Stanley Kubrick’s final mystery: Who’s responsible for the final cut of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’?
Every festive season, people line up the classics to watch with family – It’s A Wonderful Life, Love Actually, Home Alone – but if there’s one that you should save for when you’re not with your grandparents, it’s Eyes Wide Shut.
While Stanley Kubrick’s final film wasn’t designed to be a holiday essential, it’s become a favourite for many cinephiles with more perverse tastes. There’s nothing like celebrating the birth of Jesus than watching Tom Cruise enter a goddamn masked orgy.
Eyes Wide Shut was struck with tragedy when the legendary director died before it was ready to be released, leaving the final cut of the film shrouded in mystery. Is the version that we know and love the one that Kubrick would’ve been happy releasing?
Paired with damn-near insane conspiracy theories that suggested Kubrick was killed for the film due to its depiction of a mysterious elite sex cult, the film has garnered plenty of discussion over the years, but what is the truth?
Todd Field, who played the pianist Nick Nightingale, told IndieWire, “What we have is Stanley’s first cut. He died six days after screening that cut.” He continued, “If Stanley’s post-production on past films is taken into even modest consideration, it’s clear that the film would be different. However, it would be foolish to try and speculate about what might have changed had Stanley lived to make it so.”
Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, so he certainly would’ve made changes, but it seems like, for the most part, the movie was practically done. His long-time collaborator Jan Harlan believed that Kubrick was incredibly happy with the film, which I’m sure wouldn’t have been the case if he hadn’t finished it.
Final edits were made by Kubrick’s wife, Christine, and these were mainly to deal with censorship issues. She had to make amends to the orgy scene, for example, and she told Artur Piskorz, “We had to do the music and deal with the advertising. We had one censorship thing, the orgy. We superimposed some images, blocking the objectionable fornication. Which was stupid, because it was meant to be shocking.”
Meanwhile, the film’s editor, Nigel Galt, is adamant that “nothing in the film that happened, and this includes after his death, involved anything that Stanley wasn’t aware of, or wasn’t aware that was going to happen,” he told The Film Stage.
Galt added, “We had a long, long-ish conversation, and the only thing that had to be done was mundane editing stuff. We had establishing shots to put in the film, you know, exterior buildings, and that was it. There was nothing missing. That cut is Stanley’s cut, the day he died. And nothing was over-edited.”
Concluding, “There was no Illuminati. I mean, I don’t know where these things came from, these ideas or concepts, because they’ve always built up around Stanley. It’s just the fact.”
