Stanley Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, had been a long time coming.
Kubrick had been interested in adapting Traumnovelle [‘Dream Story’], Arthur Schnitzler’s novella about the romantic complexities of marriage, since 1969, and when he finally began developing it in earnest in the early ’90s, he knew the book’s sinister masked ball would be the centrepiece.
Reeling from the fantasy confessions of his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) treks into the New York night, eventually blagging his way into an elite evening involving dubious masked men, beautiful women, a whole lot of nudity and a shedload of threat. The dramatic highlight of the film, it’s a beautiful, foreboding sequence, dripping with atmosphere. But enough set-up
— say “Fidelio” and head on in…
Kubrick was fairly faithful in adapting the sequence from Schnitzler’s novel, but filtered it through his own perspective.
Jan Harlan (executive producer): In Stanley Kubrick’s mind this was a modern Hell. The centrepoint of the film was jealousy. Self-destruction through jealousy, a derivative of envy. Bill Harford finds himself there by chance and curiosity, but always driven by the same jealousy and desperate attempt of revenge. The challenge for Kubrick was to succeed in creating this Hieronymus Bosch-inspired Hell.
Leon Vitali (Stanley Kubrick’s assistant/casting agent/‘red Cloak’): In the book the masked ball is kind of earthbound: it centres on a person whose ego is being bruised and dented. But Stanley developed it in such a way that it becomes almost a life-anddeath thing. It’s something Bill has to go through to become the person he becomes at the end.
Lisa Leone (set decorator/ second-unit director): It’s a psychological journey but also what was interesting to Stanley, and me, was these secret societies. Who are these people, what are they doing? It’s this mystery. We were like, “Yeah, I think there are these secret societies with these politicians, these men.”
Vitali: People say, “It’s all about the Illuminati.” No, it’s not. It was about power, and what it could do, how it can control.
With pre-production taking shape, Kubrick began developing the orgy with cast and crew, finding the tone as he went.
Yolande Snaith (choreographer): Stanley described the orgy scene as more of a suggestive masked dance scene. My understanding was that that was based on what he’d seen of my choreography, because in my [1996] film Swinger there were a lot of intimate choreographies between couples — they were subtle, but very seductive, a lot of bodies rolling around each other. He wanted something in that area of artistic expression.
Abigail Good (‘Mysterious Woman’): That whole scene was meant to be a dream sequence: a contemporary-dance, choreographed piece. They cast a few models but also ballet dancers, and a lot of the men were ballet dancers too. We were doing ballet lifts. Over months we would come up with ideas, and Leon would record it. He would come back and say Stanley wanted us to try it like this and that. And eventually he came back with pictures from the Kama Sutra. He said, “Stanley would like you to maybe use this as inspiration.”
Vitali: He just wanted to get an idea of how far we could go before it looked tawdry and on that barrier of being really pornographic. So we were edging it all the way through those months to get the atmosphere we wanted to create.
Snaith: I didn’t do the orgy scene in the end — my focus went on the ceremony. As far as I know the orgy scene didn’t have a choreographer, and also it became a lot shorter. I think when it got to that point in the film Stanley wanted it to be a short blast of total orgy.
Harlan: It wasn’t erotic but expressed utter decadence. It could be said that this is where Kubrick failed, since many people thought it was supposed to be erotic.
Jocelyn Pook (composer): The original sketch I did [for ‘Backwards Priests’, the song that became ‘Masked Ball’] was when I was working with a dance company. I really love that unsettling quality and strangeness of backwards singing. And I came across a cassette of Romanian orthodox priests.
Snaith: I’d been working with different music in the studio, and I was a big fan of Jocelyn Pook’s music, so I was playing ‘Backwards Priests’. And when Stanley was looking at the rehearsal tapes, he said, “What is that music?” He had this total gut feeling about it.
Vitali: It gave it a spooky atmosphere, which you couldn’t do if you said, “Write some spooky music.” It was very infectious. That’s how Jocelyn came to write more of the music.
