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.
