the grounds, and I just remember thinking, ‘This guy is kind of a magical, wonderful guy.’”

Still, they did eventually get around to the matter at hand. Kubrick wanted the star of Top Gun and Cocktail to play the lead in his sexually frank adaptation of an Austrian avant-garde novel from the 1920s. The film was to lay a seemingly solid marriage out on the figurative slab. Like a pathologist peeling back waxy layers of skin, Kubrick would coldly scrutinise what festered beneath.

Cruise was all in. And he had a suggestion of his own. He wondered if Kubrick might consider casting his real-life spouse, Nicole Kidman, as the wife. Two decades on, this unlikely teaming-up of hermit director, cocksure actor and screen siren can be considered one of Hollywood’s most fascinating anomalies. How on earth did this movie ever come to exist?

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Eyes Wide Shut would cast a long shadow. It added to the background noise as Cruise’s public image underwent a post-Kidman meltdown. In 2005, he went on Oprah Winfrey and proclaimed his love of Katie Holmes. He did so in the traditional fashion of bouncing on a couch and baying like a labrador. The maniacal side he had first hinted at when going through the grinder with Kubrick had blossomed into something awe-inducing and frightening.

It’s impossible to watch Eyes Wide Shut today without all of that – Kubrick’s coronary, the Hollywood divorce, the couch-bouncing – playing on a continuous loop in your head. The effect is to amp up the already lurid weirdness. It is a deeply dissonant film. Even for Kubrick, certainly for Kidman and Cruise. But it’s also unflinching in its insights into sexuality and brusque about matters of the heart – and other body parts – to a degree unthinkable in mainstream entertainment today. Even in 1999, it felt slightly like something from another era. Eyes Wide Shut harked back to the chilliness and stylised nihilism of Seventies cinema.

On top of all that, it claims the Blue Riband for most famous on-screen orgy in Hollywood history. In the unlikely event of Kubrick and his stars ever being forgotten, it will reign in perpetuity as the group sex fandango to rule them all. Say “screen orgy” and what most people think of is Cruise gawping in pervy incredulity as revellers in Venetian masks get jiggy with it (and with each other).

The movie was a boundary-breaker long before its release. It holds the record for longest ever continuous film shoot. The 400 days Kubrick required his cast and crew to toil at Pinewood Studios was laborious even by his painstaking standards. And it played havoc with Cruise, forced to push back Mission: Impossible 2 again and again. As an entire production sat on its hands and waited on the actor in America, Kubrick rubbed his chin and tinkered.

Eye’s Wide Shut had been a lifeline obsession for the director. Its origins stretched back to the earliest years of his career. As a hotshot younger photographer in New York, he’d been spellbound by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”). He felt it confronted one of the last taboos in society: how to deal with “forbidden” desire within a marriage?

“The book opposes the real adventures of a husband and the fantasy adventures of his wife,” Kubrick commented. “[It] asks the question: is there a serious difference between dreaming a sexual adventure, and actually having one?”

Kubrick had made several previous attempts to adapt Traumnovelle . In 1973, he had the idea of changing the setting from turn of the century Vienna to contemporary Dublin. His plan was to cast Woody Allen in the Cruise role of happily married husband sexually unmoored when his wife confesses her secret desires. Somewhere along the way he concluded, moreover, that the time-frame should be changed from Schnitzler’s Mardi Gras to Christmas – giving us the least seasonal Yuletide movie ever.

Steve Martin was also considered by Kubrick after the director had decided the adaptation should be set in New York. By the early Nineties he was eyeing A-list Mr and Mrs Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger as his emotionally diseased power-couple. And then Cruise’s name came up.

It was suggested not by Kubrick but by his producer at Warner Brothers, Terry Semel. The director wanted Warner to stump up a $65m budget for Eyes Wide Shot. Kubrick refused to film outside the UK and much of the production costs would go towards recreating Manhattan in England. Semel was amenable – but only with a knock-out star in the Dr Harford role. Who was more knock-out than the magnetic lead from Top Gun and Mission: Impossible ?

Kubrick wasn’t sure. The last big name he’d worked with had been Jack Nicholson on The Shining in 1980. The film was eventually hailed a masterpiece. But the shoot had been hell. Kubrick had been particularly unappreciative of Nicholson’s tendency to speak his mind rather than do as instructed. “Stars,” he told Semel, “have too many opinions.”

Semel persevered. And Cruise said “yes” without hesitation. Once that was settled, Kubrick was amenable to casting Kidman as Mrs Harford. “Tom and Nicole” were one of the most recognisable couples in the world. Their marriage had been subject to the traditional tabloid tittle-tattle. A real-life husband and wife portraying unravelling spouses introduced a new layer of psychosexual subtext. Kubrick loved it.

Kubrick appeared to, additionally, get a kick out of exploring fissures in Cruise and Kidman’s real marriage. He had Kidman disclose her inner-most feelings in extensive therapy sessions, the contents of which were not revealed to Cruise. And he forbade the actor from the set when Kidman was shooting her fantasy trysts with the naval officer who had awoken something in Alice.

He retained his enthusiasm through the gruelling shoot. Cruise and Kidman found it harder to stay positive. It wasn’t the intensity of the material, nor the semi-nudity required of Kidman (who’d been strict from the outset as to what she would and would not do). It was that it went on and on, seemingly without end. On one occasion, Kubrick had Cruise walk through the same door 95 times. “Hey, Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star,” he is reported to have joked. Cruise tried to laugh but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

“We shot for 10-and-a-half months but we were there for a year and a half,” Kidman later lamented. “Sometimes it as very frustrating because you were thinking, is this ever going to end?

Cruise was meanwhile coming under pressure from Paramount Pictures over Mission: Impossible 2, already put back twice for Eyes Wide Shut. More than once he’d politely taken Kubrick aside and wondered if the director might possibly have an idea when he might done. Kubrick never had a straight answer. Cruise soon had ulcers – a fact he kept from Kubrick. He didn’t want more complications.

“I didn’t want to tell Stanley,” Cruise told Time . “He panicked. I wanted this to work, but you’re playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up. You try not to kick things up, but you go through things you can’t help.”

It’s astonishing that scheduling was Cruise’s biggest issue. Kubrick made full use of the opportunity to strip away the actor’s movie star aura. Again and again through the 159 minutes, Kubrick went out of his way to paint him unflatteringly.

The fly-boy glibness central to the actor’s persona was openly ridiculed by the director. In an early scene, Harford flirts with two models at a party. Kubrick has Cruise unleash his trademark boyishness. But he frames it in such way as to make Cruise come across callow and charmless. Being chatted up by Tom Cruise, the film more or less says out loud, is the least seductive experience under the sun.

There were also winks towards unfounded rumours about Cruise’s sexuality. Navigating New York by night, Harford has a run-in with fratboys who taunt him with homophobic slurs. Kubrick used the same scene to mock Cruise’s “diminutive” 5ft 7in stature. “I got dumps bigger than you,” one of the aggressors laughs, swatting Harford aside.

“Kubrick seems to take immense delight in subverting Cruise’s virile man-of-action image – Bill is almost pathologically passive, unable to acknowledge, let alone explore, his sexuality,” went a BFI essay marking Eyes Wide Shut’ s anniversary. “He’s also cringe-inducingly bourgeois, introducing himself as a doctor to everyone he meets, as if this automatically grants him moral authority in any situation.

And yet, both Cruise and Kidman proclaimed themselves delighted with the finished movie. Kubrick was so anxious that details might leak that when he arranged a screening for them in Los Angeles the projectionist was ordered to look away from the screen.

Their director’s paranoia notwithstanding they were proud of what their hard work had yielded. Here was an avant-grade film with a message everybody could understand: you can never fully know the person next to you in bed.

“I don’t think it’s a morality tale,” said Kidman. “It’s different for every person who watches it.”

Cruise agreed. Kubrick had made a masterpiece of ambivalence. “The movie is whatever the audience takes from it,” he said. “Wherever you are in life you’re going to take away something different.”

Twenty years on, Eyes Wide Shut is an acknowledged classic. But it is also notorious – largely on account of the masked orgy. It is in every sense the centre piece, and it was the sequence with which Kubrick struggled the most. He was never a prudish director.

The 10 best sex scenes in film

But nor was he one for pressing his audiences’ noses in debauchery. As time came to shoot Eye Wide Shut ’s carnival of flesh, assistant director Brian Cook joked that they should have hired Tony Scott to help out. The subject at hand far better suited his flashy style.

Kubrick’s way of getting his head into the orgy was via the soundscapes of composer Jocelyn Pook. One of his producers had introduced him to her piece “Backward Priests”, which features Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy played in reverse. Kubrick was struck by the dark, dissonant quality.

“He looked at me right in the eyes and said ‘Let’s make sex music!’ I thought to myself, what the hell is sex music? Is it Barry White?” Pook would tell Dazed and Confused . “Stanley didn’t really care to elaborate, he just trusted me to answer the question.”

She composed 24 minutes of roiling chants and percussion, using the same back-to-front technique pioneered with “Backwards Priests”. “And God told to his apprentices,” go the lyrics (when played right way around). “I gave you a command ... to pray to the Lord for mercy, life, peace, health, salvation, the search, the leave and the forgiveness of the sins of God’s children.”

Kubrick and his crew were meanwhile immersed in softcore pornography, in particular David Duchovny’s Red Shoe Diaries. They wanted a sense of how far they should be prepared to push the material. And to settle on a line they would not cross.

