Nicholas Glass made it his mission to find out more about Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s top-secret new film- in-progress
A Lear jet left Luton for Los Angeles on June 3, carrying the Cruise family back to Los Angeles. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman like England, where photographers mostly leave them alone. But they must have felt a certain relief. Finally, it seemed, they had finished shooting Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick.
Cruise had insisted that there shouldn’t be more than an extra month’s filming when he returned to Pinewood Studios on May 5, and what Tom wants, Tom tends to get. A year and a half after the cameras first rolled, after endless takes and re-shoots, Kubrick finally called a wrap on his movie about jealousy and sexual obsession.
Or so we understand. You can never be sure with Kubrick. He has a habit of saying, “Let’s do it again.” The shoot was originally meant to last 13 weeks; the original budget was $40- million. But Kubrick is a law unto himself. Depending who you ask, he is “shy”, “private”, “abrasive”, “very open”, “very friendly”, “an incredibly hard man to work for”, “incredibly exacting”, “the ultimate control freak” and “someone who doesn’t have a life outside film”. Nobody still working with him wants to be quoted. It’s more than their job is worth.
Kubrick is 70 this month. According to his latest biographer he’s “the last of the titans”. John Baxter says nobody has worked liked this since the 1920s. You have to go back to John Ford, DW Griffith and Josef von Sternberg to find men who exercised this kind of control, being in effect producer, screenwriter, cameraman and editor as well as director and promoter of their films.
Kubrick recently likened directing to “trying to write War And Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park”, but, he said, “when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal that feeling”. In getting it right, Kubrick takes his time. The director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange knows his work will outlive him. His mystique in the industry is almost without equal: Warner Brothers gives him the money and Kubrick takes 40% of the profits. He makes movies absolutely on his terms, in his adopted home, Britain. Kubrick has lived in England longer than in his native United States.
Baxter says Kubrick “doesn’t make films for money. He makes films for the ages.” Certainly they take ages. He has made just five in the last 30 years, and gestation and production times are getting ever longer. Four of his films were released in the 1960s, two in the 1970s, two in the 1980s. Eyes Wide Shut is his 13th film, but his first since Full Metal Jacket in 1987.
As with his other films, Kubrick has been making Eyes Wide Shut in a perfectionist, laborious and controlling way. Right now, he would rather the rest of the world knew as little about it as possible. Warner Brothers seem as much in the dark as the rest of us. They’ve put out just two press releases since shooting began in November 1996. One announced the movie, the other a cast change.
Eyes Wide Shut is a chamber piece, with a small cast and crew. Everyone working on it signed a confidentiality agreement. But in a gossipy industry, no film set is ever entirely closed. The more I heard of Kubrick’s secrecy, the more determined I became to find out about the film. I became obsessed. With a crew from Channel 4, I decided to track him down.
Kubrick has long wanted to make a movie based on the 1926 German novella Traumnovelle [Dream Novel], by Arthur Schnitzler. He favours literary sources, although he makes the material very much his own. In the early 1980s, he told the film historian Michel Ciment that “all of Schnitzler’s work is psychologically brilliant. It’s a difficult book to describe – what good book isn’t? It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might- have-beens with reality.”
Frederic Raphael wrote the script with Kubrick two years before the cameras started to roll. The movie evidently has a high erotic content. Several people working on it told us it will shock. Were there dream sequences? “Maybe,” was the guarded reply. The Internet has pages that speculate about black-and- white sequences, cross-dressing and drug-taking.
Schnitzler’s book is the story of a husband and wife, Fridolin and Albertine, both doctors, and the sensual adventures and dreams of a single night. Kubrick and Raphael have moved and updated the action from Vienna to modern New York at Christmas.
We were told that less than a dozen people have read the script in its entirety. But from what we’ve winkled out, the film seems to follow the same plot. Like Fridolin, the Cruise character, Bill, ends his night out at a masked ball, although Kubrick’s movie is sexually explicit in a way that Schnitzler’s book isn’t. Raphael, who enjoyed the collaboration, was discouraged from going on set. The script was “rewritten day by day” as shooting progressed.
Although he once had a pilot’s licence, and may still have one, Kubrick doesn’t like to fly. He also likes to sleep at home in Hertfordshire, so just as Vietnam was re-created for Full Metal Jacket at an old gasworks by the Thames, New York was re-created at Pinewood Studios and on location. Everything had to be a sedate Range Rover’s drive from home. A Manhattan street went up on the Pinewood backlot; such is Kubrick’s slavish attention to detail that they re-tarmacked the road to make it look old.
