I t was the fastest “yes” Tom Cruise ever uttered. Late in 1995, the world’s biggest movie star travelled by helicopter to Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire. Waiting on the expansive lawn was director Stanley Kubrick, who’d lived semi-reclusively in the 18th-century pile since 1978. So began their great adventure together making Eyes Wide Shut, the eternally divisive psycho-sexual meditation released 20 years ago in the UK this week.

A still potent mystique hangs over Eyes Wide Shut. That’s partly down to the subject matter. When the glamorous wife (Nicole Kidman) of a successful doctor (Cruise) confesses the desire she felt for a stranger months previously, he plunges down a whirlpool of jealousy.

Over the course of a single hallucinatory evening, Dr Harford embarks on a tour of the murkiest recesses of the human heart. He fends off the daughter of a patient only just passed away, almost hires a manic pixie dream girl prostitute and then blunders upon a masked orgy. It’s nightmarish. The audience is never entirely clear whether what’s happening is real or a dive into Harford’s green-eyed dream-life.

All of that would be enough to ensure its notoriety. Yet the allure of Eyes Wide Shut also surely flows from the degree to which death intrudes on a film about sex. Kubrick suffered a fatal coronary before its release. Just six days previously, he had screened his final cut for Cruise and Kidman.

Eyes Wide Shut, along with all that, appeared to foreshadow the unravelling of Cruise and his co-star Kidman’s outwardly luminous marriage. They divorced in August 2001 – almost exactly two years since the project’s release.It seemed ominous and more than a coincidence. Had Kubrick’s caper put a stake through the heart of their relationship?

Such were the questions lurking in the future as Cruise, grinning like the matinee idol he was, sat down to a long lunch with Kubrick at Childwickbury in 1995. The conversation was mostly trivial. They discussed their shared passions: vintage cameras, planes, the New York Yankees. Cruise told Kubrick how seeing the director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at age six had blown his mind. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What is life? What is space? What is existence?” (Some of us will have had the same experience watching Top Gun.)

“He was just waiting, alone in a garden,” Cruise remembered of meeting Kubrick. “He walked me around the grounds, and I just remember thinking, ‘This guy is kind of a magical, wonderful guy.’”

Still, they did eventually get around to the matter at hand. Kubrick wanted the star of Top Gun and Cocktail to play the lead in his sexually frank adaptation of an Austrian avant-garde novel from the 1920s. The film was to lay a seemingly solid marriage out on the figurative slab. Like a pathologist peeling back waxy layers of skin, Kubrick would coldly scrutinise what festered beneath.

Cruise was all in. And he had a suggestion of his own. He wondered if Kubrick might consider casting his real-life spouse, Nicole Kidman, as the wife. Two decades on, this unlikely teaming-up of hermit director, cocksure actor and screen siren can be considered one of Hollywood’s most fascinating anomalies. How on earth did this movie ever come to exist?

Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best Show all 13 1 /13 Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 13. Fear and Desire (1953) Kubrick suppressed Fear and Desire’s availability for decades, and given his well documented disdain for his first full-length feature, you would be forgiven for thinking that any trailer for Fear and Desire should have the rider “For Kubrick completists and cinephiles only”. However, this allegorical anti-war movie following four soldiers caught behind enemy lines has more going for it than its reputation would suggest. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 12. Killer’s Kiss (1955) Kubrick’s second feature was another shoestring-budget affair, but he stepped up a couple of divisions for this stylish film noir about a boxer involved with a nightclub dancer menaced by her lecherous boss. New Yorker Kubrick made good use of authentic, shadow-filled Manhattan locations for his first outing in dark city which has many classic noir tropes – the film is told in flashback by a world weary narrator, there’s love, deception, murder and revenge, and a striking denouement as hero and villain battle it out in a warehouse filled with mannequins. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 11. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) An affluent doctor is tortured by thoughts that his wife had contemplated cheating on him. Starring then husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Eyes Wide Shut was impossibly hyped as art house porn featuring Hollywood’s golden couple and as the master’s final masterpiece. It’s neither of course, merely a fairly interesting erotic drama that crawls at a snail’s pace at times, even by Kubrick’s standards. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 10. Lolita (1962) A case of wrong time, wrong place for Kubrick who was constrained both by the censors and by filming in England, where he had moved with his family the previous year, his adaption of Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel about a middle-aged professor’s infatuation with a sexually precocious adolescent girl. Kubrick later claimed if he had known beforehand how severe the censorship restrictions would be, he wouldn’t have made Lolita, but Nabokov revealed that Kubrick had incorporated several things into the film that he wished he had thought of for the novel. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 9. Spartacus (1960) As mainstream as Kubrick ever got, Spartacus is the archetypal Hollywood sword and sandals blockbuster and the least Kubrick-like movie in his oeuvre, partially because of producer/star Kirk Douglas’s input and also because Kubrick felt hamstrung by Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay which he didn’t much care for. Star and director didn’t always see eye to eye either. Douglas, exasperated by Kubrick’s meticulous attention to detail, reckoned that he spent longer making Spartacus than the slaves’ rebellion lasted. Spartacus remains a great spectacle however, if a bit wordy, and won four Oscars, none of them for Kubrick. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 8. Full Metal Jacket (1987) Kubrick’s Vietnam movie is a visceral experience which follows a group of raw Marine volunteers from boot camp to action in the Tet Offensive. Kubrick explores the dehumanising effect that not just combat but the brutal training regime under a profane, bullying instructor has on the recruits. Coming after a succession of highly regarded Vietnam movies, The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1987), Full Metal Jacket perhaps suffered by comparison. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 7. A Clockwork Orange (1971) From the Burgess novel, Kubrick’s scathing satire set in a dystopian society in the not so distant future predictably caused controversy on release and continued to do so for many years afterwards, with one reviewer accusing Kubrick of creating “intellectual pornography”. Disturbed by reports that the stylised violence in the film had provoked copycat crimes, Kubrick withdrew the film in Britain in 1973 and it wasn’t made available again until 2000, a year after Kubrick’s death. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 6. Barry Lyndon (1975) Boasting sumptuous production values, this exquisitely mounted, leisurely paced adaption of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about the rise and fall of an 18th-century Irish rogue hero received middling reviews when released, but still won four Academy Awards, including not surprisingly, the costume, cinematography and art direction categories; for Barry Lyndon is undoubtedly one of the most stunningly beautiful pictures ever made. Kubrick shot all but a few scenes by natural light and candlelight, investing the film with the authentic look of the period and evoking the works of Hogarth and Gainsborough – exactly the look that Kubrick desired Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 5. The Killing (1956) A huge leap forward from Kubrick’s first two ultra-low budget independent features Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss, The Killing has shades of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), not least in the casting of Sterling Hayden as the career criminal who recruits a team of specialists for one last racecourse heist. The caper goes to plan perfectly but the aftermath gradually and inexorably unravels in spectacular and bloody fashion. Don’t let the clichéd Dragnet-style narration or the B movie status put you off – this is top notch film noir with a lean, mean approach that proved hugely influential in the years to come, serving as the blueprint for Reservoir Dogs (1992). Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 4. The Shining (1980) Author Stephen King, upset at the wholesale changes made by the director, hated Kubrick’s adaption of his celebrated and terrifying novel. However, The Shining still works as a chilling horror movie with Kubrick putting his own indelible stamp on proceedings – the jaw-dropping tracking shot of the child on his tricycle, the shocking image of torrents of blood flowing from an elevator. Kubrick was also happy to give his actors full latitude to improvise and Jack Nicholson is in full scenery chewing mode, his descent into madness making for mesmerising viewing. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 3. Paths of Glory (1957) There are many Kubrick aficionados who cite Paths of Glory as his greatest film. It is certainly his first masterpiece and may well be the greatest anti-war film ever made, with its shattering portrayal of the slaughter in the trenches of the First World War and the jockeying for promotions of the self-serving army generals who view the men on the frontline as mere cannon fodder in their own quest for advancement. Winston Churchill considered Paths of Glory to have been the most realistic depiction of trench warfare, but the film’s themes could have been set to any war and told from the perspective of any nation. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 2. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Kubrick is at his most relentlessly cynical with this bitterly hilarious satire on the twisted logic of having the so-called ultimate deterrent in the first place. Perhaps only Kubrick would dare make a film about nuclear Armageddon as the Cold War was intensifying and so soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as he speculates on the consequences of the wrong person with their finger on the trigger. With fantastic sets courtesy of Ken Adams, outstanding black and white cinematography, a devastating script with lines quoted ad infinitum, (“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”) and a uniformly brilliant cast, allied to Kubrick’s fearless approach throughout, climaxing in the montage of mushroom clouds to the strains of “We’ll Meet Again”, Dr Strangelove is peak Kubrick, finding humour in the most chilling of subject matters. Rex Features Stanley Kubrick's films ranked - from worst to best 1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) A milestone film that places space exploration in the context of humankind’s evolution, whilst contemplating a higher power and the meaning of life in a future where computers call the shots; rarely has a film provoked so much analysis and debate, which was probably Kubrick’s intention from the outset. What, for example, is the head-scratching ending all about, and what is the true purpose of the mysterious black monolith that pops up on Earth, then the Moon and finally in outer space as the spaceship heads for Jupiter? These conundrums all add to the mystery and aura of a film in which Kubrick’s legendary attention to detail with regards to the sets stretched to importing just the right type of sand and washing and painting it to accurately portray the moon’s surface. Rex Features

