Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
- The original script for Eyes Wide Shut was written over a decade before production finally began in 1999.
- Many of the practical effects used in the climax were achieved without any CGI.
- Stanley Kubrick originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 American erotic psychological drama directed by Stanley Kubrick, his final film, completed just days before his death. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were married in real life at the time, star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a wealthy Manhattan couple whose marriage is thrown into crisis when Alice confesses to Bill that she once fantasized about having an affair with a naval officer.
Shaken by this revelation, Bill wanders through nocturnal New York encountering a series of increasingly surreal and sexually charged situations, culminating in his infiltration of a masked orgy at a Long Island mansion whose attendees may include some of New York's most powerful citizens. Stanley Kubrick's characteristic obsessive perfectionism was pushed to extremes during production β the shoot lasted an unprecedented 400 days, entering the Guinness Book of Records as the longest continuous film shoot, with Kubrick demanding hundreds of takes of individual scenes. The masked orgy sequence, filmed in an actual English estate with elaborate Venetian masks and ritualistic staging, was one of the most unsettling and debated sequences in Kubrick's filmography.
Eyes Wide Shut earned $162 million worldwide.
