Eyes Wide Shut

• 1. Introduction

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  Eyes Wide Shut, the last film Stanley Kubrick finished, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot, at 400 days. During that stretch, a single scene of Tom Cruise walking through a door was filmed 95 times.

  The story follows Bill Harford, a Manhattan doctor. His wife, Alice, tells him she once fantasized about a naval officer she noticed on vacation, and that she even considered leaving Bill and their daughter for him. Shaken, Bill spends a long night drifting through the city. He ends up at a mansion, inside a masked ritual that he has no right to see.

  Kubrick handed his final cut to Warner Bros. in early March 1999. Six days later he died of a heart attack. The film opened that July, sold to the public as a steamy thriller. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a D-. Meanwhile, the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma named it the best film of the year.

  Why would a director spend years on a story about a single marriage? Who decided what the finished film should be once he was gone? And why does a picture marketed as erotic keep being described as something closer to horror?

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• 2. Years in Waiting

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  In 1968, Kubrick read Arthur Schnitzler's novella Dream Story while he hunted for a project to follow 2001: A Space Odyssey. With help from the journalist Jay Cocks, he bought the filming rights. Then came roughly a decade of false starts.

  For much of that time, Kubrick imagined the material as a sex comedy "with a wild and somber streak running through it." Steve Martin or Woody Allen would have played the lead. In the 1980s his wish list grew to include Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Albert Brooks, Alan Alda and Sam Shepard.

  The project came back to life in 1994, when Kubrick hired Frederic Raphael to work on the script. He also invited his friend Michael Herr, who had helped write Full Metal Jacket, to make revisions. Herr declined. He feared being underpaid and trapped in a long production. The years that followed gave that worry some weight.

  In 1995, Warner Bros. president Terry Semel approved the film and made one request. He wanted a genuine movie star in the lead, something he said Kubrick had not done since casting Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Kubrick, for his part, wanted a real married couple. Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were considered, as were Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.

  He settled on Tom Cruise, whom he admired from Born on the Fourth of July, and Nicole Kidman. Kidman was in England filming The Portrait of a Lady. She and Cruise decided to visit Kubrick at his estate in Childwickbury, and after that meeting he gave them the roles. Variety announced the casting on the 17th of December 1995. Kubrick also persuaded both stars to take no other work until his film was finished.

  The supporting cast was less stable. Harvey Keitel, cast as Victor Ziegler, left first, to appear in Finding Graceland. Jennifer Jason Leigh, cast as Marion Nathanson, followed while shooting eXistenZ with David Cronenberg. Both had already filmed scenes for Kubrick, and both reportedly cited scheduling conflicts. Sydney Pollack took over for Keitel, and Marie Richardson replaced Leigh.

  Decades later, Keitel said he quit because he felt Kubrick had "disrespected" him. Gary Oldman added that the breaking point came when Kubrick asked for dozens of takes of Keitel's character walking through a doorway.

  Other casting stories are gentler. In a 2025 interview, John Turturro claimed Kubrick wrote the role of the pianist Nick Nightingale for him, and that he turned it down by accident through a misunderstanding. Kubrick offered the part to Todd Field instead. Alan Cumming said he auditioned six times for his small part as a hotel clerk.

  Vinessa Shaw won the role of Domino from a tape. As she recalled, "twice I was called in and I was hired off of tape because Stanley Kubrick didn’t fly anywhere."

  The role of Mandy, the young woman Bill helps at the Christmas party, was first offered to Eva Herzigová, who declined. Julienne Davis took it. The film implies that Mandy and the masked woman at the orgy are the same person. Davis appears as a masked participant in the background of that sequence. For the dialogue scenes with Cruise, however, Abigail Good took her place.

  In 2019 it emerged that Good could not manage a convincing American accent. Cate Blanchett had supplied the masked woman's voice instead. Cruise and Kidman suggested her, and she recorded the lines after Kubrick's death.

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• 3. Dream Story Rewritten

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  Schnitzler's 1926 novella follows a Viennese doctor named Fridolin and his wife, Albertina. It is set during Carnival, the season when masks turn up at parties, and it opens at a masquerade ball. Kubrick and Raphael moved everything to Greenwich Village in the 1990s. They renamed the couple Bill and Alice, and they began the story at Christmas time.