Eyes Wide Shut would cast a long shadow. It added to the background noise as Cruise’s public image underwent a post-Kidman meltdown. In 2005, he went on Oprah Winfrey and proclaimed his love of Katie Holmes. He did so in the traditional fashion of bouncing on a couch and baying like a labrador. The maniacal side he had first hinted at when going through the grinder with Kubrick had blossomed into something awe-inducing and frightening.

It’s impossible to watch Eyes Wide Shut today without all of that – Kubrick’s coronary, the Hollywood divorce, the couch-bouncing – playing on a continuous loop in your head. The effect is to amp up the already lurid weirdness. It is a deeply dissonant film. Even for Kubrick, certainly for Kidman and Cruise. But it’s also unflinching in its insights into sexuality and brusque about matters of the heart – and other body parts – to a degree unthinkable in mainstream entertainment today. Even in 1999, it felt slightly like something from another era. Eyes Wide Shut harked back to the chilliness and stylised nihilism of Seventies cinema.

On top of all that, it claims the Blue Riband for most famous on-screen orgy in Hollywood history. In the unlikely event of Kubrick and his stars ever being forgotten, it will reign in perpetuity as the group sex fandango to rule them all. Say “screen orgy” and what most people think of is Cruise gawping in pervy incredulity as revellers in Venetian masks get jiggy with it (and with each other).

The movie was a boundary-breaker long before its release. It holds the record for longest ever continuous film shoot. The 400 days Kubrick required his cast and crew to toil at Pinewood Studios was laborious even by his painstaking standards. And it played havoc with Cruise, forced to push back Mission: Impossible 2 again and again. As an entire production sat on its hands and waited on the actor in America, Kubrick rubbed his chin and tinkered.

Eye’s Wide Shut had been a lifeline obsession for the director. Its origins stretched back to the earliest years of his career. As a hotshot younger photographer in New York, he’d been spellbound by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”). He felt it confronted one of the last taboos in society: how to deal with “forbidden” desire within a marriage?

“The book opposes the real adventures of a husband and the fantasy adventures of his wife,” Kubrick commented. “[It] asks the question: is there a serious difference between dreaming a sexual adventure, and actually having one?”

Kubrick had made several previous attempts to adapt Traumnovelle. In 1973, he had the idea of changing the setting from turn of the century Vienna to contemporary Dublin. His plan was to cast Woody Allen in the Cruise role of happily married husband sexually unmoored when his wife confesses her secret desires. Somewhere along the way he concluded, moreover, that the time-frame should be changed from Schnitzler’s Mardi Gras to Christmas – giving us the least seasonal Yuletide movie ever.

Steve Martin was also considered by Kubrick after the director had decided the adaptation should be set in New York. By the early Nineties he was eyeing A-list Mr and Mrs Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger as his emotionally diseased power-couple. And then Cruise’s name came up.

It was suggested not by Kubrick but by his producer at Warner Brothers, Terry Semel. The director wanted Warner to stump up a $65m budget for Eyes Wide Shot. Kubrick refused to film outside the UK and much of the production costs would go towards recreating Manhattan in England. Semel was amenable – but only with a knock-out star in the Dr Harford role. Who was more knock-out than the magnetic lead from Top Gun and Mission: Impossible?

Kubrick wasn’t sure. The last big name he’d worked with had been Jack Nicholson on The Shining in 1980. The film was eventually hailed a masterpiece. But the shoot had been hell. Kubrick had been particularly unappreciative of Nicholson’s tendency to speak his mind rather than do as instructed. “Stars,” he told Semel, “have too many opinions.”

Semel persevered. And Cruise said “yes” without hesitation. Once that was settled, Kubrick was amenable to casting Kidman as Mrs Harford. “Tom and Nicole” were one of the most recognisable couples in the world. Their marriage had been subject to the traditional tabloid tittle-tattle. A real-life husband and wife portraying unravelling spouses introduced a new layer of psychosexual subtext. Kubrick loved it.