The orgy was shot at Mentmore Towers, a rural estate in Buckinghamshire built by the Rothschilds (known to hold mysterious masked balls). Initially, Kubrick wanted the models participating in the sequence to simulate sex at length. They were even asked to peruse the Kama Sutra. The response that came back was that they hadn’t signed up for that level of explicitness.

So the sequence was instead reimagined as a choreographic piece suggestive of bacchanalia. As Cruises takes it all in, you can’t quite focus on what’s going on. It’s mostly dark, suggestive blurs. The imagination is left to do the heavy lifting.

Cruise and Kidman may have adored Eyes Wide Shut but critics were slower coming around to it, even after Kubrick’s sudden death at 70 made this his accidental swan song. That wasn’t unusual with the director. Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining had been greeted with bafflement. And A Clockwork Orange had sparked a full-on moral panic. The reaction to Eyes Wide Shut was somewhere between these two poles. Many simply found it distant and a bit dull (it did make back its budget nearly three times over and is Kubrick’s highest grosser).

“It’s empty of ideas which is fine,” said The Washington Post . “But it’s also empty of heat.” “This is a film about sex that isn’t sexy,” agreed Total Film. “A movie about love with a cold heart.”

Kubrick, though, was always about the slow burn. And so it is only with the decades that the true genius of Eyes Wide Shut has been revealed. Christopher Nolan, a self-confessed Kubrick acolyte, is among the many who have confessed to misunderstanding it on first viewing. Only later, older and slightly wiser, did he begin to grasp what Kubrick was reaching for.

“Watching it with fresh eyes, it plays very differently to a middle-age man than it did to a young man,” Nolan said. “There’s a very real sense in which it is the 2001 of relationship movies.”

“I was happy that he had chosen to go after something very difficult: the idea of what should and shouldn’t remain unspoken in a marriage,” agreed Steven Soderbergh. “He was trying to get at something that was emotionally ambitious in a way that most of his films aren’t.”

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What Color Eyes Does Tom Cruise Have

What Color Eyes Does Tom Cruise Have? 9 Interesting Facts Revealed

Tom Cruise, the American actor and producer, is known for his charming looks and captivating performances on the big screen. One aspect of his appearance that often catches attention is his eye color. Many fans have wondered about the exact shade of Tom Cruise’s eyes, and in this article, we will reveal the answer to that question along with nine interesting facts about his eyes. So, let’s dive in and unravel the mysteries surrounding Tom Cruise’s eyes!

1. Eye Color Revelation

Tom Cruise’s eye color is a mesmerizing shade of blue. His intense and piercing blue eyes have become one of his defining features and have undoubtedly contributed to his on-screen charisma.

2. Natural Blue

Contrary to popular belief, Tom Cruise was not born with brown eyes. His natural eye color has always been blue. However, there have been instances where he appeared to have darker eyes due to lighting or contact lenses for specific roles.

3. The Genetic Aspect

Eye color is determined by genetics, specifically the amount and type of pigments present in the iris. The blue color in Tom Cruise’s eyes is a result of the low concentration of melanin, the pigment responsible for eye color. The absence of melanin in his irises gives his eyes their striking blue hue.

4. Heterochromia Rumors

Heterochromia is a condition in which a person has two different colored eyes. Despite some rumors suggesting Tom Cruise has heterochromia, it is not true. Both of his eyes are blue, although they may appear slightly different shades at times due to lighting or other factors.

5. Eye-Catching Complement

Tom Cruise’s blue eyes are often complemented by his dark hair, making them appear even more vibrant and captivating. This contrast adds to his overall appeal and charisma.

6. Blue Eyes in Hollywood

Blue eyes have always been associated with beauty and charm in Hollywood. Many successful actors, including Paul Newman, Chris Hemsworth, and Frank Sinatra, have captivated audiences with their piercing blue gaze. Tom Cruise undoubtedly follows in their footsteps, captivating audiences with his own striking blue eyes.

7. Eye Color and Personality

According to studies on eye color and personality, individuals with blue eyes are often associated with qualities such as intelligence, confidence, and charisma. These traits seem to align perfectly with the persona that Tom Cruise portrays both on and off the screen.

8. Eye-Related Injuries

While filming action-packed scenes for his movies, Tom Cruise has encountered several accidents and injuries. However, his eyes have remained unscathed. His dedication to safety and professionalism ensures that his captivating blue eyes continue to shine brightly.

9. Tom Cruise’s Eye-Catching Stare

Throughout his career, Tom Cruise has mastered the art of the intense stare. His piercing blue eyes have the ability to draw viewers in and hold their attention, adding depth to his on-screen performances.

Now, let’s address some common questions about Tom Cruise’s eye color:

Q1. Are Tom Cruise’s eyes naturally blue?

A1. Yes, Tom Cruise’s eyes are naturally blue.

Q2. Does Tom Cruise have heterochromia?

A2. No, Tom Cruise does not have heterochromia. Both of his eyes are blue.

Q3. Are Tom Cruise’s eyes ever brown?

A3. No, Tom Cruise’s eyes have always been blue. Any instances where his eyes appeared brown were due to lighting or contact lenses for specific roles.

Q4. Are blue eyes common in Hollywood?

A4. Blue eyes have been considered a desirable trait in Hollywood, and many successful actors, including Tom Cruise, possess this eye color.

Q5. What qualities are associated with blue eyes?

A5. Intelligence, confidence, and charisma are often associated with individuals who have blue eyes.

Q6. Has Tom Cruise ever injured his eyes during filming?

A6. While Tom Cruise has suffered injuries while filming action scenes, his eyes have remained unharmed.

Q7. How does Tom Cruise’s eye color complement his overall appearance?

A7. The contrast between Tom Cruise’s blue eyes and his dark hair enhances his overall appeal and charisma.

Q8. How does Tom Cruise use his eyes to captivate audiences?

A8. Tom Cruise’s intense stare, combined with his piercing blue eyes, has the ability to draw viewers in and add depth to his on-screen performances.

Q9. What makes Tom Cruise’s eyes unique?

A9. Tom Cruise’s eyes are unique due to their mesmerizing blue color, which has become one of his defining features.

In summary, Tom Cruise’s eyes are a captivating shade of blue that adds to his overall charm and charisma. Their striking color, combined with his dark hair, has made them a defining feature of his appearance. While rumors of heterochromia persist, Tom Cruise’s eyes are indeed both blue. Their intensity and ability to captivate audiences have undoubtedly contributed to his success as one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors.

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What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut 100 Times

In 1994, Stanley Kubrick sent the screenwriter Frederic Raphael a novella about a doctor who embarks on a dark odyssey of the soul after learning that his wife has fantasized about fucking another man. The story took place in Hapsburg Vienna; Kubrick wanted to know if Raphael could adapt it into a screenplay set in contemporary New York. As Raphael later recalled in an essay for The New Yorker , he was initially skeptical. “Hadn’t many things changed since 1900,” he recalled asking Kubrick, “not least the relations between men and women?” “Think so?” Kubrick replied. “I don’t think so.” Raphael thought about it. Then he said, “Neither do I.”

The film they eventually collaborated on, Eyes Wide Shut , came out twenty years ago to mixed reviews. While some critics praised it as one of the master’s greatest works, it was perceived by some as a disappointment, an underwhelming valediction from the great director, who died a few months before its release. One of the most consistent complaints about it was that its attitude toward sex seemed badly dated. “It feels creaky, ancient, hopelessly out of touch, infatuated with the hot taboos of his youth and unable to connect with that twisty thing contemporary sexuality has become,” wrote Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post . Rod Dreher of the New York Post quipped that it seemed to have been made by “someone who hadn’t left the house in 30 years.” Relations between men and women, in other words, had in fact changed a lot.

But had they really? I’ve watched the movie close to a hundred times in the last two years and I’m here to tell you that it was timely then, it’s timely now, and as sad as it is to say this about the world, it may well be timely forever.

My Eyes Wide Shut addiction first took hold in the spring of 2016. I was working on a novel and rarely left my apartment. The book that I was writing was a sort of fairytale, and so was the film. With its dreamy music and strangely mannered dialogue, its Christmas lights twinkling in scene after scene, it would fast track me into a trancelike state of creativity, detaching me from the real world and its mundane concerns.

What critics saw as dated, I saw as timeless. Though it technically takes place in 1990s New York, the film keeps one boot planted firmly in the fin de siècle world of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. The opening credits are set to a waltz; the gentleman who hits on Nicole Kidman’s character in the following scene is an elegant Hungarian; the film’s iconic centerpiece , a masked ritual that turns into an orgy, seems like the sort of affair that might have titillated Gustav Klimt. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s character, the amazingly naïve Dr. Bill Harford. Early on, when his wife suggests that his patients are horny for him, he assures her that women “don’t think like that” — as if he would know better than her. She falls to her knees laughing, then reveals that she was once so taken with a hot sailor that she fantasized about giving up their marriage (and even their daughter) for a single night with the guy.

It’s this confession that serves as the movie’s inciting incident, sending the shocked doctor reeling out of the apartment, out into the wild New York night. And to critics, that registered as bizarrely unrealistic . It was the ’90s after all — the decade of Wild Things and Cruel Intentions , of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Trammel asking Michael Douglas’s Nick Curran, “Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick? It’s nice.” The President was getting head in the Oval Office. Could any man really be as innocent as Dr. Harford?