Pook: I met Stanley in an office in Pinewood. For the orgy scene he said, “I don’t know what’s gonna be right for this but, you know, sexy music.” And I was like, “Oh my God, sexy music, what the hell is that?” You think of Barry White or something. It was really daunting. I wrote a piece, ‘Dionysus’, and he gave it some consideration, but didn’t use it. It went on my Untold Things album, and later Scorsese used it in Gangs Of New York. He doesn’t know it was written for Eyes Wide Shut!
Vitali: I went around with Stanley looking at locations. In the end, it came down to Elveden Hall in Suffolk because every inch of that room and corridor was carved marble. We did some interior scenes in Highclere Castle [in Hampshire], which has a beautiful library — you see Tom go through it, watching the activity. Napoleon’s chair and desk are in there. I said to Stanley, “Do you know that’s Napoleon’s chair? Why don’t you sit in it?” And he said, “Ohh… I don’t know if I should.” It was so touching.
Leone: There wasn’t that much to decorate [in Elveden Hall], some of it was already there. The [statues of ] naked ladies holding
the bulbs above when Tom walks in, I was so excited when I found those, they’re just so beautiful, very sexy and seductive. Stanley really loved them; he said, “These are perfect!”
Todd Field (‘Nick Nightingale’): I had no agent at the time. I simply received a call from the William Morris agency saying, “Stanley Kubrick is looking for you.” I was driving and got so startled I ran into another car.
Vitali: I called Todd and he said, “I’ve met you before.” He used to hang out with Matthew Modine, who took him all over the world when he was doing the publicity for Full Metal Jacket.
Field: Jan Harlan drove me to Luton Hoo where Stanley was doing lighting tests. That manor house must have a hundred rooms and I spent the better part of the day photographing and exploring every one of them before I finally got the nerve to go anywhere near the ballroom. I stood in the doorway and watched Stanley work. After a few minutes he turned, looked straight at me with that gaze of his, smiled and said, “You’re here. Come inside and see what we’re doing.” I stumbled forward, held out my hand and said, “I’m Todd Field.” Stanley laughed, “I know who the fuck you are, I hired you. Can I see that?” He gestured to my camera. I handed it over and he asked me what an M6 was going for these days.
The Eyes Wide Shut shoot was notoriously lengthy, and the masked ball was a sizeable chunk itself. As ever with Kubrick, no stones were left unturned.
Pook: My music was playing on set, because Nick Nightingale is playing keyboards, he’s supposed to be creating the music. So Todd was playing along in time to the music.
Field: I took a seat at the keyboard and started rehearsing ‘Backward Priests’ to playback. At a certain point, the music suddenly stopped. I stood, looked around, and saw Stanley standing alone on the other side of the room wearing a huge grin and holding up a blindfold. I went over, he spun me around, tied it on my head, and said, “Now you’re ready.”
Good: One day they asked me if I would go in to meet Stanley. He told me I’d been given this role now [‘Mysterious Woman’] and I’m wearing this mask and have to learn these lines. Next thing I know I was working with Tom and standing in a room working through lines and delivery. It was incredible.
Field: The only time he offered specific direction in the sequence was once, when he was arriving to work, he had [his driver] Emilio stop the car. Tom and I were outside playing football and Stanley rolled down his window and said, “Your hands were off a bit in yesterday’s dailies. We’ll do it again.”
Leone: One thing that really struck me as a young music-video cinematographer is that it was okay to say, “I don’t know.” There were so many times we would stand together and somebody would ask Stanley something and he’d say, “I don’t know.” And he was so open to ideas.
Good: It’s madness, filming with Stanley — he’s a perfectionist. One day I remember him explaining to the DOP that there was a light out. He said, “I don’t think there is, Stanley. Nobody’s been on set, nothing’s changed.” He said, “There’s a light out, find it.” And we shut down, we all had to sit down and do nothing for a day until they found it. And they found it. And it was something like — I heard — a stop out. [A stop refers to the amount of light being captured.] That was the level of his perfection.