Kidman and Cruise on the red carpet at the 69th Academy Awards, 1997 (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

Kubrick appeared to, additionally, get a kick out of exploring fissures in Cruise and Kidman’s real marriage. He had Kidman disclose her inner-most feelings in extensive therapy sessions, the contents of which were not revealed to Cruise. And he forbade the actor from the set when Kidman was shooting her fantasy trysts with the naval officer who had awoken something in Alice.

He retained his enthusiasm through the gruelling shoot. Cruise and Kidman found it harder to stay positive. It wasn’t the intensity of the material, nor the semi-nudity required of Kidman (who’d been strict from the outset as to what she would and would not do). It was that it went on and on, seemingly without end. On one occasion, Kubrick had Cruise walk through the same door 95 times. “Hey, Tom, stick with me, I’ll make you a star,” he is reported to have joked. Cruise tried to laugh but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

“We shot for 10-and-a-half months but we were there for a year and a half,” Kidman later lamented. “Sometimes it as very frustrating because you were thinking, is this ever going to end?

Cruise was meanwhile coming under pressure from Paramount Pictures over Mission: Impossible 2, already put back twice for Eyes Wide Shut. More than once he’d politely taken Kubrick aside and wondered if the director might possibly have an idea when he might done. Kubrick never had a straight answer. Cruise soon had ulcers – a fact he kept from Kubrick. He didn’t want more complications.

“I didn’t want to tell Stanley,” Cruise told Time. “He panicked. I wanted this to work, but you’re playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up. You try not to kick things up, but you go through things you can’t help.”

It’s astonishing that scheduling was Cruise’s biggest issue. Kubrick made full use of the opportunity to strip away the actor’s movie star aura. Again and again through the 159 minutes, Kubrick went out of his way to paint him unflatteringly.

The fly-boy glibness central to the actor’s persona was openly ridiculed by the director. In an early scene, Harford flirts with two models at a party. Kubrick has Cruise unleash his trademark boyishness. But he frames it in such way as to make Cruise come across callow and charmless. Being chatted up by Tom Cruise, the film more or less says out loud, is the least seductive experience under the sun.

There were also winks towards unfounded rumours about Cruise’s sexuality. Navigating New York by night, Harford has a run-in with fratboys who taunt him with homophobic slurs. Kubrick used the same scene to mock Cruise’s “diminutive” 5ft 7in stature. “I got dumps bigger than you,” one of the aggressors laughs, swatting Harford aside.

“Kubrick seems to take immense delight in subverting Cruise’s virile man-of-action image – Bill is almost pathologically passive, unable to acknowledge, let alone explore, his sexuality,” went a BFI essay marking Eyes Wide Shut’s anniversary. “He’s also cringe-inducingly bourgeois, introducing himself as a doctor to everyone he meets, as if this automatically grants him moral authority in any situation.

And yet, both Cruise and Kidman proclaimed themselves delighted with the finished movie. Kubrick was so anxious that details might leak that when he arranged a screening for them in Los Angeles the projectionist was ordered to look away from the screen.

Their director’s paranoia notwithstanding they were proud of what their hard work had yielded. Here was an avant-grade film with a message everybody could understand: you can never fully know the person next to you in bed.

“I don’t think it’s a morality tale,” said Kidman. “It’s different for every person who watches it.”

Cruise agreed. Kubrick had made a masterpiece of ambivalence. “The movie is whatever the audience takes from it,” he said. “Wherever you are in life you’re going to take away something different.”

Twenty years on, Eyes Wide Shut is an acknowledged classic. But it is also notorious – largely on account of the masked orgy. It is in every sense the centre piece, and it was the sequence with which Kubrick struggled the most. He was never a prudish director.

