Nicole Kidman Recalls Her Contractual Agreement Around Nudity In “Eyes Wide Shut”

With new rules around the way in which sex scenes can be shot unveiled in 2020, Nicole Kidman has revealed in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine that director Stanley Kubrick allowed her to have full control over what nude scenes ended up in the movie.

“When I went to work with Stanley Kubrick, he was like, ‘I’m going to want full-frontal nudity,’ and I was like, ‘Ahh, I don’t know.’ So we came up with a great agreement, which was contractual. He would show me the scenes with the nudity before they made it into the film,” she said.

“Then I could feel completely safe. 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 [Cruise’s] character is having those jealous images.”

She discussed her time working with the auteur on Eyes Wide Shut and how a three-month shoot turned into more than a year. However, Kidman has very fond memories.

“We loved working with him. We had two kids and were living in a trailer on the lot primarily, making spaghetti because Stanley liked to eat with us sometimes. We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set.”

And she says despite some thinking of Kubrick as “tortuous”, to her, he was more “arduous” in his approach to the work. “He was arduous in that he would shoot a lot,” she said. “But I’d sit on the floor of his office and talk, and we’d watch animal videos.

“He said animals were so much nicer than human beings. Though I do remember we were watching a wildlife thing where you saw the lion going after an antelope, and he could hardly watch it. Interesting, isn’t it?”

One of the conditions of Kidman’s contract was to have final say on all her nude scenes. She revealed she ended up agreeing with everything that was screened for her.

“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,” she said.

That comes down to the relationship between actor and director. “When it’s pure, it’s exquisite. And the other actors, when you’re all there doing the work, it’s exquisite.”