The actor who only impressed Stanley Kubrick on the 18th take: “You’re lucky I didn’t piss my pants”
Stanley Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, which is tricky, because this way of working certainly yielded impressive results, but really, should he have known better when to rein it in?
The most glaring example of the filmmaker’s obsession with pushing his actors to their absolute limits is, of course, exemplified by the real-life horror story experienced by Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining. He required her to repeat scene after scene over and over again, even if it was one that required her to be screaming and crying, so you can imagine the toll that takes on your body, both physically and mentally, which rendered the actor exhausted.
If this would give Kubrick the perfect take, though, he couldn’t care less if it affected his actors, such that The Guinness World Records even reported that the scene in which Scatman Crothers and Danny Lloyd discuss what ‘shining’ means in The Shining holds the record for the most takes with dialogue at a whopping 148.
So, if you signed on for a Kubrick movie, you had to be aware that you were potentially getting yourself in for lots of takes, maybe even a record-breaking amount, and a director who didn’t sugarcoat his opinions. This is what Todd Field came to learn when he was cast as the pianist in Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, although he didn’t have to do half as many takes as those in The Shining.
In fact, it took less than 20 takes to finish a specific scene, but Field was shocked with the director’s brutal directness, telling IndieWire, “The first scene, where Bill reunites with Nick at Ziegler’s party. We did 18 takes, which for Stanley wasn’t a lot, and afterwards, he said, ‘Wow, that was great, really great, but the first 17 you were lousy. I mean, the difference between take 18 and all the rest is remarkable’.”
It seemed that you had to strap in for totally honesty if you were working with Kubrick, and while Field found the whole thing rather shocking, he soon broke the ice with, “I said, ‘Look, Stanley, I was nervous. I’m here with the biggest star in the world and my favourite filmmaker, and you’re lucky I didn’t piss my pants’.”
When you’re surrounded by Tom Cruise, Sydney Pollack, and Kubrick, it’s understandable that you’d be getting nervous, which, finally, the filmmaker seemed to understand as well. “He laughed, and after that it was easy. He read wild lines with me himself. And, like Marty Scorsese, he was a terrific actor. And that was a beautiful thing, the way he played,” Field added.
The actor’s role as the pianist is vital to the film, with his character, Nick, introducing Cruise’s character Bill, the pair, former classmates, to the seedy underworld that he gets sucked into. When Nick is instructed to play blindfolded at a mysterious event, he tells Bill the password, allowing him to gain access to this bizarre ritualistic masked orgy.
Field hadn’t been in a film of this scope before, and never had he worked with someone as much of a perfectionist and candid as Kubrick, but once he cracked him, he felt a lot more at ease, allowing him to deliver a spectacular performance as the mysterious Nick Nightingale.