Vitali: I must have seen about a dozen people for the Red Cloak role. Then one morning after about six weeks of this, Stanley called and said, “I’ve decided, Leon, you’re gonna play the part,” and he put the phone down.
Snaith: When that character is in the middle with the incense burner, that’s Russell Trigg, one of the dancers in my company. Later, when that figure was speaking, it’s Leon. One of the things that we spent ages on with Stanley was the tracking: the cameraman was walking very slowly around the circle to film that. Getting the
right amount of incense in shot at the right moment in relation to the timing of the women’s sequence of movement. That took forever.
Good: We did it over, and over, and over again. They had to get frozen peas because we were in that bloody circle on our knees all the time and our knees were swelling up.
Field: During the sequence I was the only one on set with my eyes shut. Being in the dark with Pook’s music as the only anchor was a bit like checking into an eternal sensory-deprivation retreat. Yes, Stanley did many takes. But this was for very practical reasons that made sense once he explained them. It was in no way gratuitous.
Vitali: Everything was a slow growth. Tom coming in and me saying, “What’s the password?” — we must have done it 40 times, more. Tom was great. It’s one of the longest shoots on record, and there was never a word of complaint. He was so focused on what he was doing and on working with Stanley, and I think that says a lot about Stanley, that Tom subjugated himself to what he was exploring.
Soon after Kubrick passed away towards the end of post-production, the American censors asked for changes to the sexual content. To avoid making any edits, the producers obscured some of the thrusting with computer-generated cloaked onlookers. The digital offenders were subsequently removed for home-entertainment formats, and today the film lives on as intended, continually reappraised.
Harlan: When the first AD [Brian Cook] and I told Stanley that he may get into trouble with the MPAA’S self-imposed rating system and suggested a ‘cover shot’ filming the scene with the girls wearing a gown, he simply dismissed this concern as ridiculous. Unfortunately we had trouble in the US and needed to digitally superimpose more voyeurs to cover some of the offending figures, since receiving an R rating was a contractual requirement.
Vitali: We fought it. We appealed and appealed again. The idea of it going out as it was, with an X certificate, was a step too far, because to everyone X is just pornographic, so that would have made it even more open to that kind of salacious kind of idea of what the film’s about. So we came up with this CGI answer, putting those figures in between Tom and the action. We didn’t have to do that anywhere else in the world. America talks about how free they are, but this is the one place where we had to do that.
Leone: I saw the film again recently and got such a different read on it, 20 years later, being in a committed relationship. Part of it is the fantasies that go on in your mind when you’re in a committed relationship with somebody, and the struggle you have of feeling guilty about something that might or might not have happened. It’s this line of loving somebody so much, but at the same time feeling like, “I could just walk out and leave this whole thing behind.”
Good: Being older and divorced, and having met somebody and left my marriage, and everything that that brings up… Now, as an adult woman, it’s amazing to get my head into what the film was about. Jealousy and affairs and all that kind of stuff. I’ve matured and the film has matured for me.
Field: It’s gratifying that Stanley’s film is still very much in the conversation. Especially considering some of the shots critics took back in ’99, saying he was “out of touch”. I remember some complaining the downtown New York streets didn’t look “real”, that maybe they looked that way back when “Stanley lived there”. They were of course entirely missing the point, critiquing the age of the filmmaker and not his intent. It would have been very simple and, some might say, artless to reproduce those streets precisely. The source material is Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, or ‘Dream Story.’ And this dream was clearly Stanley’s intent. The film has stood the test of time pretty well. Because though we may not all be critics, we all dream.
EYES WIDE SHUT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 29 NOVEMBER. WITH THANKS TO SK FILM ARCHIVES LLC, WARNER BROS. AND UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS LONDON