"'Eyes Wide Shut'"?

"Shredded."

I'm not sure I've ever heard you relish a word like you're saying "shredded" right now, I tell her.

"Well, it feels like baggage," Kidman says. "It's all just going to go sit in an attic or down in a basement. I'm a traveling actor and can live out of a suitcase. That's how I approach life because I've always had to shove everything in a suitcase and move on."

Kidman was finishing making "Birth" when she won the Oscar in 2003 for playing Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's drama "The Hours." That year, she also appeared in Lars von Trier's bruising, incendiary "Dogville," the sober Philip Roth adaptation "The Human Stain" and the acclaimed Civil War epic "Cold Mountain," a hit nominated for seven Oscars. But even with all that, Glazer had been hesitant to cast her in "Birth," fearing her celebrity would overwhelm a delicate, peculiar character study.

"I was nervous to cast her," Glazer admits. "I needn't have been. I underestimated her ability to become anonymous. To immerse herself fully. I'd seen her in 'Dogville.' I loved that she did that. And 'Eyes Wide Shut.' It's that fearlessness which attracted me, seeking out filmmakers who would challenge her."

Glazer did just that, noting that the making of "Birth" was fraught. The studio, he says, was "enraged by my daily script changes and improvisations," often made because the scenes they had initially written were beyond the abilities of the young actor, Cameron Bright, playing the boy.

"So we'd shift the emphasis onto Nicole," Glazer says. "Sometimes three or four pages of dialogue would turn up at her house at midnight to shoot the following day, completely different to the ones she'd prepared for. She'd arrive in the morning, never late, knowing the new lines perfectly and without complaint. She stood by me throughout. She knew I was searching for something and she protected me and believed in what we were doing. She's an absolute professional and I am deeply proud of her performance."

Kidman remembers Glazer's "rigorous" reshaping of the script, a process she likens to Stanley Kubrick's methodology making "Eyes Wide Shut," a 400-day shoot that, boiled down, amounted to what she calls a "commitment to exploring the unknown."

"Stanley would rewrite scenes that we'd spent six weeks shooting," Kidman remembers. "And you just go, 'OK. Great. How do you see it this time?' With Jonathan, I'd get those pages late at night and it was glorious because the writing was so good. Great writing is easy to learn. That's never a problem. When it's not so good, then," she laughs, "that's another story."

...continued

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.