Kubrick has also been round the country houses. After camera tests, Knebworth and Mentmore were rejected. Things began in earnest at Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire in October 1996. A big party scene, with some 200 extras, was filmed there, with the actor Harvey Keitel orchestrating the action as a ring master. Keitel was in a couple of scenes, but couldn’t or didn’t want to stay on as filming dragged on. Kubrick returned to Luton Hoo in May 1997 to film Keitel’s replacement, the more compliant actor- director Sydney Pollack. Pollack says Kubrick is “a genius”.
The length of the shoot prompted one other cast change. Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was in a cameo role, was replaced by the Swedish actress Marie Richardson in April this year. Conscious of Kubrick’s reputation for working all hours, Luton Hoo insisted filming should stop at midnight. Tom Cruise, used to two or three takes on Mission: Impossible, soon learnt the Kubrick way, 95 takes of him walking through a door. Kubrick was enjoying himself. Watching the video playback, he looked up at Cruise and said, “Hey, Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star.” He sometimes unsettled his actors. Kidman, returning to the set after illness, was told by Kubrick she’d put on weight.
Elveden Hall near Bury St Edmunds and Highclere Castle near Newbury were used for the masked ball. Highclere wouldn’t tell us what happened there “because of our confidentiality clause”, but Kubrick shot an orgy scene with about 20 actors and models having sex. Everyone decorously wore a mask, but nothing else. The Cruise character gets an eyeful, but apparently doesn’t join in.
The filming regularly went on well into the early hours. Two male actors, obliged to keep going as Kubrick demanded more takes, earned the nicknames “Thrust One” and “Thrust Two”.
Of at least five London locations, the royal suite at the Lanesborough Hotel at Hyde Park Corner was hired for 10 days in November 1996. Immediately afterwards, the production moved to the Soho drag club, Madame JoJo’s. This became a New York jazz club, lit only with candles and thousands of fairy lights stapled to the ceiling. In it, Cruise meets a jazz musician played by Todd Field. Madame JoJo’s manager, Florian Windorfer, who got a part as an extra, says “everyone was smuggled in and out. Nobody knew anything.” By the end, Kubrick himself “had the camera on his shoulder, up on a chair, shooting left and right”.
For two nights in September 1997, the length of Hatton Garden, centre of London’s diamond and jewellery trade, became a Greenwich Village street so that Cruise could be filmed walking down it. New York cabs, signs, fire hydrants, newspaper stands, and American rubbish were brought in.
At every location, we were told the same story: no photographs were allowed. Images of Kubrick at work are now almost 20 years old. He has always liked cameras: his father gave him one for his 13th birthday and his first real job was as a photojournalist. But he doesn’t like unsupervised lenses pointing at him. A freelance photographer, Nick Towers, took stills of Tom Cruise over the fence at Pinewood Studios in May 1997. He also shot “this old guy, scruffy with an anorak and a beard. It didn’t really click that it was Kubrick.” His agency told him Kubrick hadn’t been photographed for 17 years. Once the photos were published, security at Pinewood tripled. Sentries were stationed in the woods. And the fence changed.
Eyes Wide Shut moved into the ground floor of Hamley’s toy shop on Regent Street for five nights in January. Cruise spotted one of the caterers with a camera, and she was escorted from the set, never to return. For what’s thought to be the closing scene in the film, there were about 100 extras, including some Hamley’s staff, “choreographed to an unbelievable extent”.
The Cruise and Kidman characters are Christmas shopping with their young daughter. The child picks up a teddy bear that is bigger than she is. Husband and wife have some kind of reconciliation. The gist of the exchange is as follows. She says: “There’s something we’ve got to do.” He says: “What?” She says: “Fuck.”
Tom Cruise, who wants to direct and reveres Kubrick as a cinema god, has worked with a batch of big-name directors – Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Neil Jordan, Ridley and Tony Scott. But was he prepared for Kubrick? At Hamley’s, relations between stars and director were reported as seeming comfortable, Cruise and Kidman humouring their eccentric father-figure. But it was Cruise who sometimes called it a night. The average number of takes was down to 30 or 40, and at three or four in the morning Cruise would tell Stanley that he thought they’d got it in the can.
Kubrick should now be editing in his stable block at home. As with Full Metal Jacket, he is spoilt for choice, with over a million feet of film – and he is editing digitally for the first time on an Avid suite.
When will Eyes Wide Shut be ready? A film set at Christmas time ought to come out at Christmas. It must do to qualify for next year’s Oscar nominations. But Kubrick is as fastidious about editing as he is about shooting. Like Warner brothers we may have to wait.
It’s clear Kubrick still has the stamina, the intensity, the flat Bronx accent. On the set, he moves around, stops and stares right through you with those “scary eyes”. At Hatton Garden, a flunkey followed him around holding a director’s chair, uncertain whether to disturb the great man in thought. He seldom sat down.