Stanley Kubrick Had Tom Cruise Flying Blind While Filming Eyes Wide Shut
It’s hard to reckon with a filmmaker such as Stanley Kubrick when he’s created art so deserving of critical acclaim, but the grandeur is clouded by how incredibly difficult, obsessive, and manipulative his behavior was on set. Films like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Eyes Wide Shut” had audiences everywhere figuratively by the throats, earning decades of dedicated viewership. However, do the ends of epic filmmaking justify the means when compromising the mental well-being of the team you’ve hired to bring your vision to life? Probably not. And yet, in a 2014 Vanity Fair article, Amy Nicholson recalls the ways in which “Eyes Wide Shut” stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman leaned into the tactics Kubrick was implementing, appreciating how the director was able to create such a vision through psychoanalyzing and manipulating his actors’ real lives.
For the then-married couple, working on “Eyes Wide Shut” was an endurance test, twisting the knife into their greatest fears and insecurities, and using those as fixtures in the story. The two ended up divorcing shortly after the film premiered.
Cruise, who holds the most screentime throughout the film and still advocates for Kubrick’s tactics over 23 years later, was barred from seeing any of his performances as the project was being shot. “Making a movie is like stabbing in the dark,” Cruise explained. “If I get a sense of the overall picture, then I’m better for the film.” But Cruise couldn’t get an overall picture, which means he couldn’t adjust his performance and maintain control of his character. He had to be himself.
Stanley Kubrick Had Tom Cruise Flying Blind While Filming Eyes Wide Shut
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