In the fall of 2017, a month or so after the world learned that an ogre in a tuxedo had been preying on Hollywood’s women for decades and getting away with it , I resumed my daily viewings. By then, #MeToo was in full swing, and a lot of men had been named. Like other women I know, I was overwhelmed, not by the fact that there were so many bad men out there — that was to be expected. It was the “him too?” of it all — the fact that so many of the men I knew were so shocked by the revelations.

I knew that Dr. Harford would be shocked, too. Here was a man so oblivious to his own wife’s sexual desires that he couldn’t abide the thought of her merely fantasizing about someone else. He’s totally clueless about what it’s like to be a woman, and when his wife tries to school him, he runs away in fear. Dr. Harford’s ignorance of his wife’s desires and the guys I knew who couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around the avalanche of stories of abuse struck me as two sides of the same coin. Both attitudes stemmed from an inability to understand the interior life of women and a refusal to acknowledge that we might be experiencing sexual thoughts and feelings so foreign to their own. And so when guys told me that they couldn’t believe the stories that were coming out about the powerful men who were being named, I heard them saying that they had chosen to be clueless, too. Was it because they were afraid of what might happen if they’d kept their eyes wide open? Afraid they’d have to be friends with different people, look up to different men, maybe even challenge those in power over them, lest they accept their complicity in a structure they knew to be abusive?

Complicity is what Harford seeks: He’s desperate to be on the inside. At the height of the film, he infiltrates a secret society where powerful men in masks and robes are having ritualistic sex with subservient naked women. Who are these women, and why are they there? They have supermodel bodies, and we can infer that they’ve been hired to do a job. But that’s about all we know. At one point, Harford asks one of them to remove her mask; she refuses, and begs him to leave the party, warning him that if he stays, it could cost him his life. A moment later, he’s exposed as an intruder, and a sort of tribunal is convened to decide what to do with him. As his fate hangs in the balance, the woman he met earlier intervenes, crying out, “Take me instead!”

Later, her body turns up in the morgue. Dr. Harford suspects that she was murdered as punishment for trying to help him, but he doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he allows himself to be lulled into a state of complacency by one of the men who was at the party, a master-of-the-universe type played by Sydney Pollack. Pollack reads Dr. Harford perfectly, accusing him of “jerking himself off” to the thought of the woman sacrificing her life for his. The truth, he insists, isn’t nearly so romantic. “She was a junkie! She OD’d!” As Pollack circles the room, tapping a pool cue in a faint echo of the ritual at the masked ball, he urges the doctor to let it go. The men at the party were “not just ordinary people,” he warns. “If I told you their names […] I don’t think you’d sleep so well.” Harford doesn’t press him for those names or any other details. He doesn’t want to know. Although Harford spent the day leading up to this conversation retracing his steps, desperate for answers, Pollock easily convinces him to give up and go home. That’s how power triumphs — Pollack offers the smallest crumbs of an explanation, drawing him into the conspiracy while offering no real answers, and Harford accepts the bargain.

If all this felt dated back in 1999, maybe that’s because we weren’t quite as savvy as we thought. We’d spent the past year obsessing over the semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, but we’d somehow missed the point of the whole dark saga. We thought it was a story about sex, but it was really about power — about the abuse of it, and our complicity in that abuse. The world’s most powerful man walked away from a scandal unscathed while his intern’s life was torn apart and we shrugged at her ordeal. We were all Dr. Harford. And by that light, Eyes Wide Shut doesn’t seem quaint; it seems prescient.

At the very end of the film, Dr. Harford comes home to find the mask he’d worn at the party resting on his pillow beside his sleeping wife. He breaks down in tears and promises to tell her everything — but the confession, which we never hear, doesn’t seem to bring them happiness. In the next and last scene, Nicole Kidman’s character suggests that the moral of the story is that they should be grateful for what they have. And what do they have? A domestic partnership built on her husband’s ignorance of her desires. She, too, is choosing complacency. Her marriage depends on it. And that’s Kubrick’s point. As long as men choose ignorance, and women accept it, the relations between them will never change. Kubrick, the most controlling and precise of directors, knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t make a naïve film — he made a film about naïvete, and the toll it takes on the world.

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Research Was Key When It Came To Creating Eyes Wide Shut's Most Famous Scene

There was a fragile consensus about "Eyes Wide Shut" when it debuted back in 1999: that it was a bit of a letdown. Audiences had expected to see married co-stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play out erotic fantasies and were disappointed to experience Stanley Kubrick's oneiric odyssey instead. But while the effect of that disappointment still lingers, as with all Kubrick films, time has seen "Eyes Wide Shut" gain more respect as a multi-layered exploration of sexual desire and naivety.

The film defies precise definition with its mix of dark humor, drama, and erotic imagery. It's based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella "Traumnovelle" ("Dream Story"), shifting the events of the book from early 20th-century Vienna to late-'90s New York City. Tom Cruise plays Dr. Bill Harford whose wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), sends him reeling into the New York night after revealing she'd considered having an affair. The resulting narrative subverts Cruise's established reputation as a handsome leading man by depicting him bumbling around Kubrick's fabricated New York (built on sound stages at England's Pinewood Studios), driven by psychosexual urges that never quite propel him to actually cheat on his wife — even when he stumbles upon an orgy.

The centerpiece of "Eyes Wide Shut," the orgy scene has become cultural shorthand for ominous secret societies and their supposed depraved activities. Dr. Bill infiltrates a ritual attended by a cabal of what's suggested to be New York's elite, all obscured by masks from Italy's Commedia dell'arte tradition. A host of young women are on-hand and the resulting orgy is less erotic than it is unsettling, ultimately culminating in a young woman sacrificing her life to protect Dr. Bill. And as you might expect with Kubrick, the whole thing took months of rehearsal and improvisation to bring to fruition.

Kubrick's research project

Infamous for his perfectionist approach , Stanley Kubrick took his exhausting methods to a new extreme with "Eyes Wide Shut," at one point allegedly making Tom Cruise perform 95 takes of walking through a doorway. But according to Vulture's oral history  (published in 2019), the orgy scene was one of the most difficult scenes (if not the most difficult).

Choreographer Yolande Snaith worked with a team of women that had been hand-picked by longtime Kubrick assistant and actor Leon Vitali, who claimed the women were required to be, "Totally natural. No Botox, no breast enhancements." But even then, Kubrick seemed unsure of what he wanted from the choreography. Snaith said the director at least seemed settled on the idea of something "surreal and suggestive" rather than outright pornographic, but also treated months of rehearsals as "a sort of research period," providing feedback on Snaith's ideas. The process became so protracted, that, as Vitali explained:

"We were taking so long that sometimes the leases ran out on where we could rehearse. I was having trouble holding on to some of the girls I'd found because they had other obligations and jobs. And then we had to find some more because we realized we didn't have enough. It was all very Stanley."

"All very Stanley" sounds about right. The auteur famously often spent years researching and planning his films, only to show up on set and, as he put it , yield to the "reality of the final moment." That's why he would demand an ungodly number of retakes, pushing actors until something spontaneous occurred and defined the scene. In the case of "Eyes Wide Shut," the orgy scene was one protracted effort to find the "reality of the final moment," despite the voluminous research that went into it.

Years of research didn't help

Even going into planning the crucial scene, Stanley Kubrick seemed, at least to his crew, somewhat unsure. As first assistant director Brian Cook remembered it , he implored the filmmaker to bring in outside directors to help:

"I used to say to Stanley, 'We should get Adrian Lyne or Tony Scott to come and shoot this stuff for us. They know how to do this, Stanley. You don't!' [...] Stanley wasn't keen on doing it in many ways. It wasn't his stuff, to be honest with you."

According to Cook, the team had "years and years of research" to rely on but that didn't necessarily help bring the scene to fruition in a timely manner. Kubrick had sought advice from G. Legman, a friend of assistant Anthony Frewin, who provided information on secret societies and "sexual mores in Vienna at the time of Schnitzler." That took the form of illustrations depicting 19th century "secret-society rituals and the Black Mass." Meanwhile, artist Félicien Rops lent his expertise on "weird erotica" to the film.

All of this provided a solid foundation on which to construct Kubrick's secret society ritual/orgy. But it didn't help speed up the already sluggish production, with Cook recalling how the orgy scene "kept getting pushed back and back and back in the shoot." Aside from Kubrick applying his usual tactic of trying things multiple ways before yielding to the "reality of the final moment," Cook maintained that erotica simply "wasn't his stuff." Add to that the pressures of finding the right venue in which to film, and the orgy amounted to what might have been the trickiest part of an extremely complex shoot, even by Kubrick's standards.

'The sexual relations film'

The final orgy scene betrays none of these behind-the-scenes struggles. Its striking shots meld dark humor (Dr. Bill arrives in a yellow cab, while the attendees' black limos are parked proudly outside) with genuinely disturbing moments (the Commedia dell'arte-inspired masks are quietly horrific), all the while emphasizing just how out of his depth Dr. Bill is. Sure, Warner Bros. messed it up with their digitally-added bodies  to obtain an 'R' rating , but the point stands.

