Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Once they get a handle on what has happened, Julia and Lt. Colonel Thomas Devoe, played by Clooney, are sent to Vienna to devise a plan to recover the nukes. There they strong-arm a trucking executive to get information from his computer and then become involved in a car chase as they try to escape.

  When they locate, via satellite, the truck carrying the nukes, Thomas dashes off to intersect them. She rushes after him, urging him to use caution. She cautions him not to “take action without authorization.”

  “What do you think I am?” he responds. “Some gungho, stupid son of a bitch?”

  “No, I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re a talented soldier with sloppy impulse control.”

  They intercept all the nukes, except for one, which makes it way to New York City. At that point, the story revolves around whether Julia and Thomas can locate the nuke before it can be detonated. Nicole did not have any memorable lines in the movie, but she did undertake her most physical role to date—running, jumping, leaping, being blown through the air by a bomb blast.

  Most of the movie was filmed in Bratislava, a Slovakian city near the Austrian and Hungarian border. There was not much to do after hours in Bratislava, so Nicole, Clooney and various members of the crew frequented the local pubs. Once they had enough gin, they would pile into a cab and, on the drive home, call London-bound Tom on a cell phone and laughingly tell him, “Wish you were here!”

  When she first arrived on the set, Nicole—who had heard horror stories about Clooney’s penchant for practical jokes—begged him to spare her any such indignities. Clooney reluctantly agreed to a truce—and he stuck to it. But once the production wrapped, he told a writer for US magazine that the truce had been lifted. Put this in your magazine, he told the writer: “George is working on a prank for her right now! When she reads that, it’ll make her sweat like a pig.”

  Once, several years before filming began on The Peacemaker, Nicole and Michelle Pfeiffer each bet Clooney $10,000 that he would be married and a father by the age of forty. When that magical day arrived on May 6, 2001—without the prophecy being realized—Nicole sent him a check for $10,000. Clooney returned the check and offered her double or quits on his fiftieth birthday.

  When The Peacemaker was released, no one, least of all Nicole, expected an Oscar buzz. It was not that kind of movie. Movie critics, for the most part, were generous in their assessments of the film. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan said: “Both Kidman and Clooney give dependable, movie-star performances in these James Bond-ish roles. While Kidman’s Dr. Kelly is too much the cliched frazzled female at times, the script balances that with scenes of strength and competence.”

  “Against all odds, Kidman makes the audience forget the absurdity of the role she’s playing,” wrote Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Choosing to pay Dr. Kelly as a harried, ambitious young executive, Kidman becomes quite sympathetic. She also looks more striking than ever. Her face is now taking on a sharp, classic look, at least before she starts outrunning fireballs.”

  Nicole was always grateful for good reviews, but she couldn’t help but wonder how long critics would focus on her looks first and her acting second. Why were the critics not constantly saying Tom was “more handsome than ever?”

  Nicole in a scene from To Die For Photofest

  Chapter 7

  THE MAKING OF EYES WIDE SHUT

  For several years, Tom Cruise and director Stanley Kubrick exchanged faxes on a wide variety of subjects of mutual interest, including cameras and airplanes. Kubrick was a well-known recluse who did not like to leave his home. Rumors abounded that he refused to fly and refused to be driven in a car traveling over thirty miles per hour; but he was not hesitant to use modern technology to reach out to individuals that his instincts told him he could trust.

  Tom was such a person.

  One day, Nicole and Tom each received simultaneous faxes from Kubrick. The faxes said simply that he was going to do a film titled Eyes Wide Shut—and he wondered if they would be interested. To Nicole, he wrote: “I want you in my movie—please play Alice.” They were speechless. They both considered the eccentric director to be one of the best in the business. They responded that yes, of course, they would be interested. Kubrick faxed them no more details about the film, but said he would send them a script as soon as work on it was finished.

