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 mystery 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 interviews 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.”
In the mid-1990s, Lisa Leone was shooting stills and working in print journalism and music videos when she got a call from her friend, Vivian. “Vivian said, ‘Hey, my father’s doing another movie, and he just faxed over pages of things to research,” Leone told IndieWire. “‘He doesn’t know I’m moving to Santa Cruz in a week and that I don’t have time. Can you help me shoot this? I can’t pay you and I can’t tell him you’re helping me, but I can buy you film.’”
Vivian’s father was Stanley Kubrick, and the movie was “Eyes Wide Shut.” When Leone saw the list of things Kubrick wanted photographed, she realized they were all in her neighborhood and told Vivian she’d be happy to help out. “I made some four by sixes, she mailed them off, and I forgot about it,” Leone said. Six months later, she checked her answering machine and heard Stanley Kubrick’s voice on one of her messages.
Vivian had come clean to her father and admitted that she didn’t take the pictures, which Kubrick thought were some of the best research photos he had ever seen. When Vivian gave Stanley her friend’s name and number, he called Leone to offer her “a couple weeks’ work” researching New York City for him, since “Eyes Wide Shut” took place there and he hadn’t set foot in New York — or America as a whole — in decades.
A couple weeks turned into four years, as Leone’s job expanded from research photographer to second unit director, set decorator, and even actor (she plays Tom Cruise’s doctor character’s receptionist in two scenes). “I started off just photographing different parts of the city, but it grew and grew,” Leone said. “I wound up sending him two 45-foot containers of taxi cabs, signs, garbage cans, everything I could to dress the set.”
An apartment that belonged to one of Leone’s friends became the model for prostitute Domino’s (Vinessa Shaw) residence when Kubrick fell in love with photos Leone took of the location. “They were gutting the apartment,” Leone said. “So I said, ‘Stanley, we could take everything. Do you want the bathtub, the fridge?’ He said yes, so I took it all.”
Kubrick also had Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown give Leone a device she could put a small video camera on, and she walked around New York to give Kubrick a sense of the city and provide reference material for establishing shots — establishing shots that Leone ended up shooting herself when Kubrick asked her to film things like the outside of Ziegler’s (Sydney Pollack) home or background plates for Tom Cruise to walk in front of on a treadmill on the film’s stages in London.
Leone would shoot stills of the locations, send them to Kubrick, and then go back to the locations and take more pictures with the camera in slightly different positions per Kubrick’s instructions. When the time came to shoot the actual footage for the movie, Leone told second-unit cinematographers Malik Hassan Sayeed and Arthur Jafa, whom she knew from the world of music videos, to just replicate the framing in the photos.
At the time, Sayeed — currently earning accolades for his work on Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” — had just begun to make a name for himself thanks to his collaborations with Spike Lee on “Clockers” and “Girl 6.” When Kubrick tasked Leone with supplying second-unit footage, she sent Kubrick Sayeed’s reel, and the young cinematographer suddenly found himself working for one of his favorite directors.
“It was all very surreal because he’s a massive cinematic hero of mine,” Sayeed said, noting that he soon realized Kubrick was relying almost entirely on Leone for the movie’s sense of what New York looked like in the 1990s. “He hadn’t been there in many years, and New York was quite different from how he had it fixed in his mind. It wasn’t the same New York, just like New York now is not the same New York as when we worked on the film.”
Leone, Sayeed, and Jafa worked to Kubrick’s precise specifications, which taught Sayeed lessons about shooting architecture that he says have stayed with him ever since. “He was very specific in how he wanted the buildings and the streets to be represented photographically,” Sayeed said. “We had to shoot with an 18mm lens from a certain vantage point, which wasn’t too high — probably a stepladder that had us up in the air 10 or 12 feet. Because the 18mm lens can distort, being on the wider side, he was very precise about making sure that our lines didn’t bend and that they were symmetrical with the frame. I’ve used that ever since for shooting architecture or anything structural.”
It didn’t take long for Leone to realize that her “couple of weeks” on the film would grow into something much more substantial. “It became like a joke,” she said. “He called me and said, ‘I fired the New York art director.’ And I said, ‘Oh, do you want me to find somebody else for you?’ He said ‘No, don’t worry about it, I’ve got you.’”
