When Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, just days after showing Warner Bros. executives the final cut of ‘Eyes Wide Shut‘, he left behind more than a movie. He left behind one of the most talked-about production stories in Hollywood history. At the center of it were two of the biggest stars in the world, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and a director whose demanding methods reportedly tested Cruise’s patience for close to a year and a half.
The numbers alone tell part of the story. ‘Eyes Wide Shut‘ holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot. It ran 400 straight days, an incredible ask for actors as famous as Cruise and Kidman. Inside that long schedule were scenes shot over and over, including a well-known moment that needed 95 takes just to get Cruise walking through a door.
Why Tom Cruise and Stanley Kubrick Clashed on Set
Some of the tension, according to several accounts, came down to how little Kubrick communicated with his actors. He reportedly held back notes from Cruise on set, leaving him unsure what he was doing wrong, and would only offer this line instead: “Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star.” Cinematographer Larry Smith later explained how carefully Kubrick built the illusion of the film’s setting, saying “generally, when Tom’s facing the camera, the backgrounds are rear-projected,” while side shots were filmed on real London streets standing in for Manhattan.
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Kubrick’s frustration reportedly had less to do with any personal issue and more with his beliefs about acting itself. He hated doing unnecessary reshoots, and by his own account, the only thing that ever pushed him to redo a scene was an actor who wasn’t ready. Kubrick said it plainly: “They cannot act without knowing dialogue,” and added, “If you have to think about anything when you’re acting you cannot work on the emotion.” Given how packed Cruise’s schedule was at the time, with other commitments pulling him away from set, that standard may not have always been met.
How ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Mirrored Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s Real Life Marriage
That intense atmosphere didn’t stay on set. Cruise and Kidman were married in real life at the time, and they played a married couple whose relationship falls apart over one strange, hallucinatory night. The emotional weight of Kubrick’s process reportedly spilled into their actual marriage, since the film’s themes of jealousy, temptation, and deception hit a little too close to home.
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Not everyone involved remembers the shoot as a battle, though. Actor Todd Field, who played Nick Nightingale in the film, pushed back on the idea that the cast suffered under Kubrick. “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director,” he said, adding that “Stanley was absolutely thrilled with the film.“
Tom Cruise’s Response and Stanley Kubrick’s Final Words About the Film
Cruise himself has since said the film’s tough reputation came from misunderstanding, not from an unhappy shoot. Speaking to Cameron Crowe for Vanity Fair, Cruise said “there were rumours out there about how Stanley was going to make a pornographic picture,” and insisted “that wasn’t the movie he was making.” He argued that critics and audiences “didn’t quite grasp what the movie was” because they walked into theaters with preconceived ideas before they’d even seen it.
What seems clear is that ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ took an unusual toll on everyone involved, including, by some accounts, Kubrick himself. ‘Full Metal Jacket‘ actor R. Lee Ermey has said Kubrick called him about the film just weeks before he died, telling him “he told me it was a piece of s**t” and “that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch.” Whether that was genuine regret or just the anxiety of a perfectionist right before release, it shows how much Kubrick had riding, creatively and personally, on getting Cruise and the film exactly right.
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