EWS Turns 25

This is a podcast discussing Stanley Kubrick's film "Eyes Wide Shut" and the experiences of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman working with him. The film was the last one Kubrick made before his death and had a continuous production process. The podcast also mentions other films and actors in relation to the Oscars. There is also a mention of the book "Blade Runner" and how it differs from the expectations set by its description and trailer. And we're back, like we never left. Welcome to episode 247 of the Confessions of a Not-So-Dangerous Mind podcast. I'd like to thank you all for joining me on this very, very seriously steamy Tuesday afternoon here in New York. Once again, we're going to skip past all that promotional jazz and get right to the guts of the episode. Today marks the 25th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's notorious 1920s novel, Dream Story, Eyes Wide Shut. For me, it's a bit of a sad occasion because it's the last film that Stanley Kubrick made in his career. He had just finished editing it when he passed. From natural causes, he was seven. Many think that he simply worked himself to death, that he wanted so desperately to finish the movie and show it not only to his stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who he worked with so very closely for the better part of two years, which is completely insane, but he wanted the bosses of Warner's to see it, and he was very proud of what he was able to achieve despite working with two big stars. Cruise and Kidman treated him with the utmost respect. He always said to them, don't be afraid to speak to me, more or less saying, don't be intimidated. I might be a little different, but I'm a person too, not a robot, I'm not God. You have ideas, I want to hear them. So Eyes Wide Shut is the longest continuous shoot, the longest continuous production, certainly that I know of, in the history of Hollywood. There are movies that took longer to be produced, but there may be a gap in filming here or there was an issue there. This was a continuous shoot. Think about it this way. My final semester at New York University, fall 1996, Tom Cruise began principal photography on Eyes Wide Shut as he was gearing up and doing press and publicity and hitting the late night talk show rounds. For Jerry Maguire. Jerry Maguire got all kinds of acclaim, and if you ask me, Tom Cruise was robbed of the Best Actor award at the 1997 Oscars for films released in 1996. I love Jeffrey Rush and the movie Shine. It's a terrific film. He's great in it as the true-life piano player David Helkett. It's a supporting performance. It's not a lead performance. Jeffrey Rush doesn't show up until there's like maybe 20, 30 minutes left in the movie. Tom Cruise gives everything he has in every scene of Jerry Maguire. Then he got sniffed at the Oscars. Too bad, so sad. But I always give Cruise credit for his reaction, how gutted he must have been when he announced Jeffrey Rush. Tom Cruise, ever the trooper, and for real, somebody who absolutely adores the movie business and does not seem to take any of his life for granted, at least based on the limited bits of himself that he shows to us. As soon as they announced Jeffrey Rush, Cruise jumped to his feet and led a standing ovation. That's something I respect. He didn't piss, he didn't curse anybody out, he got up and he appreciated a great performance. Don't get me wrong, but he should have won Best Supporting Actor. And I feel the same about Sir Anthony Hopkins, the fucking genius actor himself, winning a Best Actor award for a supporting performance in Silence of the Lambs. I believe that Warren Beatty should have won the Oscar that year for Bugsy. A two and a half hour, multi-layered, incredible, three-dimensional performance where he is the central focus. What can I tell you? It's all just opinion, right? This is my subjective view that I'm giving you. But the idea is that that Tom Cruise, the Tom Cruise who had just come off the enormous success of Mission Impossible, and knew that Jerry Maguire was going to be a big hit, he had a very high level of confidence, that the movie and him and his pal, the filmmaker Cameron Crowe, were going to receive wide acclaim. And it was going to be a big hit. He loved Renee Zellweger in the film and she got a lot of acclaim. So that Tom Cruise went to London to make a movie with the Bronx-born genius, 180 IQ, Stanley Kubrick. The word was that Kubrick was just as intelligent as Einstein and was a better chess player. If Stanley Kubrick had not been a picture-taking prodigy as a child, by the time he was in his middle teens, he was making really big money taking pictures for