"I don't find it strange but maybe that means I'm strange," Kidman says, laughing. "But I never found it strange. I found it profound, the way it deals with grief and how people will fill holes to explain things, needing to explain things and then being incredibly open to all possibilities when you're in a deeply vulnerable state."

"And also," she continues, "the idea that grief isn't finite because it most definitely isn't. Grief never ends. And you see it at that scene at the opera. She just releases into believing that it is him, this little boy is her husband. For her, it's the easier path."

For that celebrated shot, Glazer says he asked Danny Huston, who plays Anna's fiance, to whisper something banal to Kidman, "to give her a nudge or two to knock her off balance, out of her reverie." Her recovery, he notes, was immaculate.

"It was only two takes," Kidman says of the close-up. "That's how bold Jonathan was. 'Great. We got it.' It wasn't always that way with him."

While her memory of shooting that crucial scene is precise, Kidman is a little blurry on the specifics of how she prepared to play a woman still racked with despair a decade after her husband died. During one of our conversations, she closes her eyes and rubs her temples, as if trying to summon ghosts from the past.

"I know vocally, everything just got much more meek and shy and light," Kidman says. "I remember being surprised at the time at the voice that was coming out of me."

Do you still have the script, I ask, where you could look at your notes?

"No, I throw everything out," Kidman answers. "I shred them. Ooooh. It'd be like people reading my journal. I don't want anyone ever reading those."

So, every script?

"Shredded."

...continued

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