Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Did it happen? Was it a nightmare? Or a waking dream? Certainly, it had the heightened reality of a dream. Alice forgives him: “One night is not the whole life.” But Bill knows he has been changed for life: “No dream is just a dream.”

  It is a mature and subtle movie. Kubrick does not spoon-feed you stories; he tries to enter your mind and disturb it. Tom and Nicole embraced the story wholeheartedly. Their characters must have been married for at least eight years and while he undoubtedly loves her, like many men that long into marriage, he doesn’t really notice her. She is on the lavatory sniffing her armpit when she asks him: “How do I look?’ “Perfect,” comes the answer. “Is my hair okay?” “It’s great.” “You’re not even looking at it.”

  No wonder when they go to a ball and an elegant Hungarian dances seductively with her, she is intrigued when he dismisses the protective armour of her marriage with slick lines such as: “One of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties” and, absurdly: “It was the only way women could lose their virginity and be free to do what they wanted.”

  Nicole may float on the raft of his seduction but she raises her finger with her wedding ring to ward off his evil intent. It was a spontaneous, unscripted gesture.

  “Just that moment early in the film when she raises her finger and says ‘I’m married’ ‘, Tom remembers, “Stanley loved that about her. He called her his thoroughbred.”

  But the experience of this flirtation in comparison with quotidian life is part of what prompts her character reveal her infatuation with the sailor.

  “Subconsciously she wanted something more from her husband,” Nicole explains. “It triggers all sorts of reactions. It is dangerous territory. I am saying things I have held back for so long. Fascinating but so real.”

  She, more than Tom, had worries about being good enough for Kubrick. “I was so in awe. Terrified. I had fear for a month. I had these two big monologues but over time he gave me such confidence and gave me such freedom. He would say: ‘Do what you want to do. Get lost in Alice’. And over a year and a half I became that woman.”

  Tom, too, was aware that their relationship would not emerge from this unchanged. “I’m glad it didn’t happen in the first years of our marriage. It could be very difficult during the making of the film. The characters are at odds, they have to confront their issues, there are raw emotions. It was pervasive, it does invade your life. I worked every single day and Stanley knew what I was going through.”

  One thing that is the known in the cinema community and beyond is that Kubrick likes to do an incredible number of takes of each scene. Well, this isn’t invariably true: sometimes he will buy the first. And sometimes he will do seventy and then use the first. Nicole enjoyed this method. “You’ve reached his interest. You never walk away thinking ‘if only’”.

  Kidman had an instinct for Kubrick’s methodology. “He did an unpredictable number of takes. Stanley was always waiting for something to happen. As long as you relaxed into the situation, it was the most wonderful experience.”

  The English actor, Murray Melvyn, who played the Rev. Samuel Runt in ‘Barry Lyndon’, observed Kubrick closely on set and cracked the code of the director’s unique approach.

  “Kubrick watches the actor get into the character’s emotions in the first few takes and then he sees a gesture or a reaction, a piece of timing or tone of delivery that he really likes. But they are not all in the same take. And he knows that if he tells the actor what it is he likes, there is a danger of the person becoming self-conscious about it. So he waits for them to come together.”

  Kubrick operates by his own clock. Why worry about time if you have to exchange this for excellence? I can vouchsafe for this myself. I worked for him and his daughter, Vivian, on ‘The Shining’. They were making a documentary about the movie and I was invited to do the interviews. All, save the one with Jack Nicholson, were conducted on the set where I saw Stanley to be a mild and unassuming man, who gained the respect of his crew by example. He knew everything about film, more than many experts. When he asked lens-makers for a lens they insisted was impossible to make, they eventually found that it was possible.

  Jack’s interview – a look back at his career – was to be conducted on a Saturday morning in his dressing-room suite at Elstree Studios. When I got there a man was covering the windows with blue transparent paper. Stanley.

  He also operated the 16mm camera changing magazines every ten minutes. After we had talked for a couple of hours, Jack and I had run out of anything to say. But Stanley asked us to do a bit more and while he was putting on a new mag, Jack lit up a joint and whispered to me: “That guy just doesn’t know when to stop.” But he was in a very relaxed state and some of his ‘Easy Rider’ persona began to eke out. Stanley then suggested a final ten minutes. I feared we were going to have to talk about the road-works on the A1 but Jack’s private line rang. He answered it: “Hi, Toots,” he said and lovingly talked to Anjelica Huston about their plans for Saturday night. Stanley continued to shoot and that roll, no thanks to me, are the nearest anyone is going to get to the real Jack Nicholson.

  Stanley came into the room and I suggested, and Jack very much backed me up, that he might talk to me on camera about ‘The Shining’. He politely declined. “Have you ever heard an interview with a film maker that makes you want to see the film? Scorsese sounds as if he’s on speed and Coppola can come across as a moron.”