The 10 best sex scenes in film Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 best sex scenes in film The 10 best sex scenes in film Blue Valentine Derek Cianfrance dared to portray sex with any sense of realism, both physically and emotionally, only to quickly get slapped with an NC-17 rating for showing Michelle Williams’ character, Cindy, on the receiving end of oral sex. “The sex felt real - it wasn't sexy or 'a sex scene', and that's why we got into trouble,” co-star Ryan Gosling remarked to The Observer at the time. “You shouldn't be penalised for doing a good job.” After successfully appealing against the MPAA’s decision, Blue Valentine reached cinemas as an R, thankfully allowing mainstream audiences to see how emotionally complex a matter sex can actually be, especially in a broken down marriage like the one shared by its lead characters. The 10 best sex scenes in film Love & Basketball Gina Prince-Bythewood has masterfully shown Hollywood how cinema can portray realistic sex without any loss of romanticism or intimacy. That’s especially true of her directorial debut, 2000’s Love & Basketball, in which Monica (Sanaa Lathan) loses her virginity to childhood sweetheart, Quincy (Omar Epps). The moment is wonderfully tender, aided by Maxwell’s cover of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work”, while being one of the rare films that actually shows the use of a condom. “The only note that I ever got from the studio during the filmmaking process was that when I shot that scene, they looked at the dailies and they said, they didn’t think she was enjoying it enough,” Prince-Bythewood told The Huffington Post. “And my argument was, it’s the first time and despite what the male fantasy might be, it’s not that great.” New Line Cinema The 10 best sex scenes in film Y Tu Mamá También Alfonso Cuarón’s raucous classic inverts the American sex comedy: Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) are stereotypical, sex-obsessed young men distraught at the concept of their girlfriends leaving the country. Choosing to live as bachelors, they befriend an older woman (Maribel Verdú), who seduces both of them. Yet, the film drives them towards one, real truth: their own bisexuality, finally freed during the film’s famous threesome. Though Y Tu Mamá También's conclusion is tragic - Julio and Tenoch's reject their own truth, turn their backs on each other, and suppress their feelings - their threesome still marks a moment of genuine, harmonious sensuality. 20th Century Fox The 10 best sex scenes in film God's Own Country God’s Own Country star Alec Secareanu admitted he was initially “very afraid” of the kinds of scenes he would be tasked with filming for the gay drama film. “But the way each character has sex tells a lot about them; the way that they develop their relationship,” he told Attitude. The first sexual encounter between Secareanu’s character Gheorghe and Johnny (Josh O’Connor) is quick, aggressive and with little intimacy. As Johnny slowly learns to open up to Gheroghe, their second encounter is far more romantic; intense in a different way to the first. Both actors later told of how they developed a close bond in real life after working together on-screen. Orion Pictures The 10 best sex scenes in film Carol A film that finds its eroticism in small gestures - in the languid rest of a glove, in a glance, shared across a crowded room - when it comes to director Todd Haynes actually filming the first time Therese (Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett) have sex, their chemistry is already so palpable that the moment feels nothing short of explosive. “It's very much like shooting a musical number,” Haynes told E!News of the scene. “You start the music and basically you just go and the camera finds the moments and the beats. And we had some amazing material with these two women to work with.” StudioCanal The 10 best sex scenes in film Moonlight Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winner is one of the most tender depictions of yearning in modern cinema. Its protagonist Chiron (played by Ashton Sanders here, at other points by Alex R. Hibbert and Trevante Rhodes) experiences his first sexual encounter with fellow student Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) on a quiet, isolated beach. Their fumbling may pay testament to the awkwardness of a teenager’s first experiences, but Jenkins’ approach also gives the moment a profound grace, and an acknowledgement of how it will come to shape Chiron’s own view of himself. “It’s the first time I filmed a sex scene. It’s the first time these actors had performed a sex scene,” Jenkins told Entertainment Weekly of the scene. “It’s not gratuitous. It’s very delicate in keeping with most of the film, but it kept me up at night. I really wanted to get the feelings of that first sort of sexual expression, and I wanted to get it right… but then, when we got to shoot it, it rolled off like butter.” A24 The 10 best sex scenes in film Don't Look Now Much like Blue Valentine, Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 classic swiftly faced controversy due to a sex scene so emotionally faithful (while also depicting a female character, Julie Christie’s Laura, receiving oral sex), that it caused clashes with censors. A grieving couple desperately holding onto the shreds of their marriage after the death of their child, Laura and John (Donald Sutherland)’s raw emotions and vulnerability in this moment are famously intercut with post-coital preparations to go to dinner - an attempt, in fact, to satiate censors. Christie herself admitted the film’s innovations made the scene difficult to film since, “There were no available examples, no role models ... I just went blank and Nic [Roeg] shouted instructions." British Lion Films The 10 best sex scenes in film Team America: World Police Sex is funny, sometimes hilarious. There’s no getting through this list without acknowledging that fact, and there’s no better film to summarise it than Team America: World Police and its infamous puppet intercourse, enthusiastically filing through every sexual position in the book. As puppet creator Stephen Chiodo noted to MovieWeb, it’s the scene’s bracing artifice that’s actually the key to its humour. As he explained, “The more realistic it became, the less funny it was. The more axes of movement, the more lifelike movement we gave the puppets during the sex scene, it just wasn’t funny. But when you had them stiff like dolls, kind of rutting, it just was funny.” Paramount Pictures The 10 best sex scenes in film Mulholland Drive Trust David Lynch to create a highly-charged sex scene that inevitably only becomes part of the web created to deceive and befuddle us. Rita (Laura Harring) and Betty (Naomi Watts) may consummate their bubbling affections for each other in a sensuous, dreamlike manner - but who is Rita in this moment? Who is Betty? Is this encounter real or imagined? This moment of lush, Hollywood perfection only creates the set up for Mulholland Drive’s earth-shattering twist. Betty is now Diane, and her own sexual experience couldn’t be any more different: a tear-soaked, anguished masturbation scene that seems exemplary of her own broken soul. The 10 best sex scenes in film Unfaithful One of the finest examples of the erotic thriller, director Adrian Lyne depicts the extramarital affair in its full urgency, its entire spectrum of conflicted emotions, as suburban housewife Connie (Diane Lane) becomes enraptured by a handsome young Frenchman (Olivier Martinez). Their initial encounter is at first tenuous, tender, before a hunger seems to consume Connie and her guilt is momentarily forgotten in the throes of extreme passion, only for them to creep slowly back on the train ride home. The memory of its erotic power, the searing regret; those feelings soon become feverishly intertwined. 20th Century Fox