  The surname Harford was a private joke. Raphael wrote, in an introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of the novella, that Fridolin is never declared to be Jewish. Even so, his cowardice in failing to challenge an aggressor echoes the unease of Austrian Jews facing Gentile provocation. Kubrick often removed references to Jewishness from the novels he adapted. He wanted Bill to be a "Harrison Ford-ish goy," and he built the surname Harford as a nod to the actor.

  The password changed too. In the novella, the sparsely attended party demands the word "Denmark," which echoes Albertina's confessed infatuation with a Danish soldier. In the film, the password is "Fidelio." The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum observes that both words echo one spouse's behavior, though in opposite ways.

  At the novella's party, most guests dress as nuns or monks. Fridolin wears a monk's costume, and the woman who redeems him is dressed as a nun. The original screenplay kept this idea, but the filmed version dropped it.

  In the book, the emotional peak may be Albertina's dream, which leaves Fridolin hating her more than ever as they lie together "like mortal enemies." The film shifts the weight toward Bill's visit to the secret society, whose content is more shocking on screen.

  The most important addition has no counterpart in Schnitzler: Victor Ziegler. He stands for the wealth and prestige Bill covets. He also links Bill's everyday world to the secret society behind the ball. The critic Randy Rasmussen reads Ziegler as Bill's worst self, in the way other Kubrick films pair a hero with a darker double. Dr. Strangelove embodies the worst of the American security establishment. In The Shining, Charles Grady reflects the worst of Jack Torrance. And in Lolita, Clare Quilty is the worst of Humbert Humbert.

  Late in the film, Ziegler explains the whole affair to Bill. He says the party incident, in which Bill is caught, threatened and finally saved by a woman's sacrifice, was staged. Whether the audience should believe him is left open. His speech lays out how the powerful see the world.

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• 4. Night Shoots at Pinewood

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  Principal photography began on the 4th of November 1996. Kubrick had planned a three-month shoot, running from the 28th of October 1996 to the 7th of February 1997. His perfectionism wrecked that schedule. Script pages were rewritten on set. He deliberately repeated scenes to wear down the actors and coax out something more authentic, and many scenes were filmed upward of 70 times.

  Vinessa Shaw was contracted for two weeks and a single scene, and she ended up working for two months. Kidman remembered it this way: "Stanley didn’t work under the gun. Time was the most important thing to him. He was willing to give up location to save money, but he wasn’t willing to give up time."

  All filming happened at night, under a heavy campaign of secrecy that Kubrick's small crew helped maintain. The relentless pace exhausted the team, and morale was reported to be low. Cruise developed an ulcer and did not tell Kubrick. Filming finished in June 1998, with the budget at $65 million.

  Kubrick's fear of flying kept the production in England. Only some exterior footage was shot in New York, and it was rear projected behind Cruise in a few street scenes. At Pinewood Studios, the crew built a detailed Greenwich Village and the interiors of the Harfords' apartment. Kubrick sent production designers to Manhattan to measure the width of the streets and note where the newspaper vending machines stood.

  The mansion called Somerton was stitched together from three real estates. Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire supplied the exterior, Elveden Hall in Suffolk the interiors, and Highclere Castle in Hampshire more interior rooms. Hatton Garden in London stood in for a Greenwich Village street. The toy store Hamleys doubled for FAO Schwarz in the last scene, and the Lanesborough Hotel became the Nathansons' apartment. Scenes also went before the cameras at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Julienne Davis recalled that the morgue scene was shot in a disused bacon factory in St Albans, Hertfordshire.

  Cinematographer Larry Smith had worked as a gaffer on Barry Lyndon and The Shining before Kubrick chose him for this film. Wherever he could, he used lights visible in the frame, such as lamps and Christmas tree bulbs. When those fell short, he softened scenes with Chinese paper lamps. The film stock was push processed to deepen color and sharpen highlights. Smith said the technique "made the lights appear to be much brighter than they were" and gave a "wonderful warm glow."

  Kubrick supervised every visual element in a frame, down to the color of the walls. Kidman said her scenes with the naval officer, played by Gary Goba, took three days to film. Kubrick wanted them to be "almost pornographic."

