Jan Harlan (executive producer): Stanley’s idea was to show a modern hell, a very abstract concept, a hell into which people enter out of boredom – money and wealth won’t do it any longer. Did he succeed? In Mediterranean countries and in Japan, yes, if one can generalise – in the UK and the USA, no. Arthur Schnitzler’s source novel had nuns, shocking in the 1920s, now obsolete; Stanley just upgraded this. I flew to Venice and bought the masks, all different – I know every mask shop and studio, as I was guided by a local lady. It was not too hard to solve this last-minute problem. Originally the voyeurs had half-masks, more in keeping with Vienna, but this would not work as a total disguise. The Indian Palace, the strange music, the masked girls, all this to make the scene as unreal as possible.
Katharina Kubrick: I think a lot of people, especially in America and England, were expecting something more salacious, and not the serious film that it turned out to be. When you hold a mirror to society, frequently society rebels and says, ‘No, that can’t possibly be the way we behave.’ The film did well in Japan and I know that Warner Brothers had people standing outside cinemas there, and couples were coming out of the movie hand in hand. But think about the conversations those couples were going to have after seeing this film…
I don’t think it’s a film for younger people. I think you have to have lived a bit and know what it’s like to feel jealous and upset and have fantasies. That’s why it also took him forever to make it. It was one of the first contracts he made with Warner Brothers in 1970 and then he sat on it. He and my mother said, ‘We really need to live a bit longer and have more life experience before we deal with this enormous subject.’ In the end he was very proud of it. He said he thought it was his greatest film.
Anthony Frewin (Kubrick’s assistant): Stanley once said he did not want to point out the ‘blindingly obvious’ but it needed to be stated anyway – that there is no correct interpretation of any creative work, that you only get out of it what you bring to it. And, as we know, his films have never lacked interpretations, but there’s one recent one I think would have appealed to him: the Freudian critic Mary Wild’s suggestion that the naval officer is in fact the navel officer. Perhaps he was aware of this but kept it to himself. Very puckish. Very Stanley.
Frederic Raphael (co-writer): ‘Je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ was Picasso’s retort to a pious inquiry about how he looked for ideas. His use of a set of handlebars to confect a metal goat was a typical example of literal recycling. Henry Moore was inspired by weathered rocks; Tracey Emin by weathered beds. The litter of earlier material disposed Stanley Kubrick, as it did ancient Greek tragedians, to select his subjects from existing sources; Barry Lyndon (1975) – from an 1844 novel by William Thackeray – the least likely, most faithful instance. ‘Make it new’ depends on there being something old.
Eyes Wide Shut is a translation in both time and place: Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna of the 1880s in his source novel Dream Story (Traumnovelle) became ‘today’s’ New York, constructed at Pinewood. What passed for ‘now’ included ‘then’: the New York City of Stanley’s adolescence. Woody Allen mocked the lavishness of what was supposed to be a young doctor’s Central Park West home, but the dreamy aspect of Schnitzler’s novel sanctioned subjective distortion. The title Eyes Wide Shut was devised, in a blink, by Stanley, after I had proposed ‘Woman Unknown’. While Stanley incited me to re/present a Viennese marriage in modern dress and dialogue, he reverted, with pious regularity, to what he called ‘Arthur’s beats’: the movie should honour Schnitzler’s dreamy source. This included, so Stanley insisted for a long time, the ending in which the story’s sleep-walking antihero finds himself awake and back in the conjugal bed.
During more than two years of collaboration, Stanley and I met, always at his barbed-wire fenced compound near St Alban’s, only three or four times, for lunch. No one else was ever present. We never sat down to discuss problems on the script. Our practical conversations, often of an hour or two, were on the phone. After Stanley had studied the pages I had faxed, he would say that he liked this or, as time went on and he became more anxious, did not like that. Legend promises that, in the 1960s, he had toyed with making an art version of a blue movie with Terry Southern, when they were working on Dr. Strangelove (1963). The closer he came to shooting Eyes Wide Shut, the more anxious he became about how to double the outrageous with the permissible. He scanned whorehouse brochures on Japanese TV in the hope of happening on clues.
