| | | | Ahoy, mateys! Fidelio, and welcome to another thrilling installment of "In Review."
Christmas season is upon us, which means that people across the country will once again be obsessively watching Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" with their entire families as per tradition. In order to celebrate this magical time of year, IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio has spearheaded an entire week of articles devoted to Kubrick's final masterpiece, including several exclusive interviews with key members of the production. This week's newsletter is entirely devoted to that effort, because why wouldn't be?
Now, as a certain Dr. Bill might say: "Where, exactly… are we going? Exactly?"
This Week… - Welcome to "Eyes Wide Shut" Week
- "Eyes Wide Shut" is the best movie of the '90s
- An interview with DP Larry Smith
- Todd Field on becoming Nick Nightingale
- Shooting 2nd Unit for Stanley Kubrick
 The first-ever Criterion Collection release of “Eyes Wide Shut” — and in 4K! — has courted controversy ever since the company announced it earlier this year. Is this version, supervised by director of photography Larry Smith and created from the 35mm original camera negative of the uncensored international version, true to what audiences saw in theaters in 1999, or revisionist? What’s with those damn teals flooding into Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice’s (Nicole Kidman) bedroom during night sequences, once a deep, rich blue in previous home video releases? And is the 1.85:1 aspect ratio the way Kubrick intended the film to screen? Much was left unanswered when he died less than a week after screening an early cut to Warner Bros. and his actors.
Whatever your take on the color grade or formatting, Criterion’s new transfer is the highest-quality version yet made available — at least, according to someone who has purchased every DVD and Blu-ray release of the film over the last two decades. And it thankfully puts to rest that dreaded R-rated version screened in the United States, where digital figures (per editor Nigel Galt’s begrudging suggestion) were inserted to block sex acts performed during the masquerade orgy Dr. Bill infiltrates. The Criterion edition is, in other words, the definitive release of a movie IndieWire deemed the best film of the 1990s. Or as definitive as they get, as even star Todd Field in IndieWire’s recent interview timed to “Eyes Wide Shut Week” suggested that what Kubrick screened before he died was “Stanley’s first cut.”
Though “Eyes Wide Shut” is very much the ultimate Christmas movie, throughout this Thanksgiving holiday week, IndieWire unveiled a slate of interviews with those who worked closely on the film: Smith, Galt, Todd Field, second-unit director Lisa Leone, and second-unit cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed. Some, like Galt, have rarely gone on record to talk about what he described as “the most uneventful film I’ve been on — other than it took three years.” But the mysteries of “Eyes Wide Shut” and the “Room 237”-style conspiracy theories that followed it are all part of the myth that has grown around Kubrick as a director whom people close-read as if looking for patterns in the clouds: They’re there if you’re looking. But for Kubrick and a movie like “Eyes Wide Shut,” it’s all right there on the screen. Perhaps, as reads the ominous note handed to Dr. Bill through the gate outside the masquerade’s grounds, you must “give up your inquiries, which are completely useless.” But Criterion’s release, and words from Kubrick’s collaborators, hopefully are cause for new inquiries that will carry “Eyes Wide Shut” into its next life. —Ryan Lattanzio
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| "EYES WIDE SHUT" is the best film of the '90s |
Nobody knows exactly when Stanley Kubrick first read Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 “Traumnovelle” (did Kubrick find it in his father’s library sometime in the 1940s, or did Kirk Douglas’ psychiatrist give it to him on the set of “Spartacus,” as the actor once claimed?), but what is known for certain is that Kubrick had been actively trying to adapt it for at least 26 years by the time “Eyes Wide Shut” began principal production in November 1996, and that he suffered a fatal heart attack just two days after screening his near-final cut for the film’s stars and executives in March 1999. In that light, it’s hard to say if the process of making the movie — a process that famously included what was, at the time, the longest continuous shoot ever recorded for a narrative feature — is what killed Kubrick, or if it’s what had been keeping him alive. Either way, his death only adds to the mystique of the masterpiece that had mattered to him above all others, a crepuscular vision of identity, obsession, and the ultimate reconciliation between dreams and reality.
