It’s hard to reckon with a filmmaker such as Stanley Kubrick when he’s created art so deserving of critical acclaim, but the grandeur is clouded by how incredibly difficult, obsessive, and manipulative his behavior was on set.
Films like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Eyes Wide Shut” had audiences everywhere figuratively by the throats, earning decades of dedicated viewership.
However, do the ends of epic filmmaking justify the means when compromising the mental well-being of the team you’ve hired to bring your vision to life? Probably not.
And yet, in a 2014 Vanity Fair article, Amy Nicholson recalls the ways in which “Eyes Wide Shut” stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman leaned into the tactics Kubrick was implementing, appreciating how the director was able to create such a vision through psychoanalyzing and manipulating his actors’ real lives.For the then-married couple, working on “Eyes Wide Shut” was an endurance test, twisting the
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