Schnitzler’s ‘beats’ did not embrace any account of who organised the orgy. The episode concluded with a manifestly dreamy escape in a horse-drawn cab. I reminded Stanley that the enigmatic ending of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) had not given short measure a good name. Eventually, Stanley asked for some plausible background for what the orgy’s master of ceremonies, a millionaire whom I called Ziegler (played by Sydney Pollack), regularly organised. One critic has insisted Ziegler’s name was culled from some 14th-century Hasidic rabbi. In fact, I nabbed it from a garrulous agent who represented me in 1969.
In response to Stanley’s request, I typed out several pages of what purported to be an undercover FBI agent’s dossier on Ziegler and his friends. Their sexual extravaganzas were alleged to have been staged in honour of J.F.K. I faxed my pages to Stanley and was almost instantly called back, in a voice I had never heard before. He wanted me to tell him right away where I got ‘this stuff’. I said, ‘From between my ears.’ He said, ‘Freddie, don’t fool around with me. This is confidential material. Where did you get hold of it?’ ‘Stanley,’ I said, ‘I’m a writer. I make things up.’ Even provocateurs can dread the knock on the door.
Eventually I convinced Stanley that there should be a final scene with Ziegler which would explain some of the things that had happened in the ‘dream’. He turned down an early version, although he liked it, because ‘It needs Bogart and Greenstreet and unfortunately I can’t get them, so… would you do it again?’ He used to ask the same thing of his actors. He did not know what he was looking for, but – like Picasso – he recognised it when he came across it. How come Eyes Wide Shut seems, as the cant says, ‘more relevant’ after 20 years? Images sometimes gather significance. Freud was another great admirer of ‘Arthur’; dreams were Sigmund’s objets trouvés.
Sight and Sound, December 2019
EYES WIDE SHUT
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
©/Presented by: Warner Bros.
Production Company: Pole Star
Made by: Hobby Films Ltd
Executive Producer: Jan Harlan
Produced by: Stanley Kubrick
Co-producer: Brian W. Cook
Production Associate: Michael Doven
Production Accountant: John Trehy
Production Co-ordinator: Kate Garbett
Production Manager: Margaret Adams
2nd Unit Production Manager: Lisa Leone
Location Managers: Simon McNair Scott, Angus More Gordon
Location Research: Manuel Harlan
Assistant to the Director: Leon Vitali
Assistant: Stanley Kubrick: Anthony Frewin
1st Assistant Director: Brian W. Cook
2nd Assistant Director: Adrian Toynton
3rd Assistant Directors: Becky Hunt, Rhun Francis
Script Supervisor: Ann Simpson
Casting: Denise Chamian, Leon Vitali
Extras Casting: 20-20 Casting
Screenplay by: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael
Inspired by ‘Traumnovelle’ by: Arthur Schnitzler
Lighting Cameraman: Larry Smith
2nd Unit Cinematography: Patrick Turley, Malik Sayeed, Arthur Jaffa
Camera Operator: Martin Hume
Steadicam Operators: Elizabeth Ziegler, Peter Cavaciuti
2nd Unit Steadicam Operator: Jim C. McConkey
Video Co-ordinator: Andrew Haddock
Stills Photography: Manuel Harlan
Digital Visual Effects/Animation: Computer Film Company
Editor: Nigel Galt
1st Assistant Editor: Melanie Viner Cuneo
Avid Assistant Editor: Claus Wehlisch
Assistant Editor: Claire Ferguson
Production Designers: Les Tomkins, Roy Walker
Supervising Art Director: Kevin Phipps
Art Director: John Fenner
Set Decorators: Terry Wells Sr, Lisa Leone
Original Paintings by: Christiane Kubrick, Katharina Hobbs
Draughtspersons: Stephen Dobric, Jon Billington
