Stagingthatscene fromEyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubricks divisive final film.
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Something curious happenedin New York around Christmastime 2016.
For a few weeks,most of the rep houses in the city were screeningStanley KubricksEyes Wide Shut.
The directors final film had become, somehow, a holiday staple.
Hed allowed the dreamy,Mitteleuropa-n mood of Schnitzlers original novella to seep into his picture.
The film stock itself had been pushed two stops and had taken on a grainy, otherworldly look.
Some scenes had been lit solely with Christmas lights.
And then there was the deliberate, trancelike cadence of the performances.
Just then, a mysterious woman intercedes and sacrifices herself to get to save him.
Jeff Bezos, it turns out, sends awkward sexts.
The owner of the New England Patriots allegedly patronizes low-rent massage parlors.
Britains royal family cheats in the most boring ways.
The rich are too busy screwing the world over to screw each other with any imagination.
But Kubrick wasnt after realism with these scenes.
It was only after months of rehearsal and improvisation that the sequence took its final shape.
The results were strange, disturbing, creepy, erotic, ridiculous, and unforgettable.
Here, his collaborators discuss how it all came to be.
They know how to do this, Stanley.
We used to have a laugh about that.
But really, [the orgy scene] kept getting pushed back and back and back in the shoot.
Stanley wasnt keen on doing it in many ways.
It wasnt his stuff, to be honest with you.
It was complicated, and so was finding the right places to do it.
But we had every piece of research for years and years to do this stuff with.
We had a lot of illustrations, contemporary and even much older, of some ceremonies.
Legman also recommended Felicien Rops, a very famous artist who specialized in all sorts of weird erotica.
What do you fancy doing?
Shed say, No …
Absolutely no … Maybe …
Yes … No … Thats okay.
I went through every modeling agency, every dance academy.
One of the problems was that they had to be totally natural.
No Botox, no breast enhancements, anything like that.
I made it very clear to everybody who came and their agents.
I also reached out to Yolande Snaith, a choreographer with her own dance company.
Yolande Snaith (choreographer):I spent a lot of time in the rehearsal studio with the models.
Stanley wanted these sort of erotic vignettes and situations.
I think the words he used weresurrealandsuggestive.But not explicit.
He described the whole scene being in this secret huge mansion with this secret society of men with prostitutes.
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.
Instead, he said it would be more a kind of modern dance with the inference of sex.
Its a deliberate kind of movement.
She was trying to get a more kind of sensual approach to it.
There was another scene on beds or sofas.
The pressure and resistance of bodies against bodies, bodies against tables or walls or other kinds of props.
YS:Im not sure that Stanley knew entirely what he wanted.
Jocelyn Pook was a composer I knew, [who had a piece called] Backwards Priests.
I was using that in the rehearsal studio because it felt very appropriate.
When Stanley was looking at the tapes of rehearsal, he asked, What is that music?
Jocelyn Pook (composer):Stanley said, Ive heard this piece from your album.
Id love to hear more stuff.
I remember a car came within a few hours to collect the little cassette I made.
I was asked later to do the rest of the original music.
LV:We were taking so long that sometimes the leases ran out on where we could rehearse.
And then we had to find some more because we realized we didnt have enough.
It was all very Stanley.
YS:Stanley had a whole collection of Italian masks, the commedia dellarte masks.
He invited me to snag the ones that were the most striking.
We were playing around with different ritualistic formations.
Lines, roads, walking, processions towards a threshold or towards an altar.
At a certain point, it became clear to Stanley he wanted it to be a circle.
He wanted them to start on the ground.
LV:Elveden was this house that was owned by the Guinness family.
It was built by a [maharajah] in the 1800s, with a corridor that is hand-carved marble.
It had been used during the war for a secret command center.
It was the weirdest place youve ever seen.
There was another house we used which had belonged to the guy who discovered Tutankhamens tomb.
There was a very extensive museum in his basement.
Todd Field (Nick Nightingale):The ball began at Elveden Hall.
When I first walked inside, other than the musical equipment onstage, the place was empty.
I took a seat at the keyboard and started rehearsing Backward Priests.
At a certain point, the music stopped.
I was the only person on set with their eyes shut.
And that was because Stanley wanted this very particular body bang out, a sort of Barbie-doll bang out.
But that was part of the whole psychology of [the scene].
There was one woman, Abigail, who ended up having this larger role.
She hadnt trained as a dancer, but she was a natural mover.