  What he didn’t say was that to preserve the Kubrick mystique, it was better for others to interpret his works than the artist himself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Cruises at first lived in Holland Park in West London, managing to retain a degree of anonymity when they bladed in Hyde Park or went to their favourite pub on the King’s Road in Chelsea. But they found it more convenient to be nearer the studios and with Isabella, who was nearly four, and Conor, not quite two, and an attendant court of bodyguards, personal trainers, nannies and a French chef, moved to a twenty room Georgian mansion near Shenley in Hertfordshire. There Isabella was able to go to the local school and attend mother-and-daughter riding lessons at the local equestrian centre.

  Luxury was never far away and Tom’s private jet, stationed at nearby Elstree airport, took them for a brief break in the Scottish Highlands. Nicole’s romanticism was fed by a trip to the home of the Bronte sisters on the windswept Yorkshire Moors – “there’s something about the place that you know inspire sgreat writers,” she observed. She even took a poetry course in the Lake District, visiting Wordsworth’s house. After filming finished, she returned there with Tom and they stayed in a local guest house.

  All this was possible because Nicole was on call for many fewer days than her husband. She is only on the screen for forty minutes out of the film’s two hours forty minutes running time. Nevertheless she is powerfully present throughout as he visualises her passionate lovemaking with the Naval Officer, something Nicole shot herself, declining a double.

  “Stanley wanted it to be harsh and gritty, almost pornographic,” she confessed. “He didn’t exploit me. I did it because I thought it was important to the film. The film deals with sex and sexual obsession and the scenes could not have been of me in a bra and panties pretending to have sex with someone. It had to have a graphic quality to it. I certainly wouldn’t have done it for any other director and, yes, it was a little difficult to go home to my husband afterwards.” These were the only three days during the prolonged shoot that Tom did not come to the studio.

  When Stanley was named a recipient of the Golden Lion of Venice as a Lifetime Achievement Award to be presented on September 6th 1997, he, of course, declined to fly there, but it was agreed that Nicole would pick it up for him. Sadly the date coincided with the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales – a friend of Tom and certainly an acquaintance of his wife. It was agreed that their attendance at this solemn event should take precedence but Stanley, ever the minute planner, got out a map of London and foun
d that Westminster Underground Station was a short walk from the Abbey. Nicole could get a train and a car would pick her up at Hillingdon to take her to a private plane. He telephoned Julian Senior, the Warner boss in London, with the plan. Julian politely pointed out that it was unlikely Nicole would wish to be seen on the tube in her mourning outfit and, besides, there would be about a million people in the area. Stanley reluctantly agreed but Tom then called suggesting Julian contact the Coastguard who could take Nic by river down to the City airport. Julian duly did but was informed that there would be more mud than water at the landing stage on the tidal Thames. In the event Jane Campion, Nicole’s director on ‘The Portrait of the Lady’ and, fortuitously, chairman of the Venice jury, picked up the award.

  Tom, spending more time in the Kubrick household, was not unaware of Stanley’s eccentricities. One day the director had come to work extremely depressed. Priscilla, one of his cats, was dead. Stanley had seven cats and several dogs and, on occasion as is their wont, the dogs would chase the cats. Stanley got a studio chippie to cut holes in the three inch mahogany doors of the house so that they could escape. Priscilla was being chased but missed the hole and hurtled into the door and her death. Stanley brightened slightly. “I think I’ve solved the problem. I’m going to cut bigger holes and line them with foam rubber.”

  Stanley was particularly concerned with the welfare of cats. He warned Tom that, when loading cutlery into the lower layer of a dishwasher, he should make sure that all the knives and forks were put in sharp end down in case the cats were to jump on them.

  Although Stanley did not choose to analyse the film, he had already expressed some general thoughts on what he believed. “The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book's psychological content, and will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.

  “I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection into the audience's consciousness. Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don't yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful. You use the audience's thrill of surprise and discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to power them across.”

  The outside world was not privy to what had been happening in this strictly secret film and some journalists smelt trouble. ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD IS TOM CRUISE?’ demanded US Magazine in November 1998. ‘Risque Business: Working on Stanley Kubrick’s sex thriller ‘Eyes Wide Shut” may have cost the actor two years at the peak of his career. It seemed mad for a 36-year-old actor, who had ‘spent the ‘90s crafting one of the most critically and financially successful lcareers in Hollywood’ to have ’been entangled, with his wife, Nicole Kidman, ‘in the seemingly endless shoot of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.’

