The late Stanley Kubrick was renowned for his unique portrayal of topics that were looked over as controversial in his movies. And for his aim for perfection, he was a genuinely disciplined person who had rules that were to be followed by all the people on his set.
But despite his disciplined self, Kubrick, who hated working with the legendary Tom Cruise on his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, had to break his one cardinal rule because of a strange reason.
Stanley Kubrick Broke His One Cardinal Rule Only In This One Condition
Stanley Kubrick had this one cardinal rule that everyone on sets of his movie had to follow, and that was to not take too many retakes while shooting a scene. Revealing in an interview his perspective on his rule being similar to method acting, Kubrick said,
“Actors are sometimes undisciplined enough not to go home and go to sleep at night and learn their lines, and they go out. They cannot act without knowing dialogue. If you have to think about anything when you’re acting you cannot work on the emotion. It’s happened on every film. There’s really not much you can do about it.”
He further went ahead to reveal the only time when he broke his cardinal rule, claiming it was only when his actors were ‘bad’ and not good at acting out the scenes.
“So, you wind up, say, with this particular actor, maybe doing 30 takes of something. Then the guy goes back to America, and if he’s he says, ‘Oh boy, Stanley’s such a perfectionist. He does 100 takes on every scene. I had to do this thing 100 times.’ So 30 becomes 100.’ They never say, ‘Why you did so many takes.’ I don’t do a lot of takes when it’s good.”
While Stanley Kubrick’s rule was good enough, it sometimes put his actors under a lot of stress as they just weren’t allowed to do anything on his sets besides what he told them to do, with no suggestions or ideas from them.
The Reason Why Stanley Kubrick Hated Working With Tom Cruise
Stanley Kubrick is still widely known for how he hated to work with Tom Cruise on his last movie before his death, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The reason behind this was that he felt that both Cruise and his co-star Nicole Kidman had their way with him on the sets of the $162 million movie.
Actually, a lot of stress and tension on the sets arose because the then-married pair had to talk to each other before filming difficult scenes like the s-x sequence one, and the filmmaker wouldn’t allow it. This made the creation of the movie even harder than ever, leading to Kubrick hating to work with the Mission: Impossible star. R Lee Ermey, a good friend of the filmmaker revealed,
“Stanley called me about two weeks before he died. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of sh-t and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him – exactly the words he used.”
Nevertheless, the movie was widely criticized yet successful, which is still remembered as a masterpiece to date.