  The masks for the orgy came from the carnival balls in Schnitzler's book. Costume designer Marit Allen said Kubrick felt they belonged to the imaginary world of that scene and "created the impression of menace, but without exaggeration." A shipment on the scale of Venice's own carnival was sent to London. Kubrick chose who would wear each one.

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• 5. A Score of Strings

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  Choreographer Yolande Snaith had been rehearsing the masked-ball scene to a track called "Backwards Priests." Composer Jocelyn Pook had built it from a recording of a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy, made in a church in Baia Mare and played in reverse. When Kubrick heard it, he phoned Pook and asked whether she had anything else that was "weird" like it. A reworked version became "Masked Ball" in the final cut, and Pook was hired.

  She wrote and recorded four pieces totaling 24 minutes, often building on her earlier work. They are mostly strings, including a viola that she played herself. She left out brass and woodwinds because she "just couldn't justify these other textures." She also wanted the music under dialogue-heavy scenes to be "subliminal," and she felt those instruments would intrude.

  As in other Kubrick films, classical music does much of the work. The opening titles play Shostakovich's Waltz No. 2 from his "Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra," a piece misidentified as "Jazz Suite No. 2." A recurring motif comes from the second movement of György Ligeti's piano cycle "Musica ricercata."

  Kubrick had first planned to use "Im Treibhaus," from Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder. He swapped in the Ligeti because the Wagner song seemed "too beautiful." In the morgue, the soundtrack offers Franz Liszt's late piano piece "Nuages Gris," or "Grey Clouds," from 1881. Mozart's "Rex tremendae," from the Requiem, plays as Bill walks into a café and reads about Mandy's death.

  Another orgy track, "Migrations," features a Tamil song sung by Manickam Yogeswaran, a Carnatic singer. The original cut used a scriptural recitation from the Bhagavad Gita, taken from one of his earlier recordings. The South African Hindu Mahasabha protested. Warner Bros. issued a public apology and hired the singer to record a similar track to replace the chant.

  Ziegler's party plays rearranged love songs, including "When I Fall in Love" and "It Had to Be You." The songs grow more ironic as Alice and Bill flirt with strangers. Pook's score earned a Golden Globe nomination for best original score. It also earned a Stinkers Bad Movie Award for most intrusive musical score.

  Kidman was nervous about her nude scenes, so Kubrick told her she could bring her own music to the set. She brought a Chris Isaak CD, and he approved it. He then used Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing" in an early embrace between Bill and Alice. The same song later played in the film's trailer.

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• 6. Trees, Masks and Paintings

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  Almost every set in Eyes Wide Shut glows with colored lights, and critics have argued over why. The writer Michael Koresky believes Kubrick chose Christmas for its symbolism of renewal. Mario Falsetto notes a practical payoff: the lights let Kubrick shoot by the lamps already in the scene, as he had in Barry Lyndon. Janet Maslin wrote that the film "gives an otherworldly radiance and personality to Christmas lights."

  Lee Siegel of Harper's sees the Christmas tree as the film's recurring symbol. In his words, "desire is like Christmas: it always promises more than it delivers." The author Tim Kreider points out that the mansion at Somerton is the only set without a tree. Louise Kaplan adds that the film shows the "material reality of money" replacing charity and compassion. Despite the trees, she notes, there is "no Christmas music or cheery Christmas spirit." The critic Alonso Duralde calls it a "Christmas movie for grownups."

  Masks carry just as much weight. Historians and mask merchants note that Venetian masks have long been worn during promiscuous pursuits. Kreider and Thomas Nelson tie their use to Venice's reputation for both eroticism and trade. Nelson sees the orgy as a blend of Venetian Carnival and Catholic rites. Its figure of "Red Cloak" serves as both Grand Inquisitor and King of Carnival. In his reading, the ritual mirrors the darker truth behind Ziegler's glittering party.

  Carolin Ruwe, in a book on the film's symbols, calls the mask its prime symbol. Kreider notes that the prostitute is renamed Domino in the film, which is also a type of Venetian mask. Nicole M. Berg describes many of the masks as "classic Venetian masks" with "centuries-old Luciferian styles."

