Welcome to IndieWire’s “Eyes Wide Shut” Week. The password is, of course, “fidelio,” but we’ve already taken care of admittance, inviting you into five days of stories celebrating Stanley Kubrick’s swan-song masterpiece from 1999. Criterion Collection has just unveiled its 4K restoration of the classic erotic odyssey starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and it now looks better than ever, gloriously, at home.
Though “Eyes Wide Shut” is very much one of IndieWire’s favorite Christmas movies, we’ll be unveiling over the Thanksgiving week conversations with director of photography Larry Smith, second unit cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, editor Nigel Galt, set decorator Lisa Leone, and star and Kubrick mentee Todd Field, aka Nick Nightingale, blindfolded piano player to the sex-crazed elite. “Give up your inquiries, which are completely useless.”
There are few, if any, people more qualified to comment on “Eyes Wide Shut” than Nigel Galt — the man who spent 15 months in a post-production room with Stanley Kubrick before the director’s death.
The film editor — who is going on record for nearly the first time, circa the new Criterion Collection 4K release of Kubrick’s final film — has rarely spoken about his experiences with the director. Kubrick died on March 7, days after he screened his working cut of the 1999 erotic mystery to Warner Bros. brass and the film’s stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. By that time, Galt had been close with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker for nearly a decade and was one of his most trusted longtime collaborators. After first working for Kubrick as a sound editor on 1987’s “Full Metal Jacket,” he had risen up through the ranks, eventually having a hand in the international re-releases of almost all of the auteur’s films. And he was creatively involved on “Eyes Wide Shut” even before shootin, as Kubrick liked his opinion on sound, image, and even music.
Galt was also the person most intimately involved in what happened to the movie between Kubrick’s death and its July 1999 theatrical release. He not only oversaw the last-minute fixes, like adding final establishing shots, but also was tasked with navigating censorship of the orgy scene — you know, the one where Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford rides out in a taxi to an ominous mansion that plays hosts to a Boschian bacchanalia of masked, depraved sex.
Despite demands and moral panic from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, now known as the MPA), Galt refused to make cuts to the film in order to secure an R rating — resolute that Kubrick never would’ve permitted them. But it was Galt’s idea, as he explained to IndieWire, to insert digital figures into the masquerade sequence to block certain instances of penetration and satisfy the censors.
That censored sequence is now widely unavailable to the public, despite ending up in the version that was first released in theaters, when “Eyes Wide Shut” was rated R for “strong sexual content, nudity, language, and some drug-related material.” The new unrated Criterion release, supervised by director of photography Larry Smith, includes no such digital “hooded figures,” as Galt said, finally restoring the film to what Kubrick envisioned in the literal hours before his death.
This interview has been edited for length.
IndieWire: You spent 15 months with Kubrick in the edit bay after production finished on “Eyes Wide Shut,” but when did you come on the movie proper?
Nigel Galt: I was on [“Eyes Wide Shut”] before shooting.
I was very fortunate: At the end of “Full Metal Jacket,” we got on very well, Stanley and I. I was a “deemed competent,” [which was] I think, the best compliment I got. He wasn’t very generous with compliments but] he did say to me that he’d like to work with me again. I had to wait nine years, or eight years, but he was loyal to his word and phoned me up. I ended up being his go-to man to fix things on the old films. We would fix old foreign versions where optical [negatives] had gotten damaged or there were issues. I got involved in getting a new master of “2001” six-track, supervised it for him, and worked on “Clockwork Orange.” I’ve actually worked on every film he did in some form or another, so I knew I was going to do [“Eyes Wide Shut”], and I was on it a month before we started shooting.
We edited for 15 months. By the time the film finished, I’d been on it over three years. During shooting, I was looking after rushes, the dailies. I was on set most days, being around if he needed me, just doing anything editorial. But we did no editing during shooting. Stanley never cut during shooting.
Walk me through what happened from Kubrick screening the movie for Warners up until his death.
The film was screened to Terry Semel and Bob Daly at Warner Bros., and Tom and Nicole, on the same night in New York. I flew to New York. In the preceding days, we did the temp mix for the screening. We screened it on Wednesday twice. I flew home. I had Thursday off. I saw him on Friday, and we talked about the response to the film and the screening, which was very positive from everybody. And he died the next night, on Saturday.
In that last conversation, we just talked about the things that needed to be done, which were a few establishing shots we needed to put in. We had, at that point, just found the Ligeti piano piece, so that was a huge thing, because it’s so important in the film. It’s actually … a Ligeti piano exercise. When he found that piece of music, he was so excited. When we first put it up against the picture, it worked straight away. Just bizarre.
How does the Criterion release, which I know you haven’t seen in full yet, compare to past home video versions and the prints that were in theaters in 1999?
