Trivia
Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh originally played Victor Ziegler and Marion Nathanson. After Keitel and Leigh had shot some scenes, Keitel left the production due to his obligations to another project. His scenes needed to be re-shot, but Leigh was not available to re-shoot them (due to a scheduling conflict with eXistenZ). Consequently, Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson were brought in to play the respective roles.
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According to writer Frederic Raphael, the final form of Bill's family name (Harford, as opposed to Scheuer in the original story) was inspired by a debate about Bill's character. Raphael felt Bill should be Jewish as in the original, but Stanley Kubrick insisted Bill and Alice be "vanilla" Americans, without any details that would arouse any presumptions. Kubrick said that Bill should be a bit like Harrison Ford - hence the name Harford. Ironically, Ford himself is Jewish on his mother's side.
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In order for the film to be given an R rating in America, some scenes contain computer-generated people in the foreground obscuring some of the more explicit sexual action. Although some claimed this to be a perversion of 'Stanley Kubrick''s work, Kubrick had already proposed the use of computer-generated imagery prior to his death, should the MPAA deny the movie its desired R-rating.
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One of the patients who Tom Cruise cancels is called Kaminsky, the name of one of the hibernating crew that HAL kills in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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The mask that Bill Harford wears with his costume is modeled from the face of Ryan O'Neal, a reference to Barry Lyndon.
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The password "fidelio" (from the Latin root "fidelis" meaning "faithful") refers to Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio". In the opera, Fidelio is a woman who disguises herself as a man to save her lover.
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In the film, Todd Field plays a character who dropped out of medical school ten years earlier and now plays the piano. Ten years before this film was released, Field played a pianist who dropped out of medical school in Gross Anatomy which starred Matthew Modine who played "Joker" in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.
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This film contains in-joke references to almost all of Stanley Kubrick's films, including his first feature Fear and Desire. At one point we see a scene from Blume in Love on a TV set. "Blume" was directed by Paul Mazursky, who made his acting debut in Fear and Desire.
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A real estate agent's sign that appears briefly in shot at the end of a street carries the name Vitali. The newspaper article that Bill reads announcing the death of Mandy mentions that she was a model and that she had been involved with a designer named Leon Vitali. Leon Vitali is one of Kubrick's longest-serving colleagues and also plays Red Cloak.
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Stanley Kubrick died just four days after presenting Warner Bros. with what was reported to be a final cut of the film, after a legendary long shoot.
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A VHS copy of the movie Rain Man is seen in Alice and Bill's bedroom on top of their entertainment stand during their marijuana-enhanced argument.
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The tremendous hype around the release of this film resulted in several rumors about the plot. The most widely circulated rumor was that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman played married psychiatrists having affairs with their patients.
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When Bill enters his apartment for the last time (right before he discovers the mask on his pillow) we can see a stack of Stanley Kubrick videos from on the long table under the painting. The one on the top is Full Metal Jacket.
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The letters and the newspaper read by Tom Cruise are written in Italian for the Italian version of this movie. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick shot those scenes with papers written in different languages, as he did for The Shining.
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Stanley Kubrick had three assistants on the film. Their credits are "Assistant to the Director" (Leon Vitali), "Assistant to Stanley Kubrick" (Anthony Frewin) and "Assistant to Mr. Kubrick" (Emilio D'Alessandro).
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While VHS and region 2 DVD editions sold in Great Britain, Germany and France have always been completely uncensored the original region 1 DVD contained the USA theatrical cut which contained computer-generated people in the foreground obscuring some of the more explicit sexual action during the orgy sequence. However the USA version of 2007 double DVD special edition (encoded, as now appears to be Warner Bros. standard practice, for regions 1, 2, 3 & 4) contains the full uncensored European theatrical print, making it the first time Stanley Kubrick's final cut has been made directly available in any form to customers in the USA.
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Stanley Kubrick's daughter Katharina Kubrick and his grandson Alex Hobbs appear as the mother and the kid patient who had his face examined by Bill.
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The music during the ceremony at the masked ball is a fragment of an Orthodox mass played backwards; the priest is singing in Romanian.
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The film was "pushed" two stops in processing, thus enabling Stanley Kubrick to film using existing source lighting (table lamps, overhead lights, etc.) whenever possible. The light level remained low even when lighting had to be supplemented with Lowell or Chinese paper ball lamps as fill or key lights.
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Appeared in the Guinness Book of Records with the record for "The Longest Constant Movie Shoot", at 400 days.
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Though often referred to as Stanley Kubrick's "unfinished masterpiece", the final edit of the film was actually presented to Warner Bros. (by Kubrick) a full four days before his death.
