Stanley Kubrick’s collaborators discuss how the 'Eyes Wide Shut' orgy scene came to be. BilgeEbiri reports
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Photo: Warner Bros. Something curious happened in New York around Christmastime 2016. For a few weeks, most of the rep houses in the city were screening Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The director’s final film had become, somehow, a holiday staple.
These scenes, which Kubrick and his team developed and rehearsed over months, have since passed into legend, being referenced in works from Moonrise Kingdom to Get Out to Men in Black: International to HBO’s Succession.
Anthony Frewin : I had a friend who lived in the south of France, G. Legman. He supplied us with a lot of information about secret societies and sexual mores in Vienna at the time of Schnitzler. He also sent over a lot of illustrations of secret-society rituals and the Black Mass, mainly from the 19th century. We had a lot of illustrations, contemporary and even much older, of some ceremonies.
Abigail Good : They took this space which is now a really beautiful hotel in St. Pancras. A very grand building with a big staircase. It was all very surreal because we were doing these weird ceremonial movements for months. We would meet and rehearse and come up with ideas. And every day, Leon would record it and come back with feedback from Stanley.
Todd Field as Nick Nightingale. Photo: Warner Bros. Jocelyn Pook : Stanley said, “I’ve heard this piece from your album. I’d love to hear more stuff.” I remember a car came within a few hours to collect the little cassette I made. And the next day, the car returned to pick me up, and I went to see him in Pinewood studio. He was really excited about some music he was listening to, and he talked me through the section he wanted me to work on.
YS: Stanley had a whole collection of Italian masks, the commedia dell’arte masks. He invited me to select the ones that were the most striking. It was a collaborative process, but I did feel I was more of an artistic assistant for Stanley to develop a clearer vision of what that whole scene was. After a few weeks, he started to talk to me about the ritual, the masked ball, and the disrobing ritual. We were playing around with different ritualistic formations.
AG: Stanley said I reminded him of Lady Lyndon from Barry Lyndon. But yes, I wasn’t directed to walk like that really. I was a model and I’d done a lot of catwalks, so I knew how to walk in heels. God, I sound like a bit of a bimbo! “Oh, I’m really good at walking.” But no, there is a way of walking, to me, that creates a strong character.
Peter Cavaciuti : Stanley’s precision was the thing I remember most. I had three lasers on the Steadicam, pointed to the ground, and when they all lined up, a grip would drop a plumb line from a string from the lens; then I’d line my lasers up, and then the grip would talk me into the mark, saying I was two inches, one inch on the mark. That level of precision was pretty exceptional. You’d very rarely do less than 20 takes. So physically and intellectually, it was demanding.
JP: For the orgy scene, Stanley was a bit vaguer musically, because it was going to be less stylized. He said, “Yeah, I really don’t know what the music should be here, but try something — sexy music.” [Laughs.] That was my brief! I came up with a weird piece called “Dionysus,” which didn’t ultimately get used in the film. It actually got used in Gangs of New York. I don’t know if Martin Scorsese knows it was originally written for Eyes Wide Shut.
AG: They would just say, “Right, okay, you bend over, and you do that one like that, and you lie there, and you do it like that.” I know we were wearing masks and we had our anonymity and we could have just never told anybody we’d done it, but it’s not an easy thing to do. LV: It was Cate Blanchett! That was her voice. We wanted something warm and sensual but that at the same time could be a part of a ritual. Stanley had talked about finding this voice and this quality that we needed. After he’d died, I was looking for someone. It was actually Tom and Nicole who came up with the idea of Cate. She was in England at the time, so she came into Pinewood and recorded the lines.
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