Kubrick’s direction nourishes a distance in Bill and Alice, one born of two conflicting interpretations of marriage. Perfect plot points for a classic Christmas movie. He encouraged Kidman and Cruise to share intimate anxieties about marriage with him, and in one stinging example, he asked Kidman to shoot six days of sex scenes with another actor for a short dream sequence that tortures Bill throughout the movie. He was exacting upon his two leads, often demanding dozens of takes (including one infamous example of Tom Cruise walking through a door 95 times), but he also intentionally blurred the line between character and performer. The film brilliantly shreds Cruise’s rugged ’90s charisma, exposing a rawness and embarrassing vulnerability in the face of Kidman’s coy, multifaceted sensuality.Īs a director, Kubrick always maintained intense, complex, and sometimes abusive relationships with his actors. Eyes Wide Shut follows Bill’s dreamlike odyssey into an underground world of sexual debauchery and danger after Alice reveals to him that she nearly had an affair the year prior, and there’s a bit of delicious irony in the fact that Cruise and Kidman were married at the time. wanted a movie star in the role, eventually leading to the casting of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. In the ’70s, when Kubrick initially considered adapting Dream Story, he wanted to cast someone who would have “ a comedian’s resilience,” such as Steve Martin or Woody Allen. Eyes Wide Shut takes the paranoia of ’70s conspiracy thrillers and grafts it onto a Christmastime relationship drama, asking us to peel back the curtain and interrogate our own notions of sex, love, and nuclear domesticity. Exploding outwards from the consequences of Watergate, Americans are obsessed with the idea of a sinister and politically influential cabal of wealthy elites. The final product is anything but despite its playfulness, the film is uncanny and haunting, and the decision to update the setting from early-1900s Vienna to 1990s New York City throws it into the midst of America’s fixation on the secret lives of the rich and powerful.
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