The film revels in subversiveness throughout, whether it's subverting the Christmas setting with vivid depictions of sexuality, or subverting Tom Cruise's reputation as a handsome leading man by basically putting Dr. Bill through one long lesson in just how naive and uninformed he is. It's funny and carnivalesque, yet soberingly serious at the same time. That's never more obvious than during the orgy, and in that sense, despite the difficulty of bringing it to fruition, the scene fulfills its purpose as a clear distillation of the film's core themes and tone.

Much of the difficulty does seem to come down to Stanley Kubrick's lack of experience with such explicitly erotic material. As screenwriter Frederic Raphael told EW  in 1999, "Like a lot of people of my generation, I think Stanley felt he missed the sexual revolution [...] It was a genre — the sexual relations film — he'd never attempted before." Having waited literally decades to adapt Schnitzler's novella, it's no wonder Kubrick was determined to spend the time getting things right, even if it was partly down to, like Dr. Bill, being a little out of his depth. It didn't culminate in the Cruise/Kidman (figurative) sex tape everyone was expecting, but it's thankfully become recognized for the fascinating, subversive exploration of jealousy, sexuality, and naivety (both Bill and Kubrick's) that it is.

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Tom Cruise rewatch: Weird at the millennium with Eyes Wide Shut and Mission: Impossible 2

In his strangest and silliest roles, the star at his apex explored the outer limits of his image.

Celebrating today's release of Top Gun: Maverick , our writers return to their favorite Tom Cruise movies, in appreciation of an on-screen persona that's evolved over decades.

Something was seriously wrong with Tom Cruise's face. That's either the main plot or one key visual idea in so many Cruise movies from the middle of his career. Vanilla Sky and Valkyrie left him mutilated, minus one eye or plus a few scars. Minority Report body-morphed jowls onto his cheekbones, after an eye transplant. Tropic Thunder swamped him in prosthetic paunch. Did this very famous man want to hide in plain sight — or was he defacing himself as an act of self-reclamation? Would the world still love him if he wasn't beautiful anymore? Or would he wind up wandering, alone, the one guy at the orgy not getting any?

Eyes Wide Shut came out in July 1999. Mission: Impossible 2 landed one summer later. They are not similar movies in any obvious way. One is Stanley Kubrick 's last, least explicable movie, a dreamlike erotic thriller about marital maintenance. The other is Cruise's loopiest Mission , a longhair fantasia about why viruses are great for stock options. I love both movies, but neither was adored upon release. Cruise was at his pinnacle as an audience draw, so Eyes was Kubrick's highest grossing movie and M:I 2 topped the 2000 box office. Don't interpret those numbers as positive feedback, though. Casual moviegoers were still going to the theater on autopilot, seeing "the new Tom Cruise movie" without knowing what they were in for. I recall general bafflement at Eyes , and a slow-boil resentment at M:I 2 's rap-rock silliness.

Eyes Wide Shut 's reputation has improved considerably; M:I 2 is so generally loathed that its defenders (hello!) have gotten louder. And the two films rhyme. In Eyes , Cruise plays Bill Harford, a doctor living well in Manhattan. One night, a casual stoned chat with his awesome wife (Kidman) takes a strange turn. He tells her he never worries about her cheating; she tells him maybe he should. The mere possibility of infidelity sends him on a whole-movie spiral, mulling sexy temptation to get back at his wife for having any urges whatsoever. M:I 2 has its own zigzag-of-jealousy plot, imported directly from Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious with zero shame. When superspy Ethan Hunt meets superthief Nyah Nordhoff-Hall ( Thandiwe Newton ), they fall for each other mid-car chase. But Ethan's IMF superiors have a mission for Nyah. They need her to go undercover with a former boyfriend, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), a rogue agent with global-plague plans.

Bill and Ethan are both romantically tormented, cut off from their loves by physical distance and the possibility of another man. Credit this as a vague comparison — Bill does not rescue Alice from a murderous motorcycle ex, Ethan does not go undercover in any spite orgies — except for the fact that both films also have their own strange strategies for approaching Cruise's famous face.

Watching Eyes Wide Shut , it's clear that Kubrick was sparking more to Kidman as a pure performer, whose scenes combust with crackling undercurrents of domestic ennui, seductiveness, and genuine love. Cruise feels more stunt-cast, like Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon : a famous handsome star who serves as the audience surrogate. He's the watcher, never the most interesting person in the room, variously fascinated and appalled by the strangeness of his odyssey. In the movie's most famous and misunderstood scene, he wanders the halls of an aristocratic sex party, full of occult gyrations and full-frontal decadence. Hidden behind a mask and a cowl, he could be just anyone. When costumed courtiers demand that he reveal himself and remove his clothes, it's an upside-down vision of celebrity: Bill didn't want to be the center of attention. Now everyone won't stop looking at him.

Masks are also a key part of M:I 2 . The franchise loves its surprise identities, a latex face torn off to reveal whoever was really someone else. But John Woo 's entry in the series has the least intricate plot, and seems vividly uninterested in the espionage part of Ethan Hunt's job. This film was the real invention of Daredevil Maniac Tom Cruise, the very famous actor who is actually dangling off a cliff in Utah in the pointless-for-any-obvious-plot-reason mountain-climbing prologue. The actor had just spent half a decade playing somewhat regular humans in Jerry Maguire , Eyes Wide Shut , and Magnolia . So I think this second Mission was meant as a soft comeback, or maybe just an expression of pent-up action-guy frustration: Damn it, I just wanna be freaking awesome . Now Ethan Hunt knows martial arts, and drives a mean motorcycle, and can bungee-jump off a helicopter through an entire skyscraper.

It's ridiculous, but there's an intriguing twist thrown in: M:I 2 is the one Mission that keeps turning the signature mask gag back on its hero. The first time we see Cruise, he's actually Ambrose pretending to be Ethan. "He doubled you, what — two or three times?" asks the IMF Commander (Anthony Hopkins). An interesting window into IMF procedure here: When their top guy is unavailable, they slap an Ethan face onto a lesser agent and hope for the best. This is a quietly mind-boggling revelation, the kind of thing that drives vast fan theories in other franchises. (Do different movies feature different Ethans? Is that why he seems so dour in Ghost Protocol ?) And M:I 2 honors Woo's fascination with parallel good-and-evil identities. Ambrose pretends to be Ethan again later, fooling Nyah away from her moonlight escape. Toward the end of the movie, Ambrose captures Ethan and fires nine or ten bullets into his enemy's body. Of course, it's not Ethan, but the upside-mood lingers.

Malicious Neck-Snapping Cruise, Bad Boyfriend Cruise, Simpering Tortured Dead Cruise: You feel the actor exploring the outer range of his comfort zone, doing all the stuff his characters never really can do. Call these very different movies a linked set of nightmares. M:I 2 turns Cruise into a face anyone can wear. Eyes Wide Shut takes that face away entirely, reducing him to impotence and terror. Was that dwindling too much for Cruise to bear? The future was full of Mission s, hyperbolizing Cruise into the stratospheric "living manifestation of destiny." Whereas who knows with the Harfords, but some marriages just don't last.

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How Tom Cruise Really Felt When He Joined Nicole Kidman In Eyes Wide Shut

It's one thing to be married to a fellow actor and shoot a movie together, but imagine working together for over a year on what was not only a legendary director's last film, but also a movie that explored the intricacies of keeping together a mundane marriage while withstanding outside temptation. This is what Tom Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman went through while shooting Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."

Released in 1999, "Eyes Wide Shut" centers around Dr. William "Bill" Harford (Cruise) and his wife Alice (Kidman), a Manhattan-based married couple who have gotten so used to the routines of domestic life that the only way sexuality plays a role anymore is through the temptations of strangers and mystery. Things start to unravel as William finds himself seeking a new kind of pleasure as he ventures outside the city to a mansion hosting a masked party at which an underground sexual ritual is taking place.

While "Eyes Wide Shut" is notable for its unique storytelling and blatant erotica, its probably best known as Stanley Kubrick's last film, as the director died before the movie was released. It's also known as one of the most "exhausting" shoots for any cast and crew (via  Vanity Fair ). According to Vanity Fair, when "Eyes Wide Shut" began shooting in the fall of 1996, Cruise and Kidman "fully expected to return to Hollywood by spring." However, filming didn't finish until 1998. Cruise and Kidman wound up spending 15 months working on "Eyes Wide Shut," which earned the Guinness World Record for "the longest continual film shoot."

So, how did Cruise feel when Kidman joined the cast of the historic film?

Brutal honesty

Originally aiming to cast Steve Martin in the lead role in 1980, 15 years later,  Stanley Kubrick eventually landed on casting Tom Cruise, at the suggestion of his producer Terry Semel. According to the Independent , Cruise flew to England to meet Kubrick in 1995, and after some basic conversation about "vintage cameras, planes, the New York Yankees," the filmmaker asked Cruise to star in "Eyes Wide Shut." After accepting, Cruise suggested his real life wife at the time play his on-screen wife as well. Kubrick apparently loved the idea, as it "introduced a new layer of psychosexual subtext" to the movie.

The couple went through a grueling shoot with Kubrick, whose unique filmmaking methods began affecting Cruise and Nicole Kidman's marriage. Kubrick decided he would psychoanalyze his married lead actors. Per Vanity Fair , Kubrick pushed Cruise and Kidman into admitting what they feared most about marriage during "conversations that the three vowed to keep secret." According to Kidman, these conversations left her then-husband subjected to "things that he didn't want to hear," and the discussions were "brutally honest at times." She also told Vanity Fair that while it was exciting that the lines of reality and fiction blurred, it was also dangerous. Cruise agreed: "I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up."

