Eyes Wide Shut

For other uses, see Eyes Wide Shut (disambiguation).

Eyes Wide Shut
A framed image of a nude couple kissing – she with her eye open – against a purple background. Below the picture frame are the film's credits.
Theatrical release poster
Directed byStanley Kubrick
Screenplay by
Based onTraumnovelle
by Arthur Schnitzler
Produced byStanley Kubrick
Starring
CinematographyLarry Smith
Edited byNigel Galt
Music byJocelyn Pook
Production
companies
Distributed byWarner Bros.
Release dates
  • July 13, 1999 (1999-07-13) (Los Angeles premiere)
  • July 16, 1999 (1999-07-16) (United States)
  • September 10, 1999 (1999-09-10) (United Kingdom)
Running time
159 minutes[1]
Countries
  • United Kingdom[2]
  • United States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$65 million[3]
Box office$162.1 million[3]

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It is based on the 1926 novella Dream Story (German: Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler, transferring the story's setting from early twentieth-century Vienna to 1990s New York City. The plot centers on a physician (Tom Cruise) who is shocked when his wife (Nicole Kidman) reveals that she had contemplated having an affair 12 months earlier. He then embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a masked orgy of an unnamed secret society.

Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s, considering it a perfect text for a film adaptation about sexual relations. He revived the project in the 1990s when he hired writer Frederic Raphael to help him with the adaptation. The film, which was mostly shot in England, apart from some exterior establishing shots, includes a detailed recreation of exterior Greenwich Village street scenes made at Pinewood Studios. The film's production, at 400 days, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot.

Kubrick died of a heart attack six days after showing the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut to Warner Bros., making it the final film he directed. He reportedly considered it his "greatest contribution to the art of cinema". In order to ensure a theatrical R rating in the United States, Warner Bros. digitally altered several sexually explicit scenes during post-production. This version was premiered on July 13, 1999, before being released on July 16, to generally positive but polarized reviews from critics.[4] Box office receipts for the film worldwide were about $162 million, making it Kubrick's highest-grossing film. The uncut version has since been released in DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats. Eyes Wide Shut has been critically reevaluated and included in several lists of the greatest films of the 1990s, and is retrospectively considered one of Stanley Kubrick's best films.

  1. ^ "EYES WIDE SHUT". British Board of Film Classification. Archived from the original on March 6, 2017. Retrieved September 29, 2013.
  2. ^ "Eyes Wide Shut (1999)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on July 11, 2012. Retrieved December 2, 2014.
  3. ^ a b "Eyes Wide Shut (1999)". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on September 3, 2012. Retrieved December 24, 2014.
  4. ^ Colombani, Elsa (October 16, 2020). A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-7936-1377-6.