Stanley wasn’t around to grade the film, so it was reliant on the experience of his contacts with the laboratory, people who’d worked with him at Deluxe on everything, going back to “Barry Lyndon” and “Clockwork Orange.” When it came to the DVD, it was a different matter, because it was effectively a new domain for a medium. The issues with the DVD were more related to the fact that the film was force-developed, all of it, through shooting. So it’s effectively underexposing it and then correcting it in the development. The [new Criterion edition] has a lot of profound effects in how things look because it brings out the grain more, and this created a lot of issues in the making of the original DVD.
The DVDs are coming from the original negs. The only difference with this new Criterion one is, I believe, Warners made a new 8K scan from the original neg. That is going to mean that what Larry just did in the regrade will have obvious benefits. Larry graded it on [the Criterion release] the way it should have been graded, which wasn’t done before.
After Warner Bros. saw the film, there were still changes to be made, and most significantly in demands to censor the orgy masquerade.
The problem with Stanley dying is there was no plan B. Stanley and I had a conversation the night before he died, agreeing on everything that needed to be done to the picture, which was very little, because the only thing that was missing were some establishing shots that, when we were making the screening for New York, we just didn’t have time to put them all in. But we knew what they were, so all I had to do was add in exterior shots of buildings, like Ziegler’s [house], and that was it. Any idea of re-editing the film was never on the cards, because this is a Stanley Kubrick film. Who has the right to change it?
The only issues that occurred were with the MPAA when we were trying to get the rating. We went off down a path I didn’t agree with because they got obsessed about the nudity. They were so mundane and ridiculous about it. They had me make changes, and I had to do them because I was told to. But in the end, I went back to Warner Bros. and, with Jan Harlan in the office, said, “I’m putting the film back exactly as it was, and we have to find another way to release the film if the MPAA won’t sanction it.”
What was your reaction to being asked to censor the movie to secure an R rating?
You’ve probably seen the version that doesn’t have the hooded figures in it. You know when he walks through the orgy? He comes around the corner, and there’s a guy taking a girl from behind; she’s leaning over a chair. Do you know what the MPAA said? “You can’t have that. He’s fucking her up the ass.” I said, “He’s taking her from behind!” [Laughs] This is the kind of ludicrousness.
We had five screenings with the MPAA, and every time they kept trying to get us to take more out. And then it became clear that this was not going to happen. Who are they to tell the world what they see in a Stanley Kubrick movie? The premise was, as far as Warners was concerned, they only wanted one release of the film.
So whose idea was it to insert these digital figures that block the onscreen sex?
Who was the one who came up with the idea? Moi. I’m trying to think, “How can we put the film out without changing a single frame of the cut?”
I suppose in hindsight it was the right thing to do because, in the end, that American hooded version, [with the] cloaked figures, has disappeared. It never gets seen anymore. The worldwide version is the Stanley version. Especially when you take into context the Japanese [audience]… I took the film to Japan for the censorship screening, and the Japanese had a very strong thing about pubic hair. They waived it all because Kubrick to them is Kurosawa, and they don’t interfere in that kind of thing.
What would Kubrick’s reaction have been if he were alive at the time?
As a hypothetical argument, knowing Stanley, he would have said to Warners, “Well, I’ll either have to reshoot, or they have to accept it.” But he wouldn’t have made cuts, because Stanley had final cut. Stanley generated this career where he bought himself total independence, total freedom from budgets, and total amount of time to make the film. This was one of the most remarkable things about working with him. The best thing about working with him was you knew he was in charge.
What was it like working on “Eyes Wide Shut” with such a small crew?
We had a crew of just 55 people. As much as me being an editor … I could become a driver. That’s how it worked. There were no delusions of grandeur if you worked with Stanley. You did what you were told.
How complicated was that orgy scene to film, and were you on the set for any of it?
It went on forever, shooting at Elveden [Hall] and the other place they went to [the sequence shot in at least three locations in the U.K.]. I never went on the set during it. He wouldn’t let me on the set with too many pretty women. [Laughs]
They were all-night shoots. I was at the lab at 6 a.m. every morning picking up the rushes. It was quite intense from what I know [but] it wasn’t any more stressful or harder than anything else. There was a lot of night shooting and late shooting on the film. Shooting on the set with Stanley was the same whether you went on the set day or night. It was not Jim Cameron-style or anything like that — no shouting or screaming. He might have shouted at the technicians or the construction guys or the riggers, but never in front of the cast.
Well, he may not be screaming at people, but he did drive Shelley Duvall to a nervous breakdown on “The Shining.”
Apart from when he [chews out] Shelley Duvall, which is pretty brutal, he was a much more thoughtful person. He could be prone to reacting to things, but that wasn’t his real raison d’être when he worked. Everything was very methodical.
What do you make of conspiracy theories about the movie, whether it was designed as a critique of Scientology or, as Roger Avary once claimed, a movie about child trafficking? Or a critique, even of, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s marriage?
He wanted Tom and Nicole because he wanted their relationship onscreen to be real. That’s why he wanted a married couple. It’s as simplistic as that, and everything else with Stanley, as with all his movies, is the myths and legends that grow up around them. It was the most uneventful film I’ve been on — other than it took three years.
“Eyes Wide Shut” 4K is now available from Criterion Collection.