Stanley Kubrick predicted his “hardest film to make” years before he made it
Filmmaking is never easy.
With such a large number of people under your control, being a director is surely a demanding job that you have to be pretty tough to master. It helps if you have a propensity for being a bit ruthless, which is a quality that Stanley Kubrick possessed at times. You only have to read about The Shining.
Unafraid to be demanding of countless takes and letting his quest for perfection get the better of him, Kubrick wasn’t easy to work with, but his methods clearly worked. He became one of cinema’s most astounding filmmakers, treading new ground for sci-fi with 2001: A Space Odyssey, challenging violence with A Clockwork Orange, and showing the true brutality of war with Full Metal Jacket. His hardest film, though, would come at the end of his career.
For decades, Kubrick had it in mind to make a movie based on a story by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler. While the writer died in 1931 – making all of his work of a period long gone by the time Kubrick was making films – he had the idea to bring one of his stories into a modern setting, although what was classified as modern changed by the time Kubrick eventually got around to it.
You see, back in 1960, Kubrick expressed his interest in making a film inspired by Schnitzler, telling The Observer, “I know I would like to make a film that gave a feeling of the times— a contemporary story that really gave a feeling of the times, psychologically, sexually, politically, personally. I would like to make that much more than anything else. And it’s probably going to be the hardest film to make.”
It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that Kubrick would actually bring his idea to life, with Eyes Wide Shut materialising towards the end of the decade with real-life couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman playing the troubled husband and wife at the centre of the film. Kubrick used Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle as the basis for the movie, bringing the story into ‘90s New York, and the result was one of his most haunting works.
Watching Eyes Wide Shut makes you feel like you’ve stayed up all night, like you, too, have been trawling the streets of the big city alongside Cruise as he searches for something, although you can’t be quite sure what. Following his wife’s revelation that she has dreamed of cheating on him, he attends a masked orgiastic ritual, and he soon finds himself sucked into a bizarre, nightmarish world of deception.
The movie was in the works for decades, although Kubrick’s initial plan for the movie was much more comedic, and he even considered having Steve Martin in the lead role. Thank God he opted for a much darker avenue. When production commenced, it certainly wasn’t an easy one, with the shoot lasting for a record-breaking 15 months, while Kubrick’s perfectionism really took its toll on everyone involved. His attention to detail was extensive, which included meticulously recreating the streets of New York in England to save him from having to fly.
Many rumours surround Eyes Wide Shut, which wasn’t even ready for release when Kubrick suddenly died of a heart attack. So, is the final version the one that Kubrick was happy with? There have been differing accounts about how pleased Kubrick was with the version that he sent to Warner Bros before his death, but what we do know is that slight edits had to be made in post-production, even following Kubrick’s passing.
It was a production tainted by various difficult challenges, but clearly, this was something that Kubrick had predicted decades before.