  After the failures of Days of Thunder and Far and Away, Nicole and Tom had vowed to do no more films together since joint ventures seemed to dilute the drawing power that each had with moviegoers. But was that a good enough reason to turn down the great Kubrick’s offer? No, they concluded. Whatever Kubrick had in mind would be strong enough to override the previous bad luck they had experienced working together.

  Meanwhile, Kubrick worked feverishly to complete the script. On this particular project, his heralded perfectionism had gelled into an obsession. He had been working on the script for two years with noted screenwriter Frederic Raphael—of Daisy Miller, Darling and Far From the Maddening Crowd fame—and he was close to being able to admit to himself that it was as good as it was going to get.

  For Raphael, the two-year project had been both joyful and exasperating. It had begun in the spring and summer of 1994, when his agent at the William Morris Agency started receiving mysterious calls from Warner Bros. inquiring as to whether he was available. For what they didn’t say.

  The inquiries were made on behalf of Stanley Kubrick, who subsequently sent Raphael photocopies from a published novella, from which the title and author’s name had been expunged. Raphael later found out that the material was from Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, but at that point he did not have a clue about who had written it. Kubrick, who trusted no one, clearly wanted to keep that information a secret until he had an understanding with Raphael.

  Kubrick was so different—so well, odd—that many people thought he was a product of some darkly secretive European nation that changed its name from decade to decade. Not so. Kubrick was born in Manhattan, New York, during the Great Depression. Because he did poorly in school, his physician father sent him at a young age to California to live with his uncle, hoping that a change in scenery would inspire a more acceptable academic performance. That didn’t happen. When he returned to New York, he was just as disinterested in school as he was when he left.

  Kubrick’s father tried to interest him in hobbies, but nothing really caught hold until he presented him with his first camera. From that point on, he was hooked on photography. With time, he became very good. He sold a photograph to Look magazine and by the age of seventeen he had landed a job with the magazine as an apprentice photographer. It was while he was going out on assignment for Look that he came into contact with Hollywood celebrities and developed a voracious appetite for movies. In 1950, he sank all his savings into a documentary titled Day of the Fight.

  Kubrick made a couple of commissioned documentaries before he was able to raise enough financing to do his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953). For the remainder of the 1950s, he toiled in obscurity, making films that attracted little or no attention at the box office or with critics.

  Then, in 1960, his luck changed with Spartacus and two years later with, Lolita. With the 1964 release of the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, his career soared. He followed that up with the rhapsodic 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and the deeply disturbing A Clockwork Orange in 1971. He fell into obscurity throughout most of the 1970s, then roared back in 1980 with The Shining and in 1987 with the Vietnam-era film, Full Metal Jacket.

  Kubrick had not made a film in more than a decade, a fact that only peaked the interest of Nicole and Tom, who considered Kubrick a cinematic genius who probably had not yet done his best work. By the mid-1990s, receiving an unsolicited fax from Kubrick, in some circles at least, was like receiving a fax from God and it generated the same uncertainty and fear!

  Raphael was no different than anyone else. He was
in awe of Kubrick and he wanted to work with him, yet he feared he might lose a part of himself in the process and that fear served to keep him on his toes. After he read the photocopied material Kubrick sent, he told the director he was eager to work on the project. Kubrick telephoned his agent and worked out a verbal agreement for the cost of his services as a screenwriter.

  As the lawyers haggled, all that remained for Raphael was to have a face-to-face meeting with Kubrick at his Victorian home located outside London. After traveling in his cab through a series of locked gates, Raphael was deposited outside a rather large house. To his surprise, Kubrick opened the front door.

  “He was wearing a blue overall with black buttons,” Raphael wrote in his memoir. “He might have been a minor employee of the French railways. He was a smallish, rounded man (no belt) with a beard which less defined than blurred his features . . . He spoke as if unused to speech and not comfortable with company, even when he had invited it.”

  It was during that first meeting, which was lubricated somewhat with wine from New Zealand, that the writer and the director tried to come to terms on the direction of the script. They talked about transferring the location of the story to New York and they talked about specific scenes, such as the girl passing out at the party and the orgy that becomes the centerpiece of the story.