And yet “Eyes Wide Shut” hardly requires its astounding meta-textual mythology (which includes the tabloid fascination around Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s ill-fated marriage) to earn its place as the definitive film of the 1990s. What’s more important is that its release in the last year of the last decade of the 20th century feels like a fated rhyme for the fin-de-siècle energy of Schnitzler’s novella — set in Vienna roughly 100 years earlier — a rhyme that resonates with another story about upper-class people floating so high above their own lives they can see the whole world clearly save for the abyss that’s yawning open at their feet.
Side-eyed for years before the film’s beguiling power began to more fully reveal itself (Kubrick’s swan-song proving to be every inch as mysterious and rich with meaning as “The Shining” or “2001: A Space Odyssey”), “Eyes Wide Shut” is a clenched sleepwalk through a swirl of overlapping dream states. Its ample tension — often as sudden and sibylline as arousal itself — is generated by a once-unflappable man’s urgent search for equilibrium after his wife shares a sexual fantasy that shatters his sense of self and sends him teetering down the rabbit-hole of his own fear and desire.
One night, the good Dr. Bill Harford is the same toothy and confident Tom Cruise who’d become the face of Hollywood itself in the ’90s. The next, he’s fighting back flop sweat as he gets lost in the liminal spaces that he used to stride right through; the liminal spaces between yesterday and tomorrow, public decorum and private decadence, affluent social-climbers and the sinister ultra-rich they serve (masters of the universe who’ve fetishized their role in our plutocracy to the point where they can’t even throw a simple orgy without turning it into a semi-ridiculous “Sleep No More,” or get themselves off without putting the fear of God into an uninvited guest).
The reality of one night may never be able to tell the whole truth, but no dream is ever just a dream (nor is “Fidelio” just the name of a Beethoven opera). While Bill’s dark night of the soul may trace back to a book that entranced Kubrick as a young man, “Eyes Wide Shut” is so infinite and arresting for how it seizes on the movies’ ability to double-project truth and illusion at the same time. Lit by the St. Elmo’s Fire of a million christmas lights, set in an unreal Manhattan suspended between memory and invention (after expatriating to England, Kubrick never again stepped foot in his native city), and shot with a gauzy somnolence that grounds its kabuki-like performances in a place of raw emotionality, “Eyes Wide Shut” is a peerlessly lucid distillation of why dreams will always be reality’s most intimate bed partner — a mask resting on a pillow in place of the man who mistook it for his disguise.
“Eyes Wide Shut” may not seem to be as epochal or predictive as some of the other films on this list, but no other ’90s movie — not “Safe,” “The Truman Show,” or even “The Matrix” — left us with a more accurate sense of what it would feel like to live in the 21st century. In a word: Fuck.
Excerpted from IndieWire's list of the 100 Best Movies of the 1990s. |
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| "EYES WIDE SHUT" DP LARRY SMITH — by ryan lattanzio |
On the New Transfer, Filming the Orgy, and Nicole Kidman's Commitment to Takes |
There are few, if any, people more qualified to comment on “Eyes Wide Shut” than Nigel Galt — the man who spent 15 months in a post-production room with Stanley Kubrick before the director’s death.
The film editor — who is going on record for nearly the first time, circa the new Criterion Collection 4K release of Kubrick’s final film — has rarely spoken about his experiences with the director. Kubrick died on March 7, days after he screened his working cut of the 1999 erotic mystery to Warner Bros. brass and the film’s stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. By that time, Galt had been close with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker for nearly a decade and was one of his most trusted longtime collaborators. After first working for Kubrick as a sound editor on 1987’s “Full Metal Jacket,” he had risen up through the ranks, eventually having a hand in the international re-releases of almost all of the auteur’s films. And he was creatively involved on “Eyes Wide Shut” even before shooting, as Kubrick liked his opinion on sound, image, and even music.
