Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story. The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It was his last film, as the director died five days after showing Warner Bros. his final cut. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford, who is shocked when his wife, Alice, reveals that she had contemplated an affair a year earlier. He embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an underground cult.
Kubrick got the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s, considering it a perfect novel to adapt on a film about sexual relations. The project was only revived in the 1990s, when the director hired writer Frederic Raphael to help him with the adaptation. The film was wholly shot in the United Kingdom, including a recreation of Greenwich Village at Pinewood Studios, and had a long production, which holds the Guinness World Record for the longest constant movie shoot, at 400 days.
Eyes Wide Shut was released on July 16, 1999, a few months after Kubrick's death, to generally positive critical reaction and intakes of $162 million at the worldwide box office. Its strong sexual content also made it controversial. To ensure a theatrical R rating in the United States, its distributor Warner Bros. digitally altered several scenes during post-production. The uncut version has since been released on DVD.
Famous quotes containing the word wide:
“The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)