Update: Nicole Kidman has given a new interview to the LA Times on the occasion of Eyes Wide Shut‘s 25th anniversary, providing new details on the film’s creation (among them surprising notice of where her own input made the final cut). Read the original story below.
Stanley Kubrick’s final film opened 25 years ago today to largely befuddled disinterest. Even in more recent years its champions (Martin Scorsese most notable among them) seemed quixotic claiming it would someday receive appreciation à la 2001, Barry Lyndon, or The Shining. 25 years hence, Eyes Wide Shut seems nearly incontestable as one of the director’s supreme achievements––something that still feels unresolved and irreconcilable, every viewing the opportunity to glance at incomprehensible horrors among your community and within yourself.
The movie is also terrifically entertaining, and to celebrate Eyes Wide Shut‘s 25th anniversary we’ll be screening, alongside our friends at Movie Mindset, a 35mm print at the Roxy Cinema between August 3––6 as part of our Fidelio series. In a mix of commemoration and promotion I’ll point you towards this press conference which Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and producer Jan Harlan conducted as the film opened in France––an especially unique, compelling conversation for being the only time either star publicly spoke about Eyes Wide Shut at length and coming at a strange moment after the film opened stateside but was, by all accounts, new.
Thus we can see them handle a question about “underperformance” at the U.S. box office with an eye towards legacy, stars of their magnitude fighting against bean-counting obsessiveness that’s only grown exponentially worse this last quarter-century, leading to Jan Harlan’s insistence “every grown-up should see it twice”––the rare bit of promotional jesting that is emphatically true. Cruise, Mission: Impossible II hair in full flow, mentions that he shot “just a cameo in a film called Magnolia for a young director, P.T. Anderson,” while Nicole Kidman details the couple’s experience watching copies of The Decalogue handed them by Kubrick.
Watch below, along with a documentary about Eyes Wide Shut‘s creation, and buy tickets to our screenings: