The shattering moment Tom Cruise discovered Stanley Kubrick had passed away
Those days seem like a distant memory, but there really was a time when Tom Cruise would go out of his way to seek out and collaborate with the most celebrated directors in the business, and they don’t come much more vaunted than Stanley Kubrick.
As a keen student of cinema who devours as many movies and absorbs as much information as possible, Cruise would have known exactly what he was getting himself into when he and then-wife Nicole Kidman agreed to play the lead roles in Eyes Wide Shut, although even he might have been taken aback when principal photography ended up lasting for 400 days.
That was Kubrick, though, with the meticulous auteur taking as much time as he deemed necessary to craft a feature exactly in line with his artistic vision. It was a labour of love, but sadly, the filmmaker didn’t manage to bask in the fruits of those labours when he passed away in March 1999 at the age of 70.
Kubrick’s death came less than a week after he’d screened his cut of Eyes Wide Shut, with the end product making its way to cinemas a little over four months later. Cruise was still required to hit the promotional trail in support of the movie, which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world when he’d only recently given a eulogy at the funeral.
“I haven’t really talked about the movie, you know,” he said to Roger Ebert at the time, before acknowledging the elephant in the room head-on. “The pressure of going through this without Stanley being there also. Stanley who was gonna do everything, you know, suddenly…”
After trailing off, Cruise recounted the exact moment he was informed of Kubrick’s passing, which came when he was knee-deep in pre-production for Mission: Impossible II alongside director John Woo, and a day before he was expecting to hold another lengthy Eyes Wide Shut-related conversation with the legendary director.
“I got in on Saturday. Stanley and I were supposed to talk on Sunday. He’d call me in the middle of the night. ‘You’re asleep?’. No, Stanley, what’s up?’. Instead I got a call from Leon, who worked with him for many years and said, ‘Tom, Stanley Kubrick has passed away.'”
It was Kubrick’s personal assistant, Barry Lyndon‘s Lord Bullingdon, and Eyes Wide Shut co-star Leon Vitali who had to break the news to the biggest movie star on the planet, which can’t have been an easy thing to do. Nor was it an easy thing to process for Cruise, who admitted he was continuing to struggle with talking about his most recent film while reconciling with the death of its creator, who’d also been a sounding board during the entire process.