Once Kubrick began production with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in London, he relied on Leone to provide more and more references for the sets that were being built. “I still hadn’t read a script, by the way,” Leone said. “ It was like, ‘Go find something that could be a costume shop.’ I just went out and photographed every single day and night. And then when it was time to build, I went back at two in the morning and measured all the buildings and sent the measurements back for them to build the sets.”
Eventually, Kubrick realized that Leone could be an even greater resource for him on set, so he called for her to join the production in London as a set decorator — but even then, her duties went far beyond her stated job. “I would stay with him on set until two in the morning,” Leone said. “It was just me, him, and an AC [assistant cameraman], and we would test the sets. He’d say, ‘Go sit in that chair,’ and we’d look at the footage the next day and say, ‘I don’t know, maybe that rug’s not right.’ We shot so much footage. I could have made three feature films just out of those tests.”
Leone prided herself on taking on jobs — from shooting translights for outside the set windows to directing a convincing double for Tom Cruise in long shots — that Kubrick thought she wouldn’t be able to do. When it came time to figure out Leone’s credit, Kubrick was at a loss. “He said, ‘You should actually have a producing credit, but Warners will never agree to that,’” Leone said. When she proposed a second unit director credit — the most accurate description of her role — Kubrick prevaricated.
“For some reason, he thought that credit would make people think I had directed Tom, even though everybody knows second unit means not the principal cast,” Leone said. “He got stuck on that.”
Kubrick and Leone were still going back and forth about the credit when Leone got word that the director had died, just a day after her last conversation with him. (She was ultimately given credit as a set decorator.) “I had one more shot left to do when he died,” Leone said. “It was an establishing shot of Ziegler’s mansion. We had done it, it was in the edit, but it looked dead in the film.” Leone and Kubrick discussed redoing the shot with more activity, and she scheduled a shoot for two days later. The following day, she learned that Kubrick died after her mother saw it on the news.
“I didn’t believe it,” Leone said. “I called his cell phone, and Christiane [his wife] answered, and she was hysterical. That was it. I canceled the shoot and flew to London for the funeral.” After the funeral, Leone touched base with Warner Bros. executive Terry Semel and other collaborators and it was decided that Kubrick’s edit would not be touched — he had shown the movie to Cruise, Kidman, and the studio just a few days earlier and was happy with it, so aside from that lingering reshoot of the Ziegler establishing shot no new footage would be photographed and no changes would be made to the cut.
“Obviously, they had to do the sound mix and color correction, but the edit itself was not to be touched,” Leone said. She returned to the U.S. and directed the final shot, and her work on “Eyes Wide Shut” was finished. At the time of Kubrick’s death, he was talking with Leone about making “A.I.” as his next film, and she was angling for Sayeed to shoot it — a fact that Sayeed made ironic 26 years later, as he worked with Guadagnino on “Artificial,” an upcoming feature about artificial intelligence pioneer Sam Altman.
“There’s a scene in [‘Artificial’] where a character is watching ‘A.I.,’” Sayeed said, referring to the movie Steven Spielberg directed from Kubrick’s concept drawings and research in 2001. “You can’t make it up — life is so interesting.”
Leone experienced deep personal and professional grief when Kubrick died, since they had planned to spend the next five years making “A.I.” together. She notes that Kubrick’s skill as a producer — every penny he spent was on the screen — dovetailed with an extremely personal way of making movies. “Everything that I brought onto the set was basically from his house or his kids’ house,” Leone said. “It was all Christiane’s artwork on the walls, and the furniture in Tom and Nicole’s apartment was all Stanley’s living room furniture.”
The personal nature of the filmmaking extended to the limited number of people on Kubrick’s crew. “It’s like a student film,” Leone said. “Everybody is very close. And he definitely pushes you to a point where you’re like, ‘I don’t have anything else. I can’t go out there and find another angle.’ But then you do. And there’s something to being pushed like that to find something within yourself that you didn’t realize was there.”
In spite of Kubrick’s all-consuming demands, Leone never had second thoughts about devoting herself full-time to “Eyes Wide Shut.” “I was 29 or 30, and I gave up my life,” she said. “I did everything. I was on call seven days a week. Because come on — it’s Stanley Kubrick.”
“Eyes Wide Shut” is newly available on 4K UHD from Criterion in a special edition that features new interviews with Leone and many other Kubrick collaborators.