Look magazine. This was not a normal smart person or a normal artist, a normal talented artist. Stanley Kubrick was always levels above the average great artist, great intellect. Stanley Kubrick grew up in the Bronx. And after a certain point, he didn't want to live in New York anymore. And then he didn't want to really live in the United States. So he made his home in London and he worked in London. Full Metal Jacket, the Vietnam movie. My second favorite Stanley Kubrick film, Behind the Clockwork Orange. He shot it in London. What we think is Vietnam, the various scenes, they shot it at Brixton Gas Works. Not that far from London. Kind of standing in for what's supposed to be Vietnam. Stanley did things a certain way. So Cruise went overseas to make a movie. And they made that movie for a really, really, really long time. And Cruise never spoke ill of the experience. But if you do go in, you're going to work with Kubrick. People who talked about it and had talked about it, such as Jack Nicholson, Nathan McDowell, they weren't lying. Be prepared to do a lot of takes. This is a book on Stanley Kubrick, unlike most other great filmmakers. He didn't always know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn't want when he saw it. Run it again. Let's run it again. Let's try that again. Let's try to back up for a minute. Hold on. But Cruise and Kidman were troopers. And it is a bit sad, and I know it's been a long time since they split up, but it's sad in the sense that they spent two years making a movie about an apparently happily married couple that goes through cataclysmic changes that really shouldn't have been cataclysmic changes. And are they going to survive or are they not going to survive? And what's going to happen to their daughter if they don't survive? Who is she going to live with? All these things. They don't actually go into that in the movie, but it's implied. If two people start fighting and it looks like their marriage might be over, they don't have to announce to the audience who's going to get custody of the kid. We didn't speculate. It's sad. And I read an interview with Nicole Kidman that she just gave to Glenn Glyph of I think the Los Angeles Daily News. I know he's also written for Premier Magazine. He asked really good questions. And Nicole was very expansive that she didn't do the thing where she pretended that she wasn't married to Tom Cruise and that they didn't make this movie together and spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours going over stuff, scenes, ideas for the movie, take after take after take after take after take with Stanley Kubrick. She goes into a lot of detail about the process. And you know what? Again, give her credit. Maybe the ill feelings, assuming that there were ill feelings, have ebbed over time. I mean, Tom's in his 60s now. Nicole's in her mid-50s. She's getting up there too. She was so young when they first got together. So was he. He was still in his 20s. When they met on the set of Days of Thunder, Tom was 27. And Nicole was in her early 20s. It's kind of strange. She played an ocular surgeon, like an eye doctor who specialized in neurologic concussion-type stuff. She was playing somebody who was probably supposed to be older than Cruise in Days of Thunder. It's okay. It's not a great movie. Basically, it's Top Gun only with Stockings, more or less. Same idea. But it was an arduous shoot. And they all came through. And when Stanley passed in April of 1999, three months before the film was going to be released, it put a damper on everything, because how could it not? They all wanted it. When I say they, I mean also now the late, great Sidney Pollack, the filmmaker and actor who played a critical role in the film. But Sidney Pollack and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, they wanted to celebrate with Stanley. And then suddenly they had to talk about how sad they were and how devastating it was to lose him when he seemed okay. It didn't come across like the person who was on their last legs or on death's door. He seemed like somebody who had a lot more to say. And nobody really knows. Did he die of natural causes? Did he have some kind of a stroke or an embolism or a neurological event that killed him? I don't know. If that happened, nobody ever went public with it. But you see people who are a lot younger than Stanley, such as Steven Spielberg, such as George Lucas, such as Francis Coppola, such as Martin Scorsese, they're still working at full capacity. In the case of Scorsese, past 80, and Coppola, past 80. And Spielberg is getting close. Spielberg, 77. And they still seem to be the picture of health. So don't take for granted. And just as a