Galt was also the person most intimately involved in what happened to the movie between Kubrick’s death and its July 1999 theatrical release. He not only oversaw the last-minute fixes, like adding final establishing shots, but also was tasked with navigating censorship of the orgy scene — you know, the one where Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford rides out in a taxi to an ominous mansion that plays hosts to a Boschian bacchanalia of masked, depraved sex.
Despite demands and moral panic from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, now known as the MPA), Galt refused to make cuts to the film in order to secure an R rating — resolute that Kubrick never would’ve permitted them. But it was Galt’s idea, as he explained to IndieWire, to insert digital figures into the masquerade sequence to block certain instances of penetration and satisfy the censors.
That censored sequence is now widely unavailable to the public, despite ending up in the version that was first released in theaters, when “Eyes Wide Shut” was rated R for “strong sexual content, nudity, language, and some drug-related material.” The new unrated Criterion release, supervised by director of photography Larry Smith, includes no such digital “hooded figures,” as Galt said, finally restoring the film to what Kubrick envisioned in the literal hours before his death.
Read the full interview on IndieWire |
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| "Eyes wide shut" actor Todd Field — Ryan lattanzio |
The Actor Remembers His First Meeting with Kubrick |
Way before Todd Field became the acclaimed director of “In the Bedroom,” “Little Children,” and “TÁR” — one of the best runs ever for any filmmaker — the AFI Conservatory graduate starred as Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” He played Nick Nightingale, a pianist and former college friend of Dr. Bill Harford’s (Tom Cruise), who is summoned to a mass orgy of the elite somewhere ominously outside New York City.
Field went back and forth to the United Kingdom from 1996 to 1998 to complete shooting on the film, which includes said orgy scene in which Nick Nightingale is masked at the piano as Dr. Bill is humiliated once again. “Eyes Wide Shut” is now in re-release on home video, thanks to a new Criterion Collection 4K edition of the film supervised by cinematographer Larry Smith. It’s an opportunity to revisit Field’s superb, relaxed performance, one that tested his own limited piano-playing skills (his character has a Greenwich Village residency at the fictional Sonata Café, where he reacquaints with Cruise’s character).
Field has spoken publicly before about how his co-star, Tom Cruise, helped him wrest a cut of his directing debut “In the Bedroom” from potential changes urged by Miramax head Harvey Weinstein. But as revealed in a conversation exclusive to IndieWire, Kubrick was instrumental in encouraging Field to make the marital breakdown drama “In the Bedroom,” nominated for five 2002 Oscars including Best Picture and adapted from the Andre Dubus story “Killings,” at all.
Below, Field talks his amusing first meeting with Kubrick on set, what it was like to work with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and the heightened atmosphere around the orgy masquerade leading up to filming.
Read the full interview on IndieWire |
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| Shooting 2nd unit for stanley kubrick — by jim hemphill |
How Two Weeks Turned into Four Years |
In the mid-1990s, Lisa Leone was shooting stills and working in print journalism and music videos when she got a call from her friend, Vivian. “Vivian said, ‘Hey, my father’s doing another movie, and he just faxed over pages of things to research,” Leone told IndieWire. “‘He doesn’t know I’m moving to Santa Cruz in a week and that I don’t have time. Can you help me shoot this? I can’t pay you and I can’t tell him you’re helping me, but I can buy you film.'”
Vivian’s father was Stanley Kubrick, and the movie was “Eyes Wide Shut.” When Leone saw the list of things Kubrick wanted photographed, she realized they were all in her neighborhood and told Vivian she’d be happy to help out. “I made some four by sixes, she mailed them off, and I forgot about it,” Leone said. Six months later, she checked her answering machine and heard Stanley Kubrick’s voice on one of her messages.
Vivian had come clean to her father and admitted that she didn’t take the pictures, which Kubrick thought were some of the best research photos he had ever seen. When Vivian gave Stanley her friend’s name and number, he called Leone to offer her “a couple weeks’ work” researching New York City for him, since “Eyes Wide Shut” took place there and he hadn’t set foot in New York — or America as a whole — in decades.
Read the full article on IndieWire |
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life goes on. It always does, until it doesn't. |
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