Nicole Kidman’s happiest time on a movie set: “I would have shot that thing for five years”
It’s fair to say that Nicole Kidman possesses one of the highest levels of determination in the movie industry, which has naturally led to some of the most memorable acting performances in recent cinema history. A true stalwart of contemporary film, Kidman’s status as one of the modern greats as been assured for some time.
After making her breakthrough in the Australian psychological thriller Dead Calm, Kidman began to establish herself on the international circuit with performances in the likes of Days of Thunder, Far and Away, To Die For and Batman Forever, all of which helped to define her brilliant 1990s era.
That particular time in Kidman’s career would be rounded off with a stunning effort in Stanley Kubrick’s final movie, the 1999 erotic psychological drama Eyes Wide Shut, in which she starred alongside her then-husband Tom Cruise as the wife of a doctor. Eyes Wide Shut was a notoriously difficult film to make for its actors, but Kidman once said that she would have gone on making it forever if she had to.
“I would have shot that thing for five years, I didn’t care,” Kidman had said in an interview with the BBC. “I’m with the greatest filmmaker. I’m with my husband. I’ve got my kids there.” Sure, Kidman had been working with one of the all-time great filmmakers in Kubrick, but he had made her and Cruise go to torturous lengths to get what he thought would be the “perfect take” or “perfect shot”.
The true perfectionist Kubrick had at one point made Cruise walk through a door 95 times and was always rewriting scenes on the fly. Over the course of 15 months, including an unbroken shooting period of 46 weeks, Kubrick put his cast and crew to their limits, leading to many of them becoming exhausted and demoralised.
Of course, the final result is one of Kubrick’s best movies, and while there was a great cost for some individuals involved, Kidman was someone who would have stuck around for as long as it would have taken to complete it. Well, at least, she says that in hindsight, which is admittedly much easier to do than in the moment.
Kubrick sadly died shortly before the premiere screening of his final film, and Kidman remembers the moment she was told about his passing. She said, “Leon [Kubrick’s assistant] said, ‘Stanley Kubrick is dead’. I remember dropping the phone and screaming. That was probably my first encounter with death where it comes and a person you love is taken quickly and it doesn’t seem real. It was horrendous.”
Kidman’s effort in Eyes Wide Shut is one of her career-defining roles, but the director had already played an important part in her early life. In the BBC interview, the actor explained, “I made out to The Shining, which says something really weird about me. I had my first kiss [watching] The Shining, which is just totally weird.”
Sure, Kubrick was a director who pushed his actors to their absolute limits of sanity, but when the final cuts came out looking like they did, at pure masterpiece levels, then it was hard to argue with his exhaustive methods. Kidman considered herself fortunate to be involved in a Kubrick movie, and even if Eyes Wide Shut had taken until eternity to make it, she would have stuck around until it was all said and done.