cineast, when Stanley Kubrick passed, it was terrible. A great voice was forever silenced. And I saw Eyes Wide Shut on its opening day. And the previews and what I read about the movie, it suggested we were going to get a different film than we got. And this is another one of those movies that I will put in a camp with Kubrick's own Clockwork Orange and Ridley Scott, another master filmmaker who's in his 80s and still working at a frenetic pace. He's older than Harrison Ford, and Ridley Scott can't stop working. What is he, 83, 84? He's a fucking dynamo. But if you go into, for example, Blade Runner, as I've said, but for those who haven't heard this, if you go into Blade Runner, if you just read the description and you watch a trailer, it looks like an up-tempo, sci-fi action thriller. It's not. It's sci-fi. It's not up-tempo. It's not a thriller, and it's not an action film. You go in with those expectations, you'll be disappointed. If you go into a Clockwork Orange expecting an exciting film, well, I mean, it is kind of exciting, but not the way that you think. And it's also unlike any science fiction film you're likely to have seen. You have to be patient with it. Well, eyes wide shut, if you go in thinking that there's going to be mystery and thriller elements, there kind of are, but not really. If you go in expecting that movie, you're probably going to be bored to tears. You're going to be waiting for the mystery. What's going to be the mystery? Who's the killer? What killer? What do you mean, what killer? You said it was a murder mystery. I didn't say that. So my first viewing of the film was colored by expectations and understanding, even though I was only 25, that this was Kubrick's last film. Now, I don't like Barry Lyndon. I respect his movie of 1975, Barry Lyndon. He burned, I don't even know how many million candles. I'm not exaggerating. He burned millions of candles to make that movie because a lot of the film is shot indoors and Kubrick did not want to fuck around with real lights. He wanted the lighting to be natural lighting, incandescent from actual candles. That was an impossible production. I have no idea how he pulled it off. The movie, I find it to be a bit of a stick. Won a bunch of Oscars, though. And I think it was Professor Bill Simon at New York University, when he was the chairman of the department when I was there, he said Barry Lyndon was one of the three or four greatest movies ever made under the auspices of the Hollywood studio system. He considered it Kubrick's masterpiece. I don't know what movie he watched. The one that I saw, the first hour took days. It was days for me to get through the first hour, metaphorically speaking. It is very boring. I mean, it doesn't work. But my kind of Kubrick pantheon, I like The Shining, I don't love it. Jack Nicholson is almost playing Jack Nicholson. He's doing an interpretation of how we perceive him in some of even the roles that he had to that point, like Carnal Knowledge, when he just goes fucking berserk on Anne Margaret and just off his rocker kind of stuff. Completely out of control. It's scary, it's beautifully shot, but I understand why Stephen King has kind of gone back and forth because there were plenty of interviews with him, particularly closer to when the film came out, where he thought Kubrick fucked up his book. But as time has gone on, and the release of the movie Dr. Sleep, which King thought was phenomenal, he feels that The Shining is now a better movie. It seems better because of Dr. Sleep. And he's talked about that extensively. That's one thing with Stephen King. He's never afraid to give an interview, especially if it's on one of his books or on horror or topics that he's really interested in. And he seems to never tire of talking about either his book, The Shining, the Kubrick version, the Stephen Webber TV movie from the mid-90s, which King thought was fantastic, or Dr. Sleep and his now favorite filmmaker, Mike Flanagan. But I love Full Metal Jackal. That's my second favorite Kubrick film after Eyes Wide Shut. And then most of the others, like Dr. Strangelove is incredible, but it's not that easy of a movie for me to say, oh my God, I love it. And I feel the same about 2001, A Space Odyssey. It is a very cold, sterile, austere, there's another great word for you, movie. It keeps you at a distance. It is limited, almost robotic. Like the point of the film, kind of a crazy irony that how the computer has more human characteristics than the human characters. Kubrick was operating from a level of intellect where he had ideas that the average person wouldn't have thought of in the first place, things that are not apparent upon first viewing. But with Eyes