Nicole Kidman has recently revealed the piquant details of her role in the movie Eyes Wide Shut (1999), directed by Stanley Kubrick, in The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Thirteen years after the film’s release, Nicole admitted that the director had to work hard to persuade her into acting in intimate scenes with Tom Cruise, who was her lawful husband at that time:
Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn’t end up in the movie.
According to Kidman, at first it was difficult for her to awaken her sexuality. However, Kubrick managed to help her reveal herself:
“I did feel safe – I never felt it was exploitive or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.”
Nicole told about the director’s attempts to compare the relationship of the movie characters and her real relationship with Tom Cruise. Despite such an approach, she said that those characters had had very little in common with them.
In addition, Nicole denied that the shooting of the film had caused the collapse of her and Tom’s marriage. The couple divorced two years after the film’s release:
“People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don’t really think it was … That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life – which we weren’t oblivious to, but obviously it wasn’t us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.”
Kubrick died in March 1999, just four days after shooting the final scene of this motion picture. However, as we see, the memory of him and his films has not faded yet.