'Pluses and minuses' to filming a movie with your real-life spouse

In a 1999 press conference , Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were asked if they felt safe playing a married couple on screen, or if they would have felt better working alongside someone else. Cruise responded that he was "glad she played [the role in 'Eyes Wide Shut'] because of her talent." He elaborated, "As an actress, I was really excited, because she's such a great actress and artist and to share that experience together is something very special and I think that we had a lot to offer because we are married." Cruise also admitted that the entire experience "had its pluses and minuses."

While Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise would eventually divorce  in 2001 after 11 years of marriage — and only two years after the release of "Eyes Wide Shut" — they are reportedly open to a reunion as friends or co-workers as of early 2021 (via OK! Magazine ). Plus, in 2017, Kidman told Deadline that she would have continued working with Kubrick for years on end, as she really enjoyed the experience. 

"I could have stayed with Stanley [Kubrick] for five years. Never come back," she said. "I look back at that and go, 'Thank God I had this slightly zen approach to things.' Because I was married and I had my kids there. It wasn't like I was rushing to get finished, to get somewhere else. I was there, with Stanley, and I didn't care. Whatever." Kidman added, "He had a great wit and he was a philosopher, but he was never preachy. It was always coming from a place of curiosity and questioning and exploration."

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20 Years Ago Stanley Kubrick Tormented Tom Cruise to Create a Strange Classic

They don't make 'em like this anymore... why.

1999 was a big year for movies, something we discuss elsewhere on this site as well. But we wanted to take particular note of the Independent's recent write up of Stanley Kubrick's final film . 

It's hard to turn the cultural clock back to the late 1990s. There was no streaming yet. As writer Ed Power reminds us, Tom Cruise had yet to jump on Oprah's couch and none of us had seen Going Clear . Stanley Kubrick wasn't just a legend of cinema, he was a working director still making movies. 

But as different as 1999 was from 2019, this situation seems like it would be weird at any time:

Idiosyncratic/hermit/creative genius filmmaker pairs with Hollywood's most bankable star and his real-life wife for a movie whose centerpiece is a creepy masked orgy's effects on a marriage.

"the  2001  of relationship movies" - Christopher Nolan

Oh, and it was released on July 16. Like some kind of summer blockbuster. 

We have questions!

How Did Eyes Wide Shut Happen?

Kubrick had "long been obsessed" with the source, 'Traumnovelle' or 'Dream Story' which was a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler. The plot is much the same, though it takes place in Vienna in the 20th century. It's a story about adultery or the desire to commit adultery. Having the movie star a Hollywood power-couple at the peak of the tabloid fame was a stroke of pure genius. Or maybe luck. 

Or maybe both... 

Tom Cruise signed on to work with Kubrick instantly, being a fan of Kubrick's work. Having his wife Nicole Kidman play his wife in the movie was Cruise's idea. Who were Kubrick's first picks for the leading role? 

Well in 1973 he'd wanted Woody Allen for the part. You know, Woody Allen and Tom Cruise are always up for the same roles. 

There was also the consideration of Steve Martin and later Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Okay, now it's starting to feel familiar to the movie we got.

With Cruise and Kidman in, the budget could balloon and Kubrick could deliver. 

It Took a Long Time to Make

"Hey Tom, stick with me, I'll make you a star."

Cruise and Kidman gave Kubrick the ability to be as particular as he likes to be. He recreated Manhattan in the UK because he refused to travel to shoot anywhere else. He was extremely afraid to fly, and this limited the location options for many of his movies. 

More from Power's Independent post: 

"The movie was a boundary-breaker long before its release. It holds the record for longest ever continuous film shoot. The 400 days Kubrick required his cast and crew to toil at Pinewood Studios was laborious even by his painstaking standards."

Cruise was stressed because Mission Impossible 2 was waiting on him. Kubrick, apparently, never gave anyone much of an idea of how much longer he'd need to finish the movie. Another indicator of how much things have changed in Hollywood: a major franchise sequel sat and waited while an auteur worked out every last detail on a movie about a married couple's sex life. 

Yeah, that wouldn't happen in 2019. 

There are reports that Kubrick was up to his usual tormenting of stars to get the best out of them. Stories suggest he mined Kidman for information about her deeper psychology and found as many ways as possible to minimize Cruise through his character.  

Cruise developed ulcers during the seemingly endless shoot but told no-one for fear it might affect the process. The set was also on constant lockdown and Kubrick worked with a small tight crew. Allegedly Kubrick made Cruise walk through a door for 95 takes joking to Cruise, "Hey Tom, stick with me, I'll make you a star."

Paul Thomas Anderson made it to the set to visit with Tom Cruise (and perhaps get him onboard for Magnolia ) and he commented on how few people Kubrick worked with to which Kubrick replied : "How many do you need?"

The movie is long considering it's based on something so short. It covers one night, and at the end [Spoiler Alert] not much has fundamentally changed. Of course, you could also say "everything has changed" on some deeper level for this couple. 

The Eyes Wide Shut Orgy Scene

Vulture did an oral history of the famous Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene , that gets insights from the many people working on the crew that helped create it. As with all things, Kubrick had a lot of specifics in mind. One story says when he noticed a single lightbulb was out somewhere on set he insisted everyone wait until it was replaced. The body types of the nude figures had to fit certain parameters (nothing surgically altered), and they had to find a way to shoot it so it was 'lyrical' and 'ballet or yoga-like'. 

There was also some research involving watching Red Shoe Diaries .

The Eyes Wide Shut party scene is one of the most enduring elements of the movie, but it's worth thinking back on the fact that a movie with this massively strange orgy at its center was, again, a major mid-summer release with Hollywood's top stars. 

1999 was different. 

The Eyes Wide Shut Meaning

This is certainly one of those movies that critics and fans will reexamine and discuss often, with no clearly obvious meaning. We will all likely continue to do some Eyes Wide Shut analysis every once in a while. There has certainly been plenty written  on theories, proposing to be ' Eyes Wide Shut explained'. 

The reality is the movie may hold different meanings for different people, and even more so at different times in their lives. That's part of what Christopher Nolan thinks, "Watching it with fresh eyes, it plays very differently to a middle-age man than it did to a young man...it is the  2001 of relationship movies."

On a surface level, it could be about a bourgeoisie couple having a sort of interlude with the world of the super-elite, while also providing commentary on their dynamic with the lower class. Ideas of class and status run throughout the entire movie. Perhaps since it is about a marriage and "ownership" of a spouse and their sexuality, there are other depths to mine meaning-wise. 

We can save the Marxist reading of Eyes Wide Shut for another day. Or maybe another website. 

The point remains that Kubrick's movies all take big swings at some big ideas. The dynamics at the core of his plots are between humanity and God, society and base nature, heaven and hell... things get DEEP. Which is one reason film-goers and filmmakers alike keep coming back to his work. 

Maybe what Eyes Wide Shut means is less critical to understand right now than why we don't see Eyes Wide Shut  movies anymore. It wasn't that long ago that movies were about ideas like this, without providing readily available answers, and they could still make money. It was Kubrick's last film, and his most successful (Cruise and Kidman helped...) 

So What Happened?

Why don't these kinds of probing odd movies get made on the largest scale anymore? Did the audience for them dry up? Did the existence of the streaming market and a seemingly infinite ocean of 'content' create too much competition? 

Did creatives like Kubrick just cease to exist? Did stars like Cruise stop trying to make those kinds of movies because they didn't want to get ulcers?

There are honestly lots of ways to answer these questions. There are also, to be fair, plenty of movies and shows that do probe where creatives like Kubrick wanted to. They just don't get center stage as often. 

We're interested in your takes on it. 

Source: The Independant

Is the World Ready for a Fully AI-based Complete Editing Suite?

A look at ltx studio and the myriad of ai-based editing tools and features..

While we continue to report on how AI models like OpenAI’s Sora, Luma’s Dream Machine, and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha are promising (or threatening) a complete generative AI video revolution, we do want to take the time to highlight some new AI products which are using AI as a base and for features to explore how this technology might continue to shape the industry as well.

Today let’s take a quick look at LTX Studio, which does make use of generative AI video, but is a more holistic AI-based editing suite that uses AI to help with storyboarding, editing, and pretty much all types of video production.

LTX Studio AI-Based Editing Suite

As you can see in the video above (plus in others below), LTX Studio promises to allow editors to control every aspect of your videos using AI. From ideation to final edits, LTX Studio presents itself as one holistic platform for all things video. It’s only available right now for Beta access, but reviews are starting to come in and the whole system does appear to be quite powerful and promising.

It’s also a clear sign of where the industry is heading. We’ve seen AI creep into Adobe products and NLEs like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve already have text-based editing features with plenty more AI tools to undoubtedly come soon.

This LTX Studio does look to be one of the more advanced, holistic options so far though that does offer plenty of tools and features for pre-production in general, making it appealing to those looking to utilize AI tools and features early—and often—throughout their filmmaking process.

Check out these further demos below. And we’ll keep you in the loop as more details about this powerful new platform come out.

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Eyes Wide Shut, 20 years on: how does Stanley Kubrick’s last testament stand up?