But nor was he one for pressing his audiences’ noses in debauchery. As time came to shoot Eye Wide Shut’s carnival of flesh, assistant director Brian Cook joked that they should have hired Tony Scott to help out. The subject at hand far better suited his flashy style.

Kubrick’s way of getting his head into the orgy was via the soundscapes of composer Jocelyn Pook. One of his producers had introduced him to her piece “Backward Priests”, which features Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy played in reverse. Kubrick was struck by the dark, dissonant quality.

“He looked at me right in the eyes and said ‘Let’s make sex music!’ I thought to myself, what the hell is sex music? Is it Barry White?” Pook would tell Dazed and Confused. “Stanley didn’t really care to elaborate, he just trusted me to answer the question.”

She composed 24 minutes of roiling chants and percussion, using the same back-to-front technique pioneered with “Backwards Priests”. “And God told to his apprentices,” go the lyrics (when played right way around). “I gave you a command ... to pray to the Lord for mercy, life, peace, health, salvation, the search, the leave and the forgiveness of the sins of God’s children.”

Kubrick and his crew were meanwhile immersed in softcore pornography, in particular David Duchovny’s Red Shoe Diaries. They wanted a sense of how far they should be prepared to push the material. And to settle on a line they would not cross.

Eyes Wide Shut - trailer

The orgy was shot at Mentmore Towers, a rural estate in Buckinghamshire built by the Rothschilds (known to hold mysterious masked balls). Initially, Kubrick wanted the models participating in the sequence to simulate sex at length. They were even asked to peruse the Kama Sutra. The response that came back was that they hadn’t signed up for that level of explicitness.

So the sequence was instead reimagined as a choreographic piece suggestive of bacchanalia. As Cruises takes it all in, you can’t quite focus on what’s going on. It’s mostly dark, suggestive blurs. The imagination is left to do the heavy lifting.

Cruise and Kidman may have adored Eyes Wide Shut but critics were slower coming around to it, even after Kubrick’s sudden death at 70 made this his accidental swan song. That wasn’t unusual with the director. Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining had been greeted with bafflement. And A Clockwork Orange had sparked a full-on moral panic. The reaction to Eyes Wide Shut was somewhere between these two poles. Many simply found it distant and a bit dull (it did make back its budget nearly three times over and is Kubrick’s highest grosser).

“It’s empty of ideas which is fine,” said The Washington Post. “But it’s also empty of heat.” “This is a film about sex that isn’t sexy,” agreed Total Film. “A movie about love with a cold heart.”

Kubrick, though, was always about the slow burn. And so it is only with the decades that the true genius of Eyes Wide Shut has been revealed. Christopher Nolan, a self-confessed Kubrick acolyte, is among the many who have confessed to misunderstanding it on first viewing. Only later, older and slightly wiser, did he begin to grasp what Kubrick was reaching for.

“Watching it with fresh eyes, it plays very differently to a middle-age man than it did to a young man,” Nolan said. “There’s a very real sense in which it is the 2001 of relationship movies.”