Wide Shut, realistically, he was only able to get the movie made because he got Tom Cruise to star. Now, Stanley, after the success of Full Metal Jackal, and I argue that it should have had way more acclaim than it did, there were a number of critics, leading critics of the day, people like Roger Ebert, totally got that wrong. I mean, Ebert didn't even, I think he gave it a modified thumbs up for the craftsmanship, but he gave the movie two and a half stars out of four. Hey, Roger, no offense, but you got that one way wrong. Not as wrong as Blue Velvet, giving Blue Velvet one star. That's Roger's biggest miss, in my opinion, the biggest miss of a major film, an all-timer, Blue Velvet. I think Blue Velvet is in the top five greatest films ever made, and Ebert gives it one star. But a lot of critics kind of missed the boat on Full Metal Jackal. Stanley was preparing a film, he had two movies that he tried to get made after Full Metal Jackal and before Eyes Wide Shut, and in both cases, but one time, it was turned down because the project was deemed to be too expensive, and the other, he backed off because he didn't want to get in someone else's way. Now, the first one was The Aryan Papers. Now, he'd always been trying to make a Napoleon film, but at this juncture, he was focused more on these two projects. One was Aryan Papers, and the other was what became AI, Spielberg's film. And the problem with AI was, the technology wasn't quite there to make that movie as cheaply as Spielberg was able to do. The techniques that Stanley wanted to use were prohibitively expensive, and if he had mounted AI when he wanted to, it would have been right around the time of Jurassic Park, he wanted to use the same actor who played Tim, Joseph Mazzella, Kubrick really liked the kid in that. They said the film would have cost $175 plus back then, and as much as they loved Stanley, they couldn't do it. Warner Brothers said, we can't fund this, this is ridiculous. We need a miracle to even come close to breaking even. And the issue with The Aryan Papers, which was right around the same time, Stanley spent a couple of years putting that together, and he was going to cast Julia Roberts in a key role. He had all kinds of ideas and things that he was trying to do, but it was somewhat in the ballpark of Schindler's List. And he backed away. But he didn't want to, he knew what Spielberg was doing, and he knew how much Spielberg had put emotionally into it, and he backed off. And that's when he started to focus on what became Eyes Wide Shut. Now, just before Eyes Wide Shut, he was working on a movie which ended up getting made, I don't remember the filmmaker, but it was called Perfume, Story of a Murderer. And Kubrick, at Barry's point, that was a project that he wanted to do, and that didn't work out for him. So he had all of these unrealized projects, because he thought too big. And Eyes Wide Shut, I don't think that Warner Brothers would have even funded that, because this is ridiculous. This is not a big studio film. So you're telling us the wife doesn't even have an affair, she simply has a fantasy, and the husband completely goes bonkers? What the fuck, yeah? That's it, I just gave you the plot. Oops, spoiler alert, sorry. That's the story of Eyes Wide Shut. Without Tom Cruise, the movie is not getting made. It's not getting made. But with Cruise, Riding High, Mission Impossible, the interview with the vampire had been a hit prior, Eyes Wide Shut, excuse me, Mission Impossible, and a Jerry Maguire, you knew Jerry Maguire was going to be a hit, yada, yada, yada, all this shit. You go ahead, you make the movie. And almost all of it was shot in England. There are second unit shots which were shot on location, Long Island, New York City, but most of the shots of what's supposed to be New York City are set in London. I mean, there's a couple of, I think, great shots of the Northern State Parkway on Long Island, the Long Island Expressway on Long Island. I love that kind of stuff. I've been on that road. I got out of that exit last week. Now, I'm the kind of guy that says that, I'm sorry. Hey, I once did a delivery over there. Yeah, exactly. But for those who haven't seen Eyes Wide Shut, this is not the kind of story where I can spoil anything, because it is not a murder mystery. It is not a thriller. I wouldn't even say that it's a character study. It's a marriage story, is what it is. It's a marriage story. And a recent Nicolas Cage film, Dream Scenario, which I thought was okay. It wasn't great. It was okay. I love Nicolas Cage's performance. It's kind of a loose remake of Eyes Wide Shut. But the basic idea, it's so simple. That was the other thing why this wouldn't have