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, 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.”
Stanley Kubrick died on March 7, 1999 at age 70, six days after presenting a cut of “Eyes Wide Shut,” his final film, to Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and executives at Warner Bros. Many have speculated that Kubrick was not finished with the film — an erotic mystery starring a very real couple as a fictional one torn apart by jealousy and infidelity over one night in New York City — or even pleased with the version sent to brass.
The only truth to that supposition is that, no, Kubrick was not done with the movie in terms of last-minute technical fixes, even after a shoot that reportedly lasted 400 days (with a lot of holiday break time for the cast to reconvene with family) and a post-production process that neared the same length. But he was happy with the film as it stood, his collaborators say.
“Eyes Wide Shut” remains a monument to superb performances from Cruise and Kidman, and to Kubrick’s final resting-place inquiry into one of the very few places he’d previously left little explored throughout his five-decade-long career: the bedroom.
“If you men only knew,” a bra-and-underwear-only Nicole Kidman snaps back at a horrified, shirtless Tom Cruise, sexually humiliated by his wife’s confession of an almost-transgression. And she says it against the dreamiest blue nighttime light imaginable.
All the more fitting for a movie that is precisely about what it feels like to wake up from a marriage-shattering dream, back into the safety of a close lover’s arms and even despite a suspicious Venetian mask resting on the pillow, ready and needing to do that most important thing as soon as possible to tie it all back together again: fuck.
Now, the Criterion Collection is releasing what ought to be the definitive version of “Eyes Wide Shut,” or at least the one closest to the 35mm print bewildered and rapt audiences saw in theaters in July 1999. A new 4K transfer has been supervised by Kubrick’s director of photography Larry Smith, who first worked with the late filmmaker as an electrician on “Barry Lyndon,” waiting around three months on set until Kubrick showed up for the 1975-released period drama.
As a whole, Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” an adaptation of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella “Traumnovelle,” took three years to make, from a shooting start in 1996 to its release date.
The critical and audience response to “Eyes Wide Shut” in 1999 was inconsistent. Audiences were expecting a hypersexualized vivisection of the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman marriage and instead got what was, typically, a Stanley Kubrick movie: long takes, a seeming aesthetic coldness, and central mysteries left hanging in the ether. The movie’s lifetime domestic box-office gross stands at $162 million — still amazing for a movie this avant-garde and with Warner Bros.’ backing, even in spite of its star package — against a budget of $65 million in late-1990s dollars. Criticisms ranged from “riveting” to “boring” then.
But now, thanks to both the dazzlingly beautiful new Criterion release (grainy, gorgeous, and deep) and regular repertory replays of the film circa Christmas time, it’s regarded as not only one of the great films of Kubrick’s career, but possibly the best film of the 1990s (as IndieWire proclaimed). Not to mention one of the best holiday movies.
As Smith explained to IndieWire, the 2025 post-post-production team on “Eyes Wide Shut’s” new home video release worked to rectify various gaffes and color and lighting issues that slipped their way into its various DVD and Blu-ray releases over the years. To be sure, this Criterion Collection release of the 1999 film encourages audiences to see “Eyes Wide Shut” in a whole new way, in its proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio and restored color-grading (which, yes, includes the teals that Smith insists are closer to the original release).
Below, Smith talks about Kubrick’s commitment to long takes, and Kidman’s own in kind, plus the film’s Pinewood Studios recreation of New York City in the United Kingdom, controversy over the new 4K transfer, and the atmosphere of anticipation around the centerpiece orgy sequence.
This interview has been edited for length.
IndieWire: “Eyes Wide Shut” is reportedly the longest film shoot in history at 400 days. Why did he prefer to work that way?
Larry Smith: His style, if it did change, it changed very subtly over the years. If you go back from when he started taking longer to make movies. For example, obviously, his first two [documentary]-type films, “Flying Padre” and “Day of the Fight,” were less than an hour, 40-50 minutes. Of course, he had no money and he had to shoot quickly. I’m sure he took longer than somebody else would because of the way he works. Then the films came after that he had to shoot on a realistic schedule. The longest film before he gets into the later part of his career was “Paths of Glory,” which he shot in 16 weeks.
