?Eyes Wide Shut? is the final movie directed by legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Here is some trivia about this mysterious project:
Stanley Kubrick died just four days after presenting Warner Bros. with what was reported to be a final cut of the film, after a legendarily long shoot. His friends and family, as well as the cast and crew of the film, all claimed that Kubrick?s death was completely unexpected and that he never seemed to be in poor health while making the film.
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.
Though often referred to as Stanley Kubrick?s ?unfinished masterpiece?, the final edit of the film was actually presented to Warner Bros. (by Kubrick) a full four days before his death, though the score and other aspects were not finalized.
When it was announced that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman would be making the film with Stanley Kubrick, Vincent D?Onofrio (who played Leonard ?Private Pyle? Lawrence in Kubrick?s previous film Full Metal Jacket (1987)) had this open advice for them: ?Rent a house or apartment, because you?re going to be in England for a while.?
The password ?fidelio? (from the Latin root ?fidelis? meaning ?faithful?) is the title of Ludwig van Beethoven?s only opera. In the opera, Fidelio is a woman who disguises herself as a man to save her lover.
The film is notoriously known for its secrecy during production and the secrecy even divided the two main stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, director Stanley 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 fifty 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.
Appeared in the Guinness Book of Records with the record for ?The Longest Constant Movie Shoot?, at four hundred days.
Stanley Kubrick and director of photography Larry Smith tested out different film stocks and finally settled on one that had been discontinued by Kodak. As a courtesy, Kodak offered to supply as many rolls of this film as would be needed for the project.
The cast includes 7 directors: Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Thomas Gibson, Rade Serbedzija, Alan Cumming, Brian W. Cook and Tom Cruise.
Stanley Kubrick reportedly watched movies like Showgirls (1995), Basic Instinct (1992), and Fatal Attraction (1987) during the editing phase, to get the idea of how explicit the sex scenes in the movie could be and still retain the R-rated movie he had contractually agreed to deliver.
Due to Stanley Kubrick?s fear of travel virtually the entire film was shot in and near London (despite the movie?s New York City setting). Elaborate street sets built at Pinewood Studios were used for all the scenes showing Tom Cruise walking around the city.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman spent so long living in the UK, due to the prolonged shoot, that their 2 children acquired English accents.
The Jocelyn Pook composition playing during the ceremony at the masked ball is a fragment of an Orthodox mass played backwards; the voices are singing in Romanian.
This movie spent almost a year in post-production.
The letters and the newspaper read by Tom Cruise are written in Italian for the Italian version of this movie. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick shot those scenes with papers written in different languages, as he did for The Shining (1980).
In a few shots of Tom Cruise walking through the city, background plates of actual New York City streets were projected behind the actor walking on a treadmill.