  A third reading focuses on class. The scholar Arthur Versluis sees what he calls a "political gnosis," the revelation that behind an elite's wealth lies initiation into a corrupt secret network. He also notes the film's suggestion of human trafficking. Versluis believes the title plays on "seeing what is in front of us (eyes wide open) and yet not seeing." Peter Bradshaw reads the same theme through the Harfords' marriage, noting how close sexual rejection is to social exclusion.

  Some viewers have compared the orgy to the Surrealist Ball of 1972, held by Marie-Hélène and Guy de Rothschild. The talk grew because part of the film was shot at Mentmore Towers, once a Rothschild estate. Mike Rothschild, in a 2023 book on conspiracy theories, calls the parallel unfounded. The ball was not an orgy, and its photographs were not public until the 2010s.

  The walls carry their own clues. Paintings by Kubrick's wife Christiane and his stepdaughter Katharina Kubrick Hobbs hang mostly in the Harfords' home. One, titled "View from the Mentmore," sits beside the Christmas tree and refers to the mansion's exterior. At Ziegler's party, Bill passes Giulio Bergonzoli's sculpture Gli amori degli angeli, inspired by a Thomas Moore poem about three angels who fall in love with mortal women.

  In the café late in the film, two Pre-Raphaelite paintings hang on facing walls. They are John William Waterhouse's Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca. Both echo events in the story. In a hospital corridor, Bill walks past Jann Haworth's painting Aunt Gurdi Burning, from 1995. It belongs to the permanent collection of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where the scene was filmed.

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• 7. The Last Cut

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  Editor Nigel Galt began cutting footage on the 30th of December 1996, while cameras were still rolling. He and Kubrick worked on an Avid system. The load grew so heavy that Galt asked for help, and Melanie Viner-Cuneo and Claus Wehlisch joined him, often putting in 12-hour days. By mid-February 1999, with Warner Bros.' March deadline looming, Galt was working up to 15 hours daily.

  Kubrick usually screened final cuts in England. This time he sent the first cut to New York for the sake of Cruise and Kidman. It was shown to them and to studio executives at Warner's Fifth Avenue headquarters. Semel said Kubrick "felt really great about the film" and that the studio was "really thrilled." He described the remaining work as titles, "a couple of color corrections, and some technical things."

  Kubrick then held a second screening at his Childwickbury home for a British Warner representative. His sudden death came soon afterward. On the 13th of March 1999, the day after his funeral, Galt resumed post-production with Viner-Cuneo, Leon Vitali, Jan Harlan and Kubrick's wife, Christiane.

  The studio insisted that Kubrick had delivered his final cut. Even so, the film was still in its last stages, and Warner Bros. finished it together with Kubrick's estate. Journalists and viewers debated whether the remaining work was purely technical. Decisions on sound mixing, scoring and color correction would have been made without him. Kubrick also had a habit of editing until the last minute, sometimes after public screenings, as he had with 2001 and The Shining.

  Michael Herr wrote in Vanity Fair about a call from Kubrick four days before his death. The director said there was looping to do, the music was unfinished, and many small fixes remained on color and sound. He hated having to show unfinished work, but he had to show it to Cruise and Kidman for nudity releases, and to Semel and Bob Daly.

  Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, takes a harsher view. He believes the studio "grabbed the highest number Avid edit and ran off as if that was the movie." To him it does not feel like Kubrick's own film.

  Galt disagrees. In 2025 he said nothing happened to the film, even after Kubrick's death, that Kubrick was unaware of or had not planned. Only mundane work remained, such as establishing exterior shots. "That cut is Stanley's cut the day he died," Galt said. "There was no Illuminati."

  Kidman wrote of the odd timing. The film opened on the 16th of July 1999, the same weekend John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and her sister died. For her, the whole period felt "dark and strange."

  What Kubrick himself thought is also disputed. His brother-in-law and executive producer Jan Harlan said he was "very happy" and considered it his "greatest contribution to the art of cinema." The actor R. Lee Ermey told Radar magazine a different story. He said Kubrick phoned two weeks before his death, disgusted with the film and sure critics would "have him for lunch." Ermey also said Kubrick claimed Cruise and Kidman had their way with him.