Of all Stanley Kubrick’s films, his swansong remains the most divisive. After a production shrouded in secrecy, the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut opened to mixed reviews. Was Kubrick ahead of the times, or behind them?

As 1999 approached, what little was known about Eyes Wide Shut was almost indecently tantalising. Here was Stanley Kubrick, for many the world’s greatest living filmmaker, returning with his first finished project in 12 years – a sexually provocative adult drama, utterly shrouded in secrecy, starring pre-eminent Hollywood power couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick’s sudden death in March 1999, six days after delivering his final cut to Warner Bros, only served to intensify anticipation for what would now, alas, be the master’s final gift to cinema.

But while the pre-release marketing campaign, which Warner Bros claimed was executed in accordance with Kubrick’s wishes, teased a steamy, erotic thriller, the final film was a complex, confounding, intimate epic. Relocating the events of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 psychosexual novella, Dream Story, from early 20th-century Vienna to eve-of-the-millennium Manhattan, it depicts an extraordinary chapter in the life of Dr Bill Harford (Cruise), who embarks on a dreamlike nocturnal odyssey after his wife, Alice (Kidman), confesses, while intoxicated, to having had intense fantasies about another man. Bill’s wanderings offer him an enticing glimpse of a murky, sexual underworld, and ultimately lead him to a ritualistic masked orgy in an opulent mansion. But despite encountering a wealth of potential partners, Bill finds his opportunities to taste forbidden fruit thwarted at every turn.

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Come to the film expecting a salacious romp, then, and you may find it to be a profoundly frustrating viewing experience, all foreplay and no penetration. Indeed, some early detractors were annoyed to have been so flagrantly misled by the titillating trailer. “Eyes Wide Shut turns out to be the dirtiest movie of 1958,” quipped the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter.

But while it’s often talked of as a critical flop, the film had its fair share of early champions. Roger Ebert called it a “mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy”, Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune proclaimed it a “masterpiece”, and, perhaps predictably, it was widely praised by French cinephile journalists. It was also far from a commercial disaster, ultimately grossing over $162m worldwide: underwhelming for a Tom Cruise star vehicle, but really rather respectable for a near-three-hour existential art film about sexual dysfunction.

Come to terms with the lack of thrusting and you’ll discover a film of myriad other perverse pleasures. It’s more wryly amusing than many of its detractors would have you believe – though your mileage may vary depending on how tickled you are by the notion of one of Hollywood’s most handsome movie stars roaming the streets of America’s most densely populated city with the express purpose of cheating on his wife, and still somehow failing to get laid.

Kubrick seems to take immense delight in subverting Cruise’s virile man-of-action image – Bill is almost pathologically passive, unable to acknowledge, let alone explore, his sexuality. He’s also cringe-inducingly bourgeois, introducing himself as a doctor to everyone he meets, as if this automatically grants him moral authority in any situation. And the film is punctuated by moments of unexpected absurdity: a grieving daughter confesses her undying love for Bill, despite barely knowing him; the orgy sequence, entrancingly sinister at first, collapses into florid melodrama as soon as the menacing masked figures begin to speak. Appearing on the Charlie Rose show in 2000, Steve Martin revealed that Kubrick approached him for the lead role in a Dream Story adaptation back in 1980, and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Eyes Wide Shut as a full-blown sex farce.

But that’s not to suggest a lack of serious intent on Kubrick’s part. The film excels as an unflinching examination of a long-term relationship unravelling at the seams as a result of mutual suppressed desire and emotional dishonesty. Pivotal scenes in which Alice confesses her contempt for Bill and her interest in other men are given an extra jolt of authenticity by the fact that the actors were a married couple. These sequences are even more compellingly uncomfortable today, now that we know that Cruise abruptly filed for divorce from Kidman in 2001. In a 2014 Vanity Fair article, Amy Nicholson explains: “Kubrick decided to find his story through psychoanalyzing his stars, prodding Cruise and Kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret.”

There’s also a sense of art mirroring reality in the way that Bill’s sexuality is repeatedly called into question – explicitly in one scene by a group of homophobic frat boys, implicitly by the character’s general reticence around women. Persistent rumours about Cruise’s orientation are an integral part of the star’s biography, and Kubrick seems keen for viewers to keep these in mind throughout Eyes Wide Shut.

But while this blurring of fiction and reality is enthralling to behold in the finished film, it would seem that the production process, and the media circus surrounding it, was personally damaging to Cruise in particular. Ahead of the film’s release, US magazine Star alleged that Kubrick hired sex therapists for the couple after they proved unable to act amorously with one another. This came hot on the heels of an Express article suggesting that their marriage was a business arrangement, perhaps conceived to cover up their homosexuality. In both cases, the pair successfully sued, but Cruise has never since managed to quash intense speculation about his private life.

Eyes Wide Shut ultimately broke the star’s uninterrupted run of major box office hits since 1992’s A Few Good Men. To add insult to injury, Cruise was singled out by some early critics as the film’s weak link, his all-too-convincing performance as a haunted, repressed individual written off as merely wooden. It’s surely no coincidence that after the controversies and perceived failure of the film, the star became considerably more risk-averse in his choice of roles. Despite the widespread acclaim that he received later, in 1999, for his explosive turn as a monstrous sex guru in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, he swiftly retreated back into his comfort zone as an actor and continues to this day to mostly play wholesome, unwaveringly heterosexual heroes in bombastic action blockbusters. This might ultimately be the most lamentable aspect of Eyes Wide Shut’s legacy, as the vulnerability he displays under Kubrick’s tutelage is often thrilling to behold.

While the initial critical response was mixed rather than hostile, the tide has continued to turn in the film’s favour, with a steady stream of reappraisals positioning it as a misunderstood masterpiece. But it remains perhaps Kubrick’s most divisive major work. For me, it’s great but with a few significant shortcomings. The strange middle ground it occupies between reality and dreamscape is unquestionably a high barrier to entry. As a psychologically probing relationship drama, it often comes across as illogical and overwrought; as a surreal psychosexual thriller, it’s less transportive and transgressive than David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Dr. (2001). Where the film really soars is in its assured handling of dramatic tonal shifts, but that’s far more of a niche proposition than the high-minded visceral horror of The Shining (1980) or the trippy sci-fi spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

The film suffers a little by sticking so closely to the narrative of Schnitzler’s Dream Story. The central notion of a man being shaken to his core by the revelation of his wife’s inner sexual life makes perfect sense in a story written when psychoanalysis was a nascent practice. But it’s much harder to buy into the idea that a modern urban sophisticate like Bill would be so taken aback by Alice’s confessions. Kubrick’s decision to lift dialogue straight from the book also backfires; the final scene sees the protagonists ruminate on the film’s themes in a disappointingly heavy-handed manner, with Alice questioning whether “the reality of one night… can ever be the whole truth”, and Bill postulating that “no dream is ever just a dream”.

It’s perhaps inevitable that some of the film’s musings on sex and sexuality would have aged poorly, but the way in which a prostitute’s HIV diagnosis is used as a cheap plot twist is inexcusably crass. The inference here seems to be that Bill has dodged a metaphorical bullet by not sleeping with the girl in question. As such, the film ends up propagating the harmful and offensive notion of HIV as a grave punishment for aberrant or immoral behaviour.

And there are occasional moments that seem uncharacteristically clumsy for a perfectionist of Kubrick’s calibre. The use of voiceover to draw an explicit connection between an orgy attendee and a girl lying dead in a morgue feels particularly hokey. It’s tempting to imagine that, had the director lived longer, he would have continued to tinker with the film after delivering his final cut, as was his habit, and that such rough edges would have been smoothed out. But this question of authorship holds some admirers back from fully embracing the film as it stands. In an MSN chat with fans in 2001, David Lynch declared: “I really love Eyes Wide Shut. I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died.” And in a 2017 interview on MTV ’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Christopher Nolan explained: “I started looking at the reality of how the film was finished – he died before the scoring sessions were complete. So, even though I think the studio appropriately put out the film as his version, knowing where that happens in my own process… it’s a little bit early… (the film) is an extraordinary achievement, but it is a little bit hampered by very, very small and superficial, almost technical flaws that I’m pretty sure he would have ironed out.”

And yet, as with Kubrick’s more widely adored films, Eyes Wide Shut has proven powerfully prescient, often in enjoyably unexpected ways. In its depiction of sex as a ritualistic power game presided over by the ultra wealthy, the film foreshadowed the most unlikely literary phenomenon of recent years,  E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy. Though the softcore screen adaptations, which chart the romantic adventures of Jamie Dornan’s BDSM -fixated billionaire and Dakota Johnson’s demure girl next door, are about as far from Kubrickian as you can imagine, director James Foley tips his hat to Eyes Wide Shut in Fifty Shades Darker’s most memorable set piece, a masked ball in a sprawling mansion that treads a fine line between sexy and sinister.

The film has also exerted an influence on high-society hedonism beyond the realm of fiction. In 2010, Vogue celebrated its 90th anniversary with an Eyes Wide Shut-inspired party, while, thanks to sex-positive enterprises like Killing Kittens, upscale orgies are today a relatively mainstream nightlife option in cities like London and New York.

