Nicole Kidman has opened up about working on Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick and reaching a ‘great agreement’ when it came to filming her nude scenes.
Babygirl may be hitting headlines for its erotic nature, however it’s far from the first time Nicole Kidman has tackled scenes featuring nudity and sex.
In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2020, Kidman opened up about going to work with Kubrick and shooting Eyes Wide Shut (1999) for two years.
She went to shoot the film with then-husband Tom Cruise, the pair sharing two kids and living ‘primarily’ in a trailer on the lot, joined by Kubrick for dinners of spaghetti.
She reflected: “We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set. We would say, “When is it going to end?” We went over there thinking it was going to be three months. It turned into a year, a year and a half.
“But you go, As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time. Stanley, he wasn’t torturous. He was arduous in that he would shoot a lot. But I’d sit on the floor of his office and talk, and we’d watch animal videos.”
And Kidman actually struck up an official agreement with Kubrick when it came to filming certain scenes of the film in particular.
Nicole Kidman starred alongside Tom Cruise in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (Warner Bros.)
The actor explains Kubrick stated he was ‘going to want full frontal nudity’ ahead of filming which she wasn’t sure about at first however, the pair came up with ‘a great agreement’ which she reveals was actually ‘contractual’ when it came to those scenes.
“He would show me the scenes with the nudity before they made it into the film. Then I could feel completely safe. I didn’t say no to any of it. I’d wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be me standing there nude and everyone laughing at me. I was protected, so I got to explore a complicated marriage and the way in which Tom’s character is having those jealous images.
“I would never think of not wanting the storytelling to be told properly. Having them say, ‘Once you’re OK with it, great, that’s it’ – what a fantastic place to be in as a woman. Please write that correctly, because otherwise, it will be misinterpreted.”
Kidman explains the contractual agreements she devises with a director is ultimately what allows for her to ‘do nudity and scenes’ because it makes her ‘feel safe’.
She resolved: “Sexuality is over here in a box, and we don’t deal with it. I’m happy to deal with it, but there needs to be a place where you can go, I’m not going to be exploited. Then I’ll go down the road with you. I love the relationship between a director and an actor. When it’s pure, it’s exquisite. And the other actors, when you’re all there doing the work, it’s exquisite.”