REVEALED: Nicole Kidman on marriage, marijuana and the making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Eyes Wide Shut” was Stanley Kubrick’s final film. He died four months before its release. It took its stars — Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Hollywood’s most famous couple — off the market for nearly two years, as what was supposed to be a six-month shoot stretched on indefinitely, to the point where Kidman seriously began to wonder: Is this ever going to end?

Not that she was in any hurry to leave. “I would have stayed a third year,” Kidman tells me. “Does that mean I’m crazy?” The protracted buildup led to wild speculation and curiosity about the movie, which had been teased as a “story of sexual jealousy and obsession.” When it was finally released on July 16, 1999, the response was muted, tinged with disappointment.

But its reputation and its mysteries have deepened over the years. Christopher Nolan calls it “the ‘2001’ of relationship movies.” He is not entirely wrong. Kidman and I have talked about the film many times over the years. With “Eyes Wide Shut” marking its 25th anniversary, it felt like a good occasion to deepen the discussion.

Maybe that was an exaggeration. [Laughs.] It was the scene with Tom and I where I start by smoking the spliff in bed and where I laugh and deliver the long monologue. That took many weeks. A lot of that was rehearsing in the bedroom and then him not liking what we’d done. So we ended up reworking it, constructing it as we went along. There was no need to rush. Stanley would never go over budget. What he bought was time.