God, I sound like a bit of a bimbo!
Oh, Im really good at walking.
But no, there is a way of walking, to me, that creates a strong character.
YS:There were a few male dancers we were working with initially on the erotic dances.
And one of them, Russell, had been dancing in my company.
And then in the later scenes, its Leon [playing him].
Because you never see his face.
A lot of the timing of that whole scene was queued by Russell because he had his stick.
We did that shot so many times.
We just did it again and again and again to get the timing right.
JD:Our rehearsals for that lasted a month.
We were kneeling up and down on four-and-a-half-inch heels.
I injured a fascia on my leg.
Im not going to lie.
I wasnt willing to be accommodating.
I stuck to my guns about what I would do.
Peter Cavaciuti (Steadicam operator):Stanleys precision was the thing I remember most.
That level of precision was pretty exceptional.
Youd very rarely do less than 20 takes.
So physically and intellectually, it was demanding.
Very often, Stanley would say to me that I wasnt on my mark.
And one time Tom Cruise whispered to me, Just move the camera, Pete.
YS:Tom Cruise was very charming.
So nice to meet you.
And he started talking about a film that Id made for TV calledSwinger.
He was throwing all these compliments at me about this little film.
All I could say was, Oh, well, I really like your films, too, Tom.
For every movie he made, he was getting $20 million, $25 million up front.
And the same with Nicole.
AG:I remember being on set one day.
And we as the actors were sort of like, Whats going on?
And what happened was Stanley had noticed that there was a light out.
Somewhere in that scene, he said, there was a light out.
Theres not, Stanley.
Nobodys been here, nothings been touched.
Yes, there is.
Were not starting until you find it.
He was a perfectionist.
And probably drove people mad.
But he was one of those annoying people whos always right.
That was my brief!
I came up with a weird piece called Dionysus, which didnt ultimately get used in the film.
It actually got used inGangs of New York.
I dont know if Martin Scorsese knows it was originally written forEyes Wide Shut.
The piece he did use was originally on my album.
It used a vocal sampled from another earlier recording.
The vocalist had been improvising and had used some words from the Bhagavad Gita.
It was an expensive mess-up.
Like there was a bit of an homage toClockwork Orange.
It all was choreographed as we went.
Stanley could change a whole scene just because it suddenly made sense to him in a different way.
JD:They came to us and said, Theres been a change of plans.
I and another girl, we opted out.
I said to the other girls, If you do this, thats a completely different scenario.
I would ask for more money if I were you.
I didnt think the orgy really needed a lot of choreography in the end, from what it became.
They were erotic, but there was no humping going on.
LV:I think it was the profane and the graceful.
Stanley wanted it to go as far as we could possibly go.
But of course there are so many limitations when it comes to decency or obscenity.
I was on the set with Tom and Stanley, finding things on our own.
Stanley asked my opinion a lot.
Me and Tom were among the last people he ever filmed; Stanley died before the dubbing was done.
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 hed 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.
They had a huge problem.
When Kubrick died, the cut was known to be locked.
And he was a very hands-on editor.
But the agreement between Kubrick and Warner Bros. was that he was contracted to deliver an R-rated film.
But he was conscious that we were treading in pretty dangerous territory.
That same MPAA approved theSouth Parkmovie!
Its full of obscenities, full of implied or actual sexual entendres.
PE:The cut was sacred; they werent going to change one frame of it.
They didnt want to have anybody be able to say to them, Youve cut these shots out!
or anything like that.
Why have they done that?
In some cases they were pointing at the wrong figure they were pointing at somebodyrealin the scene.
It was all quite dramatically lit, which helped.
And a lot of the characters stood still that was part of the style of the scene.
But all the [CGI] figures are moving slightly.
They do change their balance a little bit.
AG:The premiere was quite interesting.
The length of the shoot caused a lot of press.
The fact that it was Tom and Nicole caused a lot of press.
Oh my God, the two biggest stars in Hollywood are going to be walking around naked.
And it was Stanley and the fact that then he died.
You were making a film about the Illuminati, wasnt it?
Its about the cover-up in the Catholic church, wasnt it?
When it began to be just a maelstrom of these calls, I would hang up.
You know, theres apparently anEyes Wide Shutclub in L.A.
They actually have women there in masks and guys in evening suits who patronize them.
Its somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills, or around that area.
When we were shooting, somebody said I think it was Tom Do you think these places really exist?
And Stanley said, Well, if they dont, they will soon.
