Stanley Kubrick had a weird and strict rule for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman during Eyes Wide Shut

It was a deliberate thematic choice on Kubrick's part, and a 2014 Vanity Fair retrospective revealed that the director had a number of on-set rules to ensure that Bill and Alice were constantly kept apart. each other. Namely, Kubrick insisted that stars Cruise and Kidman – actually married at the time – stay separated as much as possible during filming.

According to reviewer Amy Nicholson, Kubrick ran Cruise and Kidman separately, giving them each their own notes that they were forbidden to share with the other. They were allowed to develop their own characters, but prohibited from comparing notes as a couple.

Furthermore, Kubrick tried to play with real jealousy. In the film, Bill's sexual odyssey begins when Alice admits to feeling a desire to end the marriage for a passing soldier. Bill - and possibly Alice too - begin to have visions of Alice naked in bed with another man. In order to shoot these scenes, Kidman and a male model filmed naked for six days, posing in 50 unique sex positions... while Cruise was banned from visiting the set. Kidman was forbidden from telling Cruise about his experiences filming the sex scenes.

Cruise and Kidman are professionals, of course, and one would hope that jealousy would become a factor when performing intimate scenes with one another, but the terse nature of Kubrick's films likely left a deliberately uncomfortable atmosphere. The filming of "Eyes Wide Shut" was notoriously long, taking place regularly for 46 weeks, beginning in November 1996 and continuing until June 1998. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this is the movie shooting the longest in the history of cinema.