Martin Scorsese describes his love for Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
As well as one of cinema’s greatest ever masterminds, American filmmaker Martin Scorsese is one of its most loyal students too, often exclaiming his love for global innovators of the craft. Having worked with the likes of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Andrew Garfield and Cameron Diaz, Scorsese is in an authoritative position to discuss the very best individuals ever to grace cinema, too.
Gaining much of his knowledge from some of the greatest filmmakers ever to work in the industry, including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Peckinpah, Scorsese grew to prominence throughout the 1970s thanks to such classic movies as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. However, Scorsese wasn’t the only one lighting up American cinema at the time, with his innovative efforts being joined by The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick, among many others.
A great admirer of Kubrick, Scorsese names his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey as the favourite of his filmography, exclaiming of the film’s conclusion, “It is a strange thing. The religious side of me found an extraordinary comfort in the end of the film, a very beautiful moment”.
It’s by no means the only of Kubrick’s films that he adores, however, having a soft spot for 1975s Barry Lyndon as well as the director’s final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, the most divisive movie of his career. Released in 1999, the erotic drama stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and tells the story of a Manhattan doctor who embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife’s admission of unfulfilled longing.
It has now been given a new lease of life, with modern audiences seeing the paranoia, mystery and allure that pervades the peculiar film. At the time of its release, viewers and critics were quick to dismiss its apparent emptiness. The dreamlike story was taken for face value, and Kubrick’s tale that traversed psychological quandaries and questioned realms of reality was tragically misunderstood.
Scorsese pierced through the criticism of the time, however, telling Roger Ebert in a conversation about the best movies of the 1990s, “I think a lot of people were looking at Eyes Wide Shut from the wrong angle – it’s not to be taken literally”.
Continuing, he explains: “It’s Manhattan as you’d experience it in a dream, where everything feels familiar but very strange. And I think Eyes Wide Shut is a profound film about love, sex, and trust in a marriage, about learning to take things day by day, and either accepting or ignoring whatever unpleasant truths come along”.
After praising the movie, Scorsese feels the need to heap further praise on the memory of a legend, lovingly exclaiming: “It’s also a film I cherish because it puts you in the authoritative hands of an old master, with a style that flies in the face of every modern convention”.