  Todd Field rejected that account in a 2006 interview. He said he had never seen two actors so deferential to a director. In his telling, Kubrick was thrilled and spent one of the happiest weekends of his life after showing the cut. "And he probably died because he finally relaxed," Field said.

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• 8. Rated and Reappraised

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  The first footage anyone outside the studio saw was a teaser shown to theater owners at the 1999 ShoWest convention in Las Vegas. In it, Cruise and Kidman's characters caress in front of a mirror. Television spots used music by Chris Isaak and Ligeti, and revealed little of the plot. Press kits carried no production notes at all, in keeping with Kubrick's secrecy. They did not include even his marketing suggestions to Semel, given a week before he died. The film appeared on the cover of Time and on shows such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood.

  Posters were designed by Christiane Kubrick and her daughter Katharina, who photographed Cruise and Kidman full-face and used Photoshop to make them look like Venetian masks. Warner Bros. rejected the designs because the images hid the stars' faces. The approved one-sheet shows the couple kissing, framed in a mirror used as a prop in the Harfords' apartment. Katharina later said the rejected originals "really hold up."

  The marketing pointed toward an erotic thriller, and critics disagreed about the label. Christiane Kubrick said the film "has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with fear." The academic Lindiwe Dovey wrote that audiences expecting an erotic thriller instead received "a kind of horror thriller." Writing in 2019, Joe Lipsett said it was a "journey of self-realization of a close-minded narcissist."

  A more concrete fight involved ratings. Citing a contractual obligation to deliver an R rating, Warner Bros. digitally placed extra figures in the orgy to block graphic sexuality and avoid an NC-17. Larry Smith recalled five screenings with the MPAA, each time with demands to cut more. Roger Ebert wrote that the technique "should not have been done at all." Ebert has often been quoted comparing the American version to the "Austin Powers" version. His review, though, said that joke referred to an early rough draft of the altered scene, which was never publicly released.

  The film premiered at the Westwood Village Theatre in Los Angeles on the 13th of July 1999 and opened across the United States on the 16th. Venice screened it on the 1st of September, and Paris on the 2nd. In the United Kingdom it opened on the 10th of September.

  In the United States, the film topped the weekend chart with $21.7 million from 2,411 screens, beating the studio's $20 million hope. It was Cruise's sixth consecutive chart topper. The total reached $55,691,208 domestically, which placed it behind only 2001 among Kubrick's American earners, though both were considered disappointments. In Britain it opened at number one with £1,189,672. Overseas earnings of more than $105 million lifted the worldwide total to $162,091,208. That made it Kubrick's highest-grossing film.

  Critics were split. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 76% approval rating from 164 reviews, and Metacritic gives a score of 69 out of 100 from 34 reviews. More than fifty critics named it among 1999's best films. Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune called it a masterpiece. Ebert gave it three and a half stars out of four, praising its "odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone." Janet Maslin found it "dead-serious," with Kubrick's dreamlike intensity "in full force."

  Others were unimpressed. Manohla Dargis called the orgy "banal" and "surprisingly tame." Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post called it the "dullest orgy he'd ever seen." Owen Gleiberman said the soundstage New York lacked bustle. David Edelstein asked who these people were, so shocked by sexual fantasies the culture absorbed decades ago. J. Hoberman said it "feels like a rough draft at best." France was kinder, giving it a César nomination for best foreign film and a win from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics.

  Martin Scorsese argued that every Kubrick picture except his earliest was first misunderstood. The realization that 2001, Barry Lyndon or The Shining was unique, he wrote, came "after five or ten years." The film's standing has risen. In 2012, Slant Magazine ranked it the second greatest film of the 1990s. In 2022, IndieWire named it the decade's best. The BBC placed it at number 61 on its list of the 100 greatest American films.

  The uncensored version reached home video late. Warner's VHS and DVD releases on the 7th of March 2000, and a 2001 reissue, carried the censored American cut. A 2007 release finally presented the uncensored film, although the packaging wrongly claimed both cuts were included. On the 25th of November 2025, the Criterion Collection issued a 4K and Blu-ray edition. It uses a new master scanned from the original 35 mm camera negatives, and its cover reuses one of the posters Warner Bros. had rejected.

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