In its ominous references to decadent elites pulling society’s strings, the film also anticipates an obsession with secret societies and conspiracy theories that has become a defining trait of 21st-century popular culture – from the shadowy religious sects at the centre of Dan Brown’s unfathomably popular Robert Langdon novels, to the grotesque farce of the Pizzagate scandal in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. Indeed, the internet is today rife with outlandish tales asserting that Eyes Wide Shut was inspired by the clandestine activity of a real-world Illuminati, and that Kubrick was murdered for attempting to expose their scandalous practices. This may not quite be how Kubrick aficionados would ideally want their idol to be remembered, but it’s testament to Eyes Wide Shut’s idiosyncratic, enigmatic brilliance that the film continues to inspire such unpredictable responses.

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After Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise's daughter, Suri Cruise drops last name as she graduates High School

S uri Cruise, the 18-year-old daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, has officially graduated from LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. However, it is a little detail on her graduation certificate that has everyone talking.

Just days after actor Brad Pitt was in the headlines when his daughters Shiloh and Vivienne dropped Pitt from their last name, reports now state that Suri has also reportedly dropped 'Cruise' from her name.

In a pamphlet obtained by Page Six, Suri was listed as "Suri Noelle", and no longer uses the surname of her 61-year-old estranged dad. According to reports, "Noelle" is Suri's middle name.

READ ALSO: Prince William, Tom Cruise, Ashton Kutcher leave internet in splits in VIRAL video dancing to Taylor Swift's 'Shake It Off' - WATCH

Suri and Tom have reportedly been estranged for years following his divorce from Katie Holmes in 2012 after six years together.

Just last week, all eyes were on the beauty, who was seen with her date, attending the school prom.

READ ALSO: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ daughter’s date with an upcoming musician

Meanwhile, Tom was also in the news for allegedly skipping Suri's graduation. He, however, did make an appearance later that day at Taylor Swift's concert, where he was seen in a rather cheery mood, dancing and having a good time with fellow B-town stars at the gig. Tom was seen taking his place in the VIP box and dancing away with actors like Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Liam Hemsworth, director Greta Gerwig and many others. The Top Gun star went viral after videos saw him bonding with Taylor's beau Travis Kelce.

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Tom Cruise Height, Weight, Age, Body Statistics

Tom Cruise is an actor and film producer from Syracuse, New York, U.S. He is known worldwide for his role as IMF agent Ethan Hunt in the action spy film series Mission: Impossible.  His first film as a producer was also Mission Impossible (1996). Since then, he has produced many films including the entire  MI film series. Tom also provided his vocals to the soundtrack of the 2012 film  Rock of Ages . Overall, he has shown an all-around performance in his field.

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV

Tom Cruise, TC

Syracuse, New York, U.S.

Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Nationality

Tom Cruise did 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades from Robert Hopkins Public School  in Ottawa, Canada. Then, he completed 6th grade from Henry Munro Middle School , part of the Carleton Board of Education.

In totality, Tom went to 15 schools in 14 years.

Actor, film producer, director, writer

• Father – Thomas Cruise Mapother III (Electrical Engineer)
• Mother – Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer) (Special Education Teacher)
• Siblings – Lee Anne Mapother (Older Sister), Marian Mapother (Sister), Cass Mapother (Sister)
• Others – Patrick Russell Cruise (Paternal Great-Great-Great-Grandfather)

He is signed with  Creative Artists Agency .

His publicist is 42 West.

5 ft 7 in or 170 cm

67 kg or 148 pounds

Girlfriend / Spouse

Tom Cruise dated –

• Cher – Singer Cher and Tom Cruise dated for some time in the mid-1980s.
• Rebecca De Mornay (1982-1985)
• Mimi Rogers (1986-1990) – Tom Cruise started dating American actress and competitive poker player, Miriam Mimi Rogers in January 1986. They married next year on May 9. They ended their three-year relationship in 1989 due to a lack of physical intimacy. Their divorce was finalized on February 4, 1990.
• Nicole Kidman (1989-2001) – A pretty long marital relationship was maintained   by Nicole Mary Kidman and Tom after starting dating in December 1989. The duo met on the set of the 1990 movie Days of Thunder  for the first time. They married a year later on December 24, 1990. Australian actress, Kidman and Cruise adopted a daughter named “Isabella Cruise” and a son named “ Connor Cruise “. This relationship saw an end in 2001.
• Penelope Cruz (2001-2004) – In 2001, Tom started dating Spanish actress Penelope Cruz after they met on the set of the movie Vanilla Sky (2001). It was a long-distance relationship as they used to spend the majority of their time working apart. As a couple, they were seen for the first time publicly during the movie premiere of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) in August 2001. They dated for nearly 3 years and split in January 2004.
• Nazanin Boniadi (2004-2005) – In November 2004, Tom Cruise started dating Iranian actress and activist, Nazanin Boniadi. She was one of Cruise’s girlfriends and a potential wife vetted by the Church of Scientology. However, she got to know about the enter thing only after she landed in New York and had previously just been told that she was going for an important task. Later, Nazanin Boniadi revealed that “at the beginning of the relationship [he] was very romantic but as the relationship progressed he began to have temper tantrums. He began to show violent tendencies”. As their affair dissolved within just a few months in January 2005, she confessed to a friend how devastated she felt at the moment. She was later punished by the Church for this act and “had to dig ditches at midnight and scrub floor tiles… She was placed on a curfew… escorted everywhere she went” which made her feel like “she was a victim of white slavery because she traveled across state lines under false pretenses”.
• Katie Holmes (2005-2012) –   Tom, commenced dating actress Katie Holmes in April 2005. Just a couple of months later, the couple engaged in June 2005. Their marriage took place in November 2006. The couple, who is fondly called “TomKat” by the media has 1 daughter named “Suri Cruise” (b. April 18, 2006). The relationship ended in 2012, when a divorce was filed on July 9, 2012.
• Yolanda Pecoraro  (2012) – Tom was rumored to be dating American actress, Yolanda in the past.
• Cynthia Jorge  (2012) – Again in 2012, Cruise was romantically linked to an American businesswoman, Cynthia Jorge.
• Jennifer Åkerman   (2012) – He was rumored to be dating model and actress Jennifer Åkerman in 2012.
• Laura Prepon  (2013) – Tom had a fling with another actress, Laura Prepon, to whom he took to The Renaissance at The Manor Hotel in November 2013. Laura was picked by Tom in his vintage car and he also took along a wine bottle with him. After all this, Laura believed that Cruise was on ‘cloud nine’. It was later proved to be a RUMOR.
• Annabelle Wallis (2016) – In 2016, after working together in The Mummy (2017), English actress Annabelle Wallis and Tom were rumored to be dating each other. But, these rumors were rejected by Gossip Cop.
• Vanessa Kirby – Tom was rumored to be dating Vanessa in 2017 when he recommended the  Mission: Impossible producers to consider Vanessa for a role. Tom first got impressed by Vanessa by watching her perform in The Crown (2016–2017). He was also rumored to be thinking of making Vanessa as his fourth wife.
• Hayley Atwell (2023) – In 2023, Tom and his Mission: Impossible co-star, Hayley Atwell were rumored to be dating. However, they later denied the rumors.
• Elsina Khayrova (2023-2024) – In December 2023, Tom was rumored to be dating Russian socialite Elsina Khayrova after they were seen together during a party in London’s Grosvenor Square. On December 15, 2023, Tom booked an entire floor of London restaurant Novikov for a date night with her. In February 2024, it was reported that the couple had broken up.

Race / Ethnicity

Tom has English, Irish, and German ancestry.

Sexual Orientation

Distinctive features, brand endorsements.

He has appeared in a Japanese Kure 5-56 commercial, Coca-Cola commercial, guitar hero advert, and many others.

Scientology

Best Known For

Acting in the “ Mission Impossible ” Series. Tom Cruise has acted in all Mission Impossible (MI) Movies from 1 to 6. Tom Cruise acts as “Ethan Hunt” in MI Series. He is well known for the risky stunts in the series including the Burj Khalifa scene in the Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol .

Endless Love in 1981 for his role as “Billy”.

Personal Trainer

Tom Cruise has been trained by “Benny The Jet Urquidez”.

Tom Cruise Favorite Things

• Favorite Food – Italian particularly Pasta. He also likes strawberries, lobster, and flounder
• Favorite Color – Green ( Since it is the color of money )
• Favorite Sport – Football
• Favorite Perfume – Clive Christian
• Favorite People – L. Ron Hubbard

Tom Cruise Facts

• Tom Cruise’s father is Thomas Mapother III (Electrical Engineer, born: 15-Oct-1934, died: Jan-1984). But, Tom (when he was 12) lived with his stepfather “Joseph South” and mother “Mary Lee Pfeiffer South”.
• Tom Cruise has a pet cat named ‘Harvey’.
• At the age of 14, he enrolled in a seminary to become a priest but dropped out after one year.
• Both Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes wore an Armani dress at the time of their wedding.
• He is a big fan of singer  Joss Stone .
• Tom was raised in poverty.
• Tom purchased his first motorcycle when he was just 12 using his savings.
• October 10, 2006 was the “Tom Cruise Day” in Japan just because he visited Japan more than any other Hollywood star.
• He was the world’s most powerful celebrity of 2006 as per Forbes.
• Tom has been termed as “gay” on several occasions for which he also sued British tabloid “Daily Express,” p*rn star Chad Slater, and Bold Magazine publisher Michael Davis. Tom is heterosexual in reality.
• He became the highest-paid actor of Hollywood in 2012.
• In December 2020, his leaked audio clip went viral where he was heard threatening to fire crew members on the Mission: Impossible 7 set if they did not follow the COVID-19 safety protocols. Later, it was revealed that 5 crew members actually left.
• Collectively, all his films (released until 2020) have earned more than $10 billion worldwide.
• For War of the Worlds (2005), Tom reportedly earned a total of $100 million as he had decided to take 20% of the film’s profits.
• Tom is left-handed.
• In March 2021, he listed his Colorado-based 11,512 square-feet house for $39.5 million.
• In August 2021, Tom’s $190,000 BMW X7 was stolen while he was filming for Mission Impossible: 7 in Birmingham, England.
• For the movie Top Gun: Maverick , Tom Cruise’s base salary for just $13 million. However, he also reportedly received 10-20% of the net grosses from the theatrical run. The movie had already crossed the $1 billion mark in earnings.
• Top Gun: Maverick was the most successful film of 2022 (until its release) and even Tom Cruise’s career.
• The Iron Man movie franchise was first offered to Tom. But, he rejected it and it was offered to Robert Downey Jr , as we all know, who made it a billion-dollar franchise.
• In January 2024, Tom announced a strategic partnership with Warner Bros. in which they aimed to develop and produce original and franchise theatrical films starring Cruise in 2024.