That’s a really complicated movie and in fact my favorite movie of Stanley’s. He shot that in 16 weeks, and I used to talk to him about that. “You shot that in 16 weeks,” and he said, “Yeah, but it was tough,” and whatever. Then, I think later as the movies went on that he was making longer and longer, and when he eventually moved to the U.K., he moved to the U.K. because he was doing movies [there]. I think he realized that this is an environment that he can work in and that he can maybe work at his own pace. It’s more forgiving, put it that way, than Hollywood. This is supposition on my part, but I suspect it’s close to the truth.
Was it that his budget or ambition expanded, or was he just digging deeper into his process with long shooting schedules?
With that, it’s a bit like the analogy I would use is you live in a small flat, and suddenly you’ve got no room, you can’t get all your furniture and your clothes in. So you need a bigger place. So you go from a studio flat to a one-bedroom or maybe a two-bedroom. In two or three years, you’ve got no room again. You keep expanding. “This is comfortable, but I’d like a bit more.” I think Stanley naturally would more likely go in that direction until such times that he can’t work in a different way. It takes him this long. He didn’t make a film every year. He made a film on average every six years, seven years, maybe even longer than that, not because he didn’t want to make more films. His process wouldn’t allow him to.
Is there any parallel in “Eyes Wide Shut” to that pantry scene in “The Shining” that famously took well over 140 takes? I wonder about Nicole Kidman’s confessional monologue to Tom Cruise.
No, I think interestingly enough, all of the scenes that involved Nicole, she was very passionate about delivering her lines in any particular scene in a particular way. She was worked very hard at trying to get that right for Stanley and right for herself. That is a scene that, of course, you can play in different ways. The bedroom scene, the break-the-law scene, where she’s telling him about this naval officer, that was a long scene. A lot of the time, as you’ll notice, most of it’s played on Nicole. It’s not too much on Tom, and a lot of the times, Tom wasn’t there. He would be if he was required. Sometimes, it suited him not to be there, I think. She could then play the scene the way she wanted and add a little bit here and a little bit there. We certainly shot that scene, when she goes over to the window and sits down and she’s talking, that took quite a lot of shooting purely because, I think, Nicole wanted to produce a performance that was memorable. And Stanley was, in that situation, very happy to let her run with it.
Cinephiles who got an early look at the new 4K transfer took issue on social media with the “teal” color-grading on many of the bedroom and nighttime scenes. Is what we are seeing on the Criterion edition what people saw in theaters on a 35mm film print?
I’m assuming a lot of these people either have the original DVD or they’ve seen it somewhere… normally, people who comment on these are people who know the film really well, so you have to take on board that they do know a little bit about what they’re talking about. Or it could be that they’ve seen really bad prints of it in the past, or when they last saw it. The DVD, I can’t ever remember watching it, but I must have, so I can’t comment on how good that was. If you take “Eyes Wide Shut,” because Stanley died before he could color-grade this movie, and also the DVD, somebody else would’ve been doing it that probably wasn’t qualified, then you’re going to get the final-answer print and the DVD to be not as good as they could or should be. Therefore — because I wasn’t involved in that as well, because I wasn’t invited, other people thought they could do it better — now, we get it back.
Now that Criterion said, “What do you think about this print?,” we talked about it. We came to exactly the same view: It has lots of problems. It shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t be this grainy, this bright, or this or this. So, we went into a post-production house here in London, and we rectified a lot of the technical problems that were never addressed, which is unforgivable. Forget how you see it, how it should be graded. There were things in there that shouldn’t have been there. They should have been painted out. OK, it was a different world then, and a bit more difficult to do, but they would’ve come out had Stanley been alive. In a way, that tells you the care that was taken to release the original movie that was nowhere near good enough. So the understanding of how it should have looked, therefore, would not have been good enough.
If people are wedded to that look, that’s what they’re used to, then, of course, when they see this version, it’s gonna jump for some people. It should jump in a more enjoyable way. It doesn’t change the plot; it’s just visually, I hope anyway, more interesting to see. Less grain, the highlights are not too bright. We pulled back maybe a couple things here and there that he would’ve done anyway for sure.
What were some of the inconsistencies and issues that needed to be resolved on that print?
For example, one of the main ones is that in the bathroom scene, the overdose scene, where they bring Tom up from the party and he comes into the bathroom, you track across the bath. The bath’s in foreground, and it was all very chrome, there were chrome strips. A lot of people don’t see this of course, but I saw it, because this was a very slow track, and it’s like tracking across a mirror. In the chrome strip is one of my first ACs. He doesn’t know. He’s not in the movie. He’s in the reflection, and nobody saw it. It’s one thing not to see it when you’re shooting it, but before you release the movie, who was looking at that? That was a glaring thing that we did very easily, it was a very simple thing to do. And there were a few things like that, where we painted something out that didn’t look quite right. But all these things should’ve been addressed, and they weren’t. They are now.