gotten made. You say, why was Kubrick obsessed with this? Why was it worthy of his time and attention, when he had such little time left? Well, Stanley had a very old-fashioned view of marriage. Clearly. And Eyes Wide Shut has an apparently happily married couple, Bill and Alice Harford. Bill is a doctor. I think he's supposed to be a general practitioner. You don't really get any deeper than that. He's a specialized physician. You don't know any of it. He's quite successful, has done very well for himself. And I guess he's supposed to be in his mid-to-late 30s. We don't really know. I think Cruise was actually playing his real age at the time. Tom was, what was he, 34, 35, during filming, in that ballpark. He started filming Eyes Wide Shut just after he completed Jerry McGuire. Within a couple of months. The length of hair, it looks like he grew his hair slightly longer for Eyes Wide Shut. But he has the same look, it's a matter of a couple of months. Because, remember, Mission Impossible, he had a crew cut. That was shot, like, summer, fall 1995. Jerry McGuire was shot months later. Tom's hair grew out. And he seemed, as I say, a little bit further, a little bit more, for Eyes Wide Shut. But Nicole plays Alice, who is an art gallery, like a curator. So she's a big hitter. This is not the cliché of a housewife sitting home with the kids, watching soaps, or in this case, kids, watching soap operas and having vivid fantasies about harlequin romances. No. Alice is every bit as intense and intelligent as her husband, if not more so. That is what the movie gives us. And to Cruise's credit, again, it does not give a Tom Cruise performance. He does everything he can to train the movie star charisma and just try to come across like this. Kind of a schmuck, but he's believable. If you buy into the idea of marriage that Stanley is throwing onto the screen, which is a woman of both characters being judged simply for admitting to having fantasies about other men, not even taking someone's phone number, not gallivanting with a man that she met at the art gallery. Sweetie, I saw a man in line when we were on holiday last year, and I imagined how good it would be to throw everything away, and I would have thrown everything away for one night with that guy. Okay. Any mortal words of Emperor Joseph in Amadeus? Well, there it is. Big deal. In Tom Cruise's archaic way of thinking, she has just confessed the worst possible shit she could ever confess. OMG, my wife is a real live person, a flesh and blood human being who had sexual thoughts about somebody other than me. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I don't feel fine. To paraphrase Michael Stipe. And the movie becomes this kind of nightmarish odyssey. As Tom Cruise's character, he's like a sheep, a wayward sheep who temporarily leaves the flock to find out what else is going on. Maybe there's another flock I can get to. He sees some real crazy shit. Spoiler alert. He doesn't really take part in that much. He thinks he wants to, but he really doesn't. He's just salty, and he's mad because, heaven forbid, his lovely wife has had moments where she maybe wanted to fuck around with a couple of other guys, but she hasn't, and we're led to believe it wasn't even part of the thought process. She fantasized. She wasn't going to actualize. She didn't even look in the window to see what's on sale that means she was going to fight. She didn't even get that far. She didn't even engage in flirtatious banter. Nothing. And it was enough to send her husband off the deep end. So this very old-fashioned view of marriage. To be honest, as a kid, I kind of agreed. Looking now as an older person, no. I think that it's absurd that time reacted that way. But to even think of it in these terms, to think of marriage in such stark terms, sure is a little bit mind-bending. The pun? What does constitute cheating? And certainly in the Internet era, which was burgeoning at the time this movie came out, this movie doesn't get into any of that. But Kubrick, it's too bad he passed when he did because it would have given him more ideas to his incredibly fertile imagination. But there are real discussions about, is cybersex cheating? See, that to me, yes. Cybersex is way worse than Nicole Kidman seeing a strapping football player-looking naval officer in line while they're on holiday and imagining having hours of sex with him. Never saying a word to him. Never following him on the Gram or TikTok. Nothing. Eyes Wide Shut leaves us with so many questions as great art often does not have a set beginning, middle, and end. And as somebody who knows, neither does marriage. It can have a set beginning, middle, and end, but not the way