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Ken lerner height, weight, age, wife, children, miguel cazarez mora height, weight, age, facts, family, bonnie somerville height, weight, age, net worth, husband, 15 comments.

Thank you all for the tips.I just want to tell you that I found this site really useful to me. I will visit this blog regularly to read more.

I adore Tom Cruise!

There’s no way in hell he’s 77kg/170lbs! At 170cm he’d be obese at that weight. I think it should read 67kg.

Yeah, you are right Tom. It has been corrected.

The article said 148 lbs.

is there something wrong with the above picture of TC and Katie Holmes in the park, height?

small size but huge Tom

Actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are having a hard time convincing people of their sudden hot and heavy romance. In a poll taken in New York City’s Times Square, over 2/3 of the respondents believed that the Cruise and Holmes romance is a publicity stunt due to their upcoming movie releases (Cruise’s War of the Worlds and Holmes’ Batman Begins. Actors/actresses notoriously fall in and out of love in Hollywood, so why is there so much speculation about this romance. Why is this romance such a hard pill to swallow? Doesn’t anyone believe in love at first sight anymore?

Close up in M.I., his eyes are HAZEL! Top Gun = blue eyes. Internet says they’re green, which is it????????

Toms eyecolour is just like mine.Ever since I was a little girl,ppl.had a hard time telling what colour they were.(Even me)Toms eyes(Iris)are a darker ue/grey=green,with a touch of a light,golden circle around the pupil=A “colder” hazel.Some Ppl.guess a light brown,but most blue or green.Depends on the colour of clothes,hair,lights & so on.

What happened to his face in last pic?? Droopy eyes, huge mandibular jaw implants, looks like he’s been squished down/up! :-/

Hi tom , I am your biggest fans in Bangladesh . My name is Anup from Jessore . How are your imaginations of holiday or off time ? Please throw your comment for me . Love you tom . God bless you . Best of luck and take care your self .

Tom Cruise weight is atleast 70KG.

m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzFlMTJjYzUtMWFjYy00NjkyLTg1Y2EtYmZkMjdlOGQ1ZGYwL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg

Tom Cruise is a very fit actor but he would’ve looked better if he had build a physique like Brad Pitt.

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Tom cruise attends taylor swift’s eras tour in london day after daughter suri’s high school graduation.

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Tom Cruise was all smiles at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour show in London Saturday night the day after daughter Suri’s high school graduation in NYC just hours prior.

The “Top Gun” star looked gleeful at Wembley Stadium as he traded friendship bracelets with fans ahead of the singer’s second of three sold-out performances in England’s capital city.

The 61-year-old actor — who rocked dark wash jeans, a white T-shirt and a black jacket — sat among A-list attendees including Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Hugh Grant and “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig.

Cruise appeared to be having the time of his life as he — much like Prince William the night prior — danced along to the Grammy winner’s hit song “Shake it Off” with his famous peers in the VIP tent.

Swift’s beau, Travis Kelce, was also among stars as he attended his second London concert in a row with his brother and sister-in-law, Jason and Kylie .

Meanwhile in the US, Cruise’s estranged 18-year-old daughter graduated from LaGuardia High School the day prior.

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A beaming Suri was photographed greeting friends outside the venue shortly after they received their diplomas.

She also eagerly took pictures with mom Katie Holmes, who proudly stood by her daughter’s side on the special day.

The teenager dressed for the heat in a white sundress and heels adorned with a flower.

She completed her summery ensemble with a red graduation robe and white sash.

The 45-year-old “Dawson’s Creek” alum, for her part, looked cheerful in beige pleated trousers and a matching collared shirt.

Cruise’s choice to opt out of the graduation does not come as a surprise, as he has been estranged from the teen for years .

Suri even dropped the “Risky Business” actor’s last name in her school’s official graduation pamphlet, opting instead to go by her first and middle names, “Suri Noelle.”

Cruise confirmed in a 2012 deposition that Holmes divorced him “in part to protect Suri from Scientology.”

Followers of the controversial religion are not allowed to associate with nonbelievers.

Suri — who revealed she will attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the fall — did not let her father’s absence ruin her final days of high school.

Earlier this week, she was seen having a blast with her friends as they took pictures before they went off to prom.

Suri looked like a spitting image of her mother in a ’90s-inspired floral gown that featured a corseted bodice.

Holmes and Cruise split in 2011 nearly six years after tying the knot.

The “Mission Impossible” actor shares daughter Isabella, 31, and son Connor, 29, with ex-wife Nicole Kidman, whom he separated from in 2001 following an 11-year marriage.

Cruise still spends time with his eldest children as they have followed in his Scientology-practicing footsteps.

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‘Tom Cruise has in his contract that you cannot look into his eyes’: Mira Nair claims this rule applies to ‘aam log’ on his sets

Oscar nominated filmmaker mira nair said that tom cruise doesn't allow crew members on set to look at him directly in the eyes..

Filmmaker Mira Nair and actor Shabana Azmi spoke about the importance of an actor remaining connected to common people, and how difficult this can become as they become more and more famous. Mira cited the example of Hollywood megastar Tom Cruise , and claimed that he has it stipulated in his contracts that people on set can’t look him directly in the eye. Shabana appeared to be taken aback by this revelation, as Mira continued to claim that it is true, but also seemed to be a little cautious about what she was revealing.

Mira Nair has fostered a long and successful career in Hollywood, and has made films such as Amelia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Queen of Katwe. In an interaction with Shabana at the New York Indian Film Festival, Mira asked Shabana how she keeps herself ‘sprightly’ as an actor between roles, to which Shabana replied, “An actor’s resource base has to be life. When you’re alive to everything that is happening around you, that is the fuel, that is the experience. Because what happens with stars is that as they become bigger and bigger, they move away from life completely. You get into an ivory tower, and there’s no chance that you will have even the slightest contact with the real world.”

Also read – Mira Nair had sourced ‘priceless heirloom ring’ for Kama Sutra, actor Naveen Andrews threw it over the wall in anger, ripped apart his costume

Mira concurred, and said, “Tom Cruise has in his contract that you cannot meet his eyes. You’re not allowed to look at him in the eyes.” Shabana was surprised. She asked, “Why?” And Mira replied, “I don’t know! But it’s in the contract, I’m telling you. Serious. Maybe he believes that his juice will be robbed by people perhaps, let’s conserve it for the screen. I don’t know. But this is real.”

Shabana asked if this applies to people in real life or on set, and asked, “If I don’t look at you, how can I act?” Mira replied with a laugh, “The actors and directors can (look at him). But not aam log. I’m telling you. Anyway, this might have changed. I shouldn’t be talking so much about somebody I’ve only just seen and not been able to see… But in any case, it is true.”

Read more – ‘You’ll be shocked how Christopher Nolan was treated by Indian authorities’: Anurag Kashyap says Indians have no interest in empowering cinema

Cruise is known to be a demanding presence on film sets. Several of his co-stars have spoken glowingly about how involved he is in all aspects of filmmaking. During production on the latest Mission: Impossible film, a leaked audio recording of Cruise berating a crew member for allegedly breaching pandemic protocol went viral. In his tirade, the actor-producer claimed that the entire industry was relying on the success of productions like Mission: Impossible to find a way out of that difficult period.

One of the few negative comments about Cruise’s work ethic were voiced by his Mission: Impossible II co-star Thandiwe Newton, who accused him of pushing her into ‘terror and insecurity’ on the film’s set. “He was a very dominant individual,” she told Vulture. “He tries super hard to be a nice person. But the pressure. He takes on a lot. And I think he has this sense that only he can do everything as best as it can be done.”

Click for more updates and latest Hollywood News along with Bollywood and Entertainment updates . Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the World at The Indian Express .

The first day of the 18th Lok Sabha saw a brief moment of unity between PM Modi and Rahul Gandhi, but was overshadowed by political divisions. The election of Om Birla as Speaker sparked a debate over the Congress' stance on the Emergency. Despite Opposition's efforts, the ruling BJP and allies protested outside the Parliament building.

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Tom Cruise’s Iconic Characters

Discover four characters played by tom cruise, and learn why they are so iconic. read on to explore our list of films.

Risky Business (1983)

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)