What about the aspect ratio? The DVD and Blu-ray were presented in the boxy, Academy format, and here we get a more widescreen view.
I know what the format is, 1.85:1, but I can’t remember what they were released in the old format. This [Criterion release] is how you’ll see it in the cinema. Stanley was never anyone who shot in any other format apart from “2001,” which he shot in 65-millimeter. He only ever shot in one format, it was 1.85:1, spherical. I may be wrong going back to before “Strangelove,” but that was his preferred aspect ratio.
The orgy scene was censored in order to secure an R rating after Stanley died, which he would not have been happy about. What was your reaction at the time? Nigel Galt, who worked with Stanley for 15 months on the temporary color grade and sound mix ahead of the release, was tasked with censoring the sex and nudity but refused. Other than the insertion of digital figures, which you see in the theatrical version, to block the penetration onscreen.
That movie would not have been released in that way had Stanley been alive. Whatever he would have done, whatever pressure he would have brought to bear on people to keep it in the way he cut it, he would. If that wasn’t possible, he would’ve found another way. Nigel Galt didn’t want to do it because [Stanley] never would have done that, and it looks awful.
What was the atmosphere around that sequence? It must have been hanging over the set with great curiosity on all ends of the production team.
That whole sequence was shot in at least three different locations, different parts of the country. It took ages. It took forever. Not only was it in different locations but had to be lit and tested. That whole sequence, including the pulling up at the gates and driving into the house — the exterior of the house was even in a different location — probably we were shooting that sequence for maybe a month.
Most of those scenes, we had a lot of nude models. They weren’t actresses. Some of them might have been porn stars, I don’t know. But they were nude models. The one thing I learned, when I see a lot of fashion stuff, with really smart models… Of course, the crew, especially certain members, because all of them want to see what’s going on, beautiful ladies who’ve got no clothes on. It’s a normal thing. The models, or most models, cover up and don’t want anyone on the set whatsoever. The really smart ones, do you know what they do? They immediately take their clothes off. Everybody sees what they’ve got, and everybody goes, “Oh, OK.” You never see anyone on the set after that. We were so used to seeing these girls with no clothes on that it wasn’t a big deal.
How immersive was Kubrick’s approximation of New York City that he created at Pinewood? Some critics at the time said it was unrealistic, but it only adds to the dreamlike, ethereal atmosphere.
We built [the streets] to scale. Part of Stanley’s genius was that he could do these things. He built these things that felt real. We shot in London for the streets of New York, and there were streets in London you wouldn’t know weren’t New York unless you knew them. In terms of an audience subconscious, reading that, I don’t buy [those criticisms].
Kubrick kept a pretty small crew. There’s a story about Paul Thomas Anderson and feeling like Kubrick made him into a “Hollywood asshole” because he couldn’t believe there were so many people in the crew, and Kubrick was like, “How many do you need?”
I don’t remember him being there, actually. When we say he liked a smaller crew, he never had 10 cameras. He had two cameras, that’s it, maximum. Shoot with one most of the time. We did have a big crew. He just wouldn’t have lots of people on the set. It’s a distraction. We don’t need them on the set. Make them sit out in the corridor. Film crews can be very obstructive, and not deliberately sometimes. They sit around. They don’t mean to sit around. They’re bored or in the way or they’re talking. He hated anything like that. Any kind of distraction, we would take people out. For people that shoot with lots of people on the set, it would look like “Where is everyone? Is everyone on a tea break?”
And he’s not shooting a lot of coverage, where you’re collecting various angles and shots on the back end of a given scene to give the editor more opportunities.
That’s another thing about Stanley. You’re the first person to mention that today. People don’t realize how little coverage he did. This is, to me, a wake-up call for the way modern TV and movies are shot. The coverage, the extra shots. If you talk to directors that work this way, they say, “We need it because of the audience and their attention span.” I don’t believe it. If you cover a scene well, you don’t need a million cuts. That’s my opinion, and very few people allude to that as the way Stanley worked. That’s why he never did storyboards. That’s why he never did shot lists. He knew the coverage he wanted, and he never questioned [if he] was anything short, because he never was.
The new Criterion Collection 4K release of “Eyes Wide Shut” debuts on November 25.