‘Eyes Wide Shut’: The shoot Tom Cruise described as his “exploratory years”
Even the biggest stars in Hollywood refuse to get performatively comfortable, or at least Tom Cruise did for a while before he settled into his familiar groove of putting his life on the line in the name of his latest risky and death-defying stunt in a succession of blockbusters largely cut from the safe cloth.
He’s been firmly embedded as one of the most famous faces on the planet since Top Gun rocketed him to superstardom in 1986, but Cruise never actively chased A-list status in the years to come. Instead, he intentionally sought out the best, brightest, and most acclaimed filmmakers to help him both advance his craft and further his knowledge of cinema as a whole.
Prior to embarking on his current era of being Tom Cruise the personality at the expense of Tom Cruise, the actor, he went out of his way to embark on an odyssey that partnered him with some of the most distinct auteurs to have ever picked up a megaphone, a drastically different outlook from today considering – with the greatest respect, of course – he barely goes anywhere without Christopher McQuarrie.
Between Top Gun and his first McQuarrie collaboration on 2008’s Valkyrie, Cruise starred in features from Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, Brian De Palma, Cameron Crowe, Paul Thomas Anderson, John Woo, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Mann, an incredible collection of talents.
However, working with Stanley Kubrick on the exacting, exhausting, and epic two-year shoot of Eyes Wide Shut made such an impression that Cruise – who’d been working solidly for nearly 20 years at that point and had spent the majority of them as a household name – described that process as his “exploratory years” to Vanity Fair.
Not only that, but he also referred to that record-breaking period of 46 consecutive filming weeks between November 1996 and June 1998 as both his “acting years” and “student years,” such was the impact sitting under the Kubrickian learning tree had on somebody who was well within their rights to believe they’d conquered their profession.
Cruise wasn’t particularly fond of Dr. Bill Harford as a character, and he had to rein in his typical instincts because the entire performance in “every moment, it’s just about containment.” He had to be patient, reserved, and ready to acquiesce to Kubrick’s wishes, and deliberately stifling his more overtly charismatic tendencies was something that would affect the star for years to come.
Admitting he “learned a hell of a lot, a hell of a lot,” working with Kubrick, Cruise picked up tricks, techniques, and nuances “that I know has carried onto other pictures that I’ve done.” There’s a reason why the Eyes Wide Shut director is lauded as one of the all-time greats, with his reputation for meticulous preparation proving invaluable even to an actor of Cruise’s standing, who opened himself up in a way rarely seen before – or since – for the express purpose of learning new things about himself as an actor.
It would be debatable to call Harford the single greatest performance of Cruise’s career, but in terms of how profoundly it shaped his approach to everything he did moving forward, it may well be the most important.
