The classic movie Nicole Kidman was too disturbed to finish: “I think I only saw half”
There are several different kinds of cinema-goers in the world: the ones who will watch practically anything, the high-brow snobs, and the ones who predominantly see films as a source of escapism. Yet, if we were to draw a Venn diagram of movie watchers, the intersection would highlight the category that we all fit into at some point in our film-watching careers, regardless of our tastes, that is the movie watcher who finds a feature too much to handle.
Even some of the most seasoned movie nerds find certain projects too intense to sit through, whether that be due to sickeningly graphic imagery or themes that push the boat out a little too far. There’s always going to be a film out there ready to test someone’s limits for cinematic transgression, no matter that be something as uncomfortable and violent as I Spit on Your Grave or as stomach-turning as A Serbian Film.
For Nicole Kidman, a film left her feeling so disturbed that she couldn’t even make it to the end, but that didn’t stop her from working with the director in the future. The actor might be a versatile star, appearing in everything from Lars von Trier’s Dogville to the family comedy Paddington, but she isn’t one for super graphic violence unless it has a purpose.
She once told The Hollywood News, “I don’t like exploitative violence, but I’m not opposed to violence in cinema when it’s relevant. As long as films have an intellectual idea behind them and isn’t just pure exploitation, then I’ll consider them and I don’t mind being challenged viscerally, intellectually.”
When it came to watching Park Chan-wook’s classic Oldboy, Kidman could certainly understand the decisions behind such intense scenes of violence, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to actually sit through it. Even worse, she had attempted to watch it on a plane.
The actor explained, “I watched The Vengeance Trilogy. I think I only saw half of Oldboy because I was like ‘Oh my god..’ I was watching it on a plane and sitting next to my husband, and Keith just saw me putting my hands up to my face and shrieking, and he was like, ‘What are you watching?’ And I showed him the dental scene.”
Oldboy features many brutal sequences that will have you watching them with gritted teeth and your hands over your eyes, and in the case of that dental scene, in which teeth are brutally broken out of a character’s mouth, you’ll likely be left feeling terrified of your next trip to the dentist. Who can forget the scene in which a live octopus is consumed, too? It’s no surprise that Kidman found the film too much to stomach, especially thousands of feet above the ground.
Kidman continued, “But you know, Park is such a gentle man, and yet he makes these amazing films, and he has these incredible ideas that come out of him. There are very strong intellectual ideas that he puts forward in his films. And it’s the same with Stoker. He creates a very tense atmosphere in what is, on one level, a thriller that builds and builds, but it’s actually about evil and the genesis of evil.”
So, despite the horrors of Oldboy, Kidman didn’t hesitate to work with the director on Stoker, which is certainly intense, although no octopuses were consumed during the making of the film.