  Raphael said he thought the entire story was meant to be experienced as a dream. Kubrick did not like that approach at all. He told him that it could not all be a dream, for without reality they had no movie. Before they parted company, they agreed on a work schedule. Kubrick asked, almost apologetically, if Raphael would send him chunks of the screenplay as he completed them. To a writer, such a request is a sacrilege, but Raphael agreed, against his better judgment. He told Kubrick he was the only director in the world that he would consider doing that for.

  After he left Kubrick’s house that day, Raphael wrote in his notebook: “He is, I begin to suspect, a movie director who happens to be a genius rather than a genius who happens to be a movie director. My difficulty with him will be to guess what he really wants of me.”

  The process would prove to be grueling for Raphael. He would turn in scores of first drafts, hundreds and hundreds of pages, only to have Kubrick suggest changes. But he stuck with it for two years. Finally, he finished the script and sent it off to Kubrick. He could not imagine it being rejected, because they had debated every scene, almost every word, in the script. Still, weeks went by, then months—with no word from Kubrick. What Raphael did not know was that Kubrick had sent the script to Nicole and Tom.

  Tom read the script first and “flipped” over it; then Nicole read it and had much the same response. No question about it. They wanted to do the movie. Nicole later said she would have agreed to do the film, without ever reading the script. She was that enthusiastic about working with Kubrick.

  When they telephoned Kubrick and told him they were eager to discuss the project further, he invited them to have dinner with him and his wife, Christiane, at their house. Kubrick was delighted by their interest, but being the person that he was, he asked them to please return the script for security reasons. They understood.

  A short time later, Nicole and Tom flew to London. They arrived at the Kubrick home by helicopter, according to Raphael, who wrote in his memoirs that Kubrick described them as holding hands. “It was sweet ,” said Kubrick. “Now and again they’d kinda consult together. He’d look at her, she’d look at him and he’d say, ‘Okay, Nic?’ and she’d say ‘If it is with you.’ They’re a truly married couple. It was kinda touching.”

  Kubrick told Raphael that Nicole had promised him a couple of days for the nude scenes and he told the screenwriter, wink, wink, that it might be a good time for him to visit the studio. The writer was tempted by the prospect of seeing Nicole naked, but he declined, feeling it would be taking advantage of the actress.

  After the meeting, they made arrangements for the lawyers to go over the necessary contracts. Nicole was thrilled, but felt unsure of herself. Deep down inside, she later confessed, she worried that Kubrick would hate her style of acting. One of the things they talked about at his house was her shyness, her reluctance to have other people watch her work. He agreed with her that the rehearsal process would be a good opportunity for her to overcome those fears.

  In mid-December 1995, Kubrick sent a fax to the still-waiting Raphael, notifying him that he had completed work on the script, made a deal with Warner Bros, and cast Tom and Nicole for the lead roles. Raphael could finally stop worrying about it; his script would indeed be made into a movie starring two of the biggest stars on the planet. On top of the good news, Kubrick reminded Raphael that he must remain mum about the title of the book on which the movie was based.

  Tom and Nicole were also sworn to secrecy. They didn’t mind. Everyone knew that Kubrick was queer that way, and if cloak-and-dagger intrigue made him happy, so be it. Certainly, there were directors with worse afflictions than compulsive distrust.

  Later, when asked about the secrecy by the Boston Globe, Nicole replied: “If I say anything, Stanley will get upset. He’s not tyrannical. He really believes ‘Let’s not talk about the film, and let’s put all our energy into making it instead of talking about it. And once it’s made we can go out there and talk about it as it exists.’ Which is right.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Eyes Wide Shut production began in November 1996. Kubrick predicted it would take about twelve weeks to shoot the film, one of the biggest underestimates in film history. It ended up being a three-year project. Well, perhaps not the biggest underestimate, since his 2001: A Space Odyssey took four years to complete; before that project was over, anxious studio executives were asking Kubrick if 2001 was going to be the title or the completion date.