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The 13 and-a-half minute billiard room scene between Tom Cruise and Sydney Pollack took about three weeks of filming. The greeting scene at the party early in the picture took only two hours.
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Early on in production, Stanley Kubrick, a huge Woody Allen fan, considered casting him in the Victor Ziegler role eventually given to Sydney Pollack. He also considered casting Steve Martin as Bill Harford (Kubrick had greatly enjoyed The Jerk).
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Due to Stanley Kubrick's fear of travel virtually the entire film was shot in and near London (despite the movie's New York setting). Elaborate street sets built at Pinewood Studios were used for all the scenes showing Tom Cruise walking around the city.
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Christiane Kubrick (Stanley's wife) and Katharina Kubrick (Kubrick's stepdaughter) contributed original paintings to the film.
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Next to the Sonata Jazz club is a café called "Gillespie's", named after famous jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie.
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Paul Thomas Anderson made a visit to the set, where he offered Tom Cruise the role of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia.
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In a few shots of Tom Cruise walking through the city, background plates of actual New York streets were rear-projected behind the actor walking on a treadmill.
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The Harford's apartment is based on a New York apartment where the Kubrick family lived during the early 1960s.
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Variety reported that Stanley Kubrick himself selected the movie's release date after analyzing scores of box-office data provided to him by Warner Bros.
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Stanley Kubrick and director of photography Larry Smith tested out different film stocks and finally settled on one that had been discontinued by Kodak. As a courtesy, Kodak offered to supply as many rolls of this film as would be needed for the project.
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Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman signed open-ended contracts. They agreed to work on this project until Stanley Kubrick released them from it, however long that turned out to be.
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The article Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is reading in the café titled "Ex-beauty queen dies in hotel drugs overdose" credits "Larry Celona" as the article's author. Larry Celona was the journalistic advisor for the film.
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When it was announced that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman would be making the film with Stanley Kubrick, Vincent D'Onofrio (who played Leonard "Private Pyle" Lawrence in Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket) had this open advice for them: "Rent a house or apartment, because you're going to be in England for a while."
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Eva Herzigova was offered the role of Mandy by Kubrick, but she refused because there were too many naked scenes and Kubrick didn't want to modify them.
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According to writer Frederic Raphael a few of the proposed titles for the film were "You and Me" and "The Female Subject". Kubrick personally chose "Eyes Wide Shut".
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When Tom Cruise's character returns to the Mansion the Mysterious/Sinister music that is heard was first used in the 1946 'David Niven' film, Stairway to Heaven when Niven's character is being judged in heaven.
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Tom Cruise and Sky du Mont, who plays Sandor Szavost both have something in common besides this movie. Sky Dumont played the character Claus Von Stauffenberg in War and Remembrance, in the Project Valkyrie Chapter, and Cruise played the same character in Valkyrie (2008), directed by Bryan Singer.
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When Harford's secretary brings lunch to his desk, she stops directly between the camera and a painting that looks like him with his clothing removed.
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Harford's wallet is quite full at the beginning of the film but later it's clear that he's very outmatched financially. When he arrives home and his wife and daughter are doing homework, they're working a math problem about two individuals that have different amounts of money.
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Director Stanley Kubrick reportedly watched movies like Showgirls, Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction during the editing phase, to get the idea of how explicit the sex scenes in the movie could be and still retain the R-rated movie he had contractually agreed to deliver.
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When Bill Harford watches television in his living room apartment, an American professional football game is on. The game is also on when he enters the Sonata Café. Stanley Kubrick was a huge NFL fan, as he reportedly received VHS recordings of matches taped by his friends back in the United States when he lived in England.
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The mirror scene lasted up to 90 seconds in the trailers. Audiences were surprised when only 20 seconds of it made it into the film.
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Abigail Good, a runway model who plays the mysterious woman that intervenes at the ceremony and is led away to an uncertain future, spoke her lines during filming, but her voice was dubbed by another actress in final production.
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Cameo
Brian W. Cook:
served as co-producer and first assistant director and played the tall butler.
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Director Trademark
Stanley Kubrick:
[114]
The room in the morgue visited by Bill is in wing C, room 114 (C-Rm114, or CRM-114). CRM-114 was the name of the decoding machine in Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, as well as the number printed on the medicine that Alex is given in A Clockwork Orange.
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Stanley Kubrick:
[The Glare]
The scene in the taxi, when paranoid thoughts are going through Tom Cruise's mind.
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Spoilers
Near the end of the movie, when Dr. Harford enters the coffee shop, we hear Mozart's Requiem - a mass for the dead. It is at this point that the music swells and Dr. Harford picks up the newspaper to find that the prostitute that he has been searching for has been found dead of a drug overdose.
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