Stanley Kubrick’s controversial rules during the filming of Eyes Wide Shut

A lot of fascinating movies came out in the late 1990s, and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was certainly no exception.

Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999 when Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were married and already established as movie stars. However, Stanley Kubrick believed in retaking some shots akin to method acting as much as a hundred times and often totally pushed the boundaries of actors to the point where several of them almost had breakdowns during the shooting of his films.

Kubrick's decision to have Kidman film six days worth of sex sequences with another actor who portrays her character Alice's fantasies may have been the most divisive aspect of this approach. The two actors had to perform 50 different sex scenes, and Kidman was not allowed to talk to Cruise about any element of the process on or off the set.

As his final picture, Eyes Wide Shut, is today recognised as one of his finest artistic successes, Kubrick continued to be a director of unmatched artistic genius up until the very end.

Even Tom Cruise, who is known to arguably be as much a perfectionist as Stanley Kubrick ran out of the intense enthusiasm that he generally displays for all aspects of acting and filmmaking as the filming of Eyes Wide Shut was notably drawn out, lasting steadily for 46 weeks from November 1996 to June 1998. It is the longest continuous film shoot in the history of cinema, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.