  Tom had given some indication of what he had been up to at the Toronto Film Festival where he was promoting ‘Without Limits’, a film he and Paula Wagner had produced with his favourite writer, Robert Towne, directing. It was the story of the famed athlete Steve Prefontaine who died at the age of twenty four. The film found favour with the critics but not the public. Costing nearly $25m to make, it grossed less than a million at the U.S. box-office. In this instance, it seems Tom was a more gifted actor than producer although if, as originally had been the plan, he had played Steve (instead of Billy Crudup) and Tommy Lee Jones had played his coach, Bill Bowerman, (instead of Donald Sutherland) it would have been a great deal more commercial.

  At Toronto Tom defended his career decisions. “It’s a finite period of time for anyone in the movie business and not just actors. How many movies can you make? How many years do you have the energy, the power, the time to produce movies? I know I’ve got to do it now. I want to use time in a way that’s constructive. I don’t want to sit down when I’m seventy and say I’ve wasted my time away and not made the films I wanted to make.”

  Regarding the millions of dollars that ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ cost him in lost fees he was very sure of himself. “People say: ‘You’ve lost 40, 60, 80 million dollars. You’ve lost all this money. You’ve lost all this time.’ I don’t understand that kind of thinking. I’ve been doing this for eighteen years. Yeah, I make money. I make a lot of money. And money’s wonderful and nice. But that does not enter into why I make movies. There are some things you don’t do for the money. I know that’s hard to believe. To have a chance to work with a genius is one of them.”

  It seemed Hansel and Gretel had been kidnapped by the wicked witch – or, in this instance, eccentric wizard. Matters were made worse by the film’s overrun, causing Warners to postpone the release from Christmas 1998 to summer 1999. There were rumours of troubles on the set. Harvey Keitel had been replaced by Sydney Pollack as Ziegler. This was true: Stanley never really got round to the main part of Ziegler until Keitel had to leave for another movie and Pollack was a friend of the film, having assured Stanley of Tom’s dedication after directing him in ‘The Firm’.

  There had had to be reshoots and Jennifer Jason Lee would not return for them. Also true. She had the lead in a new film, David Cronenberg’s ‘eXistenz’, and Stanley had wanted to give a completely different emphasis to her small cameo – she was the dead patient’s daughter who embraced Bill, declaring her love.

  There was trouble with the rating. The orgy with its sex and nudity was unacceptable to the MPAA and Kubrick had promised Warners he would deliver an R rated film. Computer generated people and images were added to hide the offending parts from the American audience to get the contractual certificate. Elsewhere in the world, apparently, the nudity didn’t give as much offence and was left in, save in Japan where Stanley had already shot the scene with a view to avoiding what they consider improper – genitalia and, especially, pubic hair are off the menu there.

  Tom recalls the conclusion of shooting in August 1998. “I was looking forward to and dreaded the last day. I didn’t want the experience with Stanley to end. I gave him a kiss and a hug and I said: ‘I love you, Stanley, you know that.’ He said: ‘I love you, too.’”

  Nicole, meanwhile, was extending her love affair with Arthur Schnitzler. She was already in rehearsal for his most famous play, ‘La Ronde’. It had been updated by the British playwright, David Hare, for the two leading actors, Nicole and Iain Glen, to play all ten parts – most of them in bed. Glen was to make a naked appearance and Nicole just covered her modesty, thereby ensuring a sell-out at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Or was that due to whiz-kid Sam Mendes’s direction?

  The couple had moved back into London while she was doing the play, renting a four million pound Nash house in Cumberland Terrace overlooking Regent’s Park. There Tom experienced some drama of his own. On the afternoon of 23rd September one of his neighbours, Mrs Rita Simmonds, was getting out of her Porsche when she was set upon by two muggers. She screamed loudly, fearing for the safety of her two-year-old daughter, Sophie, who was with her. Cruise, accompanied by his bodyguard, came racing out of his house. “Tom was brilliant,” Mrs Simmonds said later. “He rushed down the road and chased the attackers away.” Unfortunately they were unable to catch the men who made off in a Ford with £87,000 of Mrs Simmonds’s jewellery. But Tom came back and comforted the shaken woman.

  Before ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ wrap
ped, Nicole had already squeezed in a leading role in Griffin Dunne’s ‘Practical Magic’ as Sandra Bullock’s wierd sister. The actress liked to keep busy. When she was promoting ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ in Venice, a Warners executive observed her attending two meetings and accepting two parts in the short period between the lunch-time press conference and the early evening premiere.

  Stanley was deeply into post-production with the movie. He worked at the house. Most days Julian Senior would come in to work on the marketing campaign: Stanley had already researched the optimum dates to open in territories throughout the world. Leon Vitali looked through the selected frames that would be released to the press as stills; although he started out in life as a photographer, Stanley didn’t like the idea of having stills shot on the set.