that we necessarily think when we adhere to it. And we don't know, based on the world of the story, what's going to happen to Bill and Alice Harper. It feels like there's a chance that they are going to be okay because now they're going to be able to communicate. There's not going to be the same level of superficial surface detail. He's going to listen to her when she talks to him. He's going to hear her. And he's not going to either jump to conclusions or act like a nursery school kid throwing a tantrum when she tries to open up. This is why Christopher Nolan says, and he's only a little bit hidden, Eyes Wide Shut is 2001. What relationship means? Because you have two people who think they're happy. And they could be happy, but they need to relate to one another better. And isn't that the most obvious thing that many of us either take for granted or have taken for granted? My appreciation for Eyes Wide Shut has grown over the years. And Dream Scenario goes quite pale by comparison. It's nowhere near as good. But in brief, the idea of Dream Scenario is that Nicolas Cage's character somehow starts randomly appearing in the dreams of tens of millions of people around the world. And he is judged for the representation of him in their dreams as if it's real. He is judged partially for his fantasy representation in other people's minds. That is a crock of shit, but that's what happens in that film. And Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise goes off the deep end because his beloved bride confesses to fantasies, just thoughts, not actions. And that's basically the movie. And you're left to ponder not only what it all means, but what do you think about this? How do you feel about this? Do you think that Tom's character was justified in losing his shit? Or is he just being a bitch? I think he's just being a bitch. I think he should have made greater attempts to communicate with his wife. And not just made assumptions. That just because you've been married for six years and you respect her, and she respects you, and you're raising a daughter, and you have a good life, it doesn't mean that she can't think of other things. It doesn't mean that she can't have really dirty, X-rated fantasies about men, or women, that aren't you. Abre los ojos. Open your eyes. And by the end of the movie, Tom Cruise is Bill Harvard. His eyes are open. Now mostly thanks to Cruise, Eyes Wide Shut did turn a significant profit. It was a box office hit. The budget was inflated because of the protracted shooting schedule, but it grossed somewhere between $160 and $165 million. Where 25 years ago, do the math, inflation, it was a significant hit. The reviews were pretty good. There were certain major critics that thought that Eyes Wide Shut, that they put it firmly in Kubrick's top five. But then there were other critics that they were let down. But I feel like there were plenty of people who reacted like I did, where I was let down. And as years went on, I realized that I had misjudged the film because it did something other than what I expected. I wanted it to be a different movie. Selfish. It's not. This is another film you have to be patient with. You have to let it work on you. And you also have to listen. What is Nicole saying? And why is Tom reacting like this? There are lots of lessons for us all in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. The final film, I mean, him and Hitchcock, 1 and 1A, as far as I'm concerned, and Orson Welles, if you want to go back further. But the final film of a true master, who if he didn't go into motion pictures, would have been splitting the atom along with Einstein. That is how intelligent Stanley Kubrick was. He said his IQ was probably 200. It's hard to believe he's 25 years old. Amazing. July 16, 1999. Saw it at the Shorey in Huntington. It's kind of ironic that I ended up moving and living a block and a half from that theater from 2016 until the first part of 2023. So a somewhat solemn happy 25th anniversary to the release date of Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sidney Pollack. This has been episode 247 of the Confessions of a Not-So-Dangerous Mind podcast. I'd like to thank you all for spending some of your very, very steamy and humid and hot and uncomfortable Tuesday afternoon here in New York. But if you caught this episode on the YouTube channel and haven't done so already, please click like, subscribe, comment, share, and turn on those notifications. Or if you catch this episode on the audio platform such as Spotify or iTunes, the same general rule applies. Click like, subscribe, share, and turn on those notifications. I'll be back with a new episode real, real soon. Until then, peace.