Property Master: Terry Wells Jr
Construction Manager: John Maher
Costume Designer: Marit Allen
Costume Supervisor: Nancy Thompson
Wardrobe Mistress: Jacqueline Durran
Make-up: Robert McCann
Hair: Kerry Warn
Titles: Chapman Beauvais
Title Opticals: General Screen Enterprises
Original Music by: Jocelyn Pook
Music Consultant: Didier De Cottigniers
Choreographer: Yolande Snaith
Sound Recordist: Edward Tise
Sound Maintenance: Tony Bell
Re-recording Mixers: Graham V. Hartstone, Michael A. Carter, Nigel Galt, Anthony Cleal
Supervising Sound Editor: Paul Conway
Sound Editing: Sound Design Company
Foley Editor: Becki Ponting
Camera Technical Adviser: Joe Dunton
Medical Adviser: Dr C.J. Scheiner
Journalistic Adviser: Larry Celona
Dialect Coach to Ms Nicole Kidman: Elizabeth Himelstein
Venetian Masks Research: Barbara Del Greco
Studio: Pinewood Studios
Cast
Tom Cruise (Dr William Harford)
Nicole Kidman (Alice Harford)
Sydney Pollack (Victor Ziegler)
Marie Richardson (Marion Nathanson)
Rade Sherbedgia (Milich)
Todd Field (Nick Nightingale)
Vinessa Shaw (Domino)
Alan Cumming (desk clerk)
Sky Dumont (Sandor Szavost)
Fay Masterson (Sally)
LeeLee Sobieski (Milich’s daughter)
Thomas Gibson (Carl)
Madison Eginton (Helena Harford)
Jackie Sawiris (Roz)
Leslie Lowe (Illona)
Peter Benson (bandleader)
Michael Doven (Ziegler’s secretary)
Louise Taylor (Gayle)
Stewart Thorndike (Nuala Windsor)
Randall Paul (Harris)
Julienne Davis (Mandy)
Lisa Leone (Lisa, receptionist)
Kevin Connealy (Lou Nathanson)
Mariana Hewett (Rosa)
Dan Rollman, Gavin Perry, Chris Pare, Adam Lias, Christian Clarke, Kyle Whitcombe (rowdy college kids)
Gary Goba (naval officer)
Florian Windorfer (Café Sonata maître d’)
Togo Igawa (Japanese man 1)
Eiji Kusuhara (Japanese man 2)
Sam Douglas (cab driver)
Angus MacInnes (gateman 1)
Abigail Good (mysterious woman)
Brian W. Cook (tall butler)
Leon Vitali (Red Cloak)
Carmela Marner (waitress at Gillespie’s)
Phil Davies (stalker)
Cindy Dolenc (girl at Sharky’s)
Clark Hayes (hospital receptionist)
Treva Etienne (morgue orderly)
Colin Angus, Karla Ashley, Kathryn Charman, James DeMaria, Anthony Desergio, Janie Dickens, Laura Fallace, Vanessa Fenton, Georgina Finch, Peter Godwin, Abigail Good, Joanna Heath, Lee Henshaw, Ateeka Poole, Adam Pudney, Sharon Quinn, Ben De Sausmarez, Emma Lou Sharratt, Paul Spelling, Matthew Thompson, Dan Travers, Russell Trigg, Kate Whalin (masked party principals)
USA/UK 1999©
159 mins
Digital
BIG SCREEN CLASSICS
Little Women
Sun 1 Dec 18:10; Mon 16 Dec 14:30; Fri 20 Dec 17:50
My Night with Maud Ma nuit chez Maud
Mon 2 Dev 18:10; Thu 5 Dec 12:20; Tue 17 Dec 20:30
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
Tue 3 Dec 20:35; Sat 21 Dec 14:50
When Harry Met Sally
Wed 4 Dec 18:10 + intro by Ruby McGuigan, BFI Programme and Acquisitions; Fri 20 Dec 20:50; Sun 22 Dec 12:15
Torch Song Trilogy
Fri 6 Dec 18:05; Fri 13 Dec 20:30
Female Trouble
Fri 6 Dec 20:50; Wed 18 Dec 20:50; Sun 29 Dec 18:30
Fanny and Alexander Fanny och Alexander
Sat 7 Dec 19:30; Sun 29 Dec 14:15
The City of Lost Children La Cité des enfants perdus
Sun 8 Dec 15:15; Fri 27 Dec 20:45
Tangerine
Mon 9 Dec 20:45; Sat 21 Dec 20:45
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Wed 11 Dec 18:10 + intro by Justin Johnson, BFI Lead Programmer, Thu 19 Dec 12:30; Sun 22 Dec 18:30
Carol
Thu 12 Dec 12:20; Sat 21 Dec 20:40; Mon 30 Dec 17:50
Eyes Wide Shut
Sat 14 Dec 20:00; Wed 18 Dec 17:40; Sat 28 Dec 17:00
Goodfellas
Sun 15 Dec 17:50; Mon 23 Dec 20:10; Sat 28 Dec 20:15
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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