  At this stage, everyone was optimistic it would be a twelve-week project, but a cautious Nicole and Tom cleared their calendar to spend about five months in London. There were no futuristic, technical components involved in production—no wild car chases or exploding buildings; it was a simple story about not-so-simple human relationships. They didn’t see how a character-driven production could possibly be stretched out longer than five months.

  Almost all of the filming was done on sets at Pinewood Studios outside London. The apartment that Nicole and Tom lived in as the movie couple was modeled after one Kubrick once occupied in New York. However, Nicole took one look at the apartment set and—seeing too much of a masculine influence—changed the color of the window shades and picked out an assortment of books to line the shelves. But she didn’t stop there. She also put change on the bedside table, just the way Tom did at home, and she brought some of her own makeup to put in the bathroom and she brought some of her clothes to toss about on the floor, to give the apartment the “messy” look she and Tom were accustomed to at home. A couple of times she and Tom slept in the bed, staying overnight on the set, just to increase their comfort level with the furnishings.

  Almost from day one, Nicole, Tom and Kubrick were inseparable. When they were rehearsing or shooting, they got together in his office or some other private place and talked—and talked and talked and talked. Sometimes Tom made pasta and salad for the director. Sometimes Nicole sat around for hours in Kubrick’s office, wearing her bathrobe, drinking coffee and asking him questions.

  During those private moments, Kubrick probed the couple for every detail about their relationship and how they interacted and resolved conflicts. For Nicole and Tom, it was a little bit like undergoing psychoanalysis. Although the questions were personal and intrusive, neither of them hesitated to share their innermost secrets with the director.

  “He was always encouraging about me as an actor and as a woman,” Nicole told Nancy Collins for Rolling Stone. “The shock for Tom and me is that nobody knew us the way Stanley did. Not even my mom and dad. Nobody. It was three years with just the three of us. He knew us.”

  Once, after overhearing interchanges between them, Kubrick chastised Nicole for
the way she talked to Tom. He told her that he had been married a long time and he felt there were things, within a marriage, that a woman could not say to a man. He encouraged her to consider the impact of her words.

  During filming, Nicole effectively reversed that father-daughter relationship by telling the director that he was off base in some of the scenes he had planned for her character. She told him that some of the dialogue did not ring true, in the sense that it did not seem to be something a woman would say to a man. With time, Kubrick became baffled by Nicole’s character. Sometimes after his conversations with Nicole he would disappear for a short time, then return with a better idea.

  The biggest shock of working with Kubrick hit them early on, in the pre-production. The director was famous for doing many takes on each scene. What Nicole and Tom did not realize was that he had the same insecurities about rehearsals. They didn’t just go over scenes two or three times, they went over each scene twenty or thirty times, until Kubrick felt every phrase and nuance was in its proper place.

  Sometimes Nicole had interesting reactions to that routine. Once, while they were rehearsing the opening scene in the movie—a party that Nicole’s character attends with her husband—Nicole got so weary after twenty or thirty attempts that she slipped away during a break and returned with a glass of champagne.

  Kubrick, who never seemed to take his eyes off of Nicole when they were rehearsing, saw what happened with the champagne and thought it would be good to have Nicole’s character get drunk at the party—and so he wrote it into the script. What moviegoers saw in the finished product was a prime example of art imitating life. The most existentialist director in movie history proved himself to be a realist when it came to satisfying the creative bottom line.

  That was a quality that Nicole appreciated in Kubrick. The most identifiable scene in the movie is the one in which Nicole and Tom share an erotic interlude in front of a mirror. That one scene—and the music that played in the background, Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing”—was used in the trailer and came to symbolize the spirit of the film. So who was the genius that paired the music with the scene? It wasn’t Kubrick. Before shooting the scene, the director asked Nicole to pick out a sexy CD from her collection and play it for the background music. She chose “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.”