Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s final film released posthumously in 1999, has always been enveloped by an aura of mystery and rumor, which continues to this day: in particular, the recurring chatter about heavy cuts concerning a pedophilia sub-plot, according to commentators and influencers even linked to the Epstein scandal. Some have even quantified the edits at 20 minutes, buoyed by the context, suggesting the film was reworked following the director’s sudden death. While several sources have denied such theories, Nicole Kidman among them, Vivian Kubrick, the director’s daughter, has now chosen to speak.
Vivian Kubrick Denies the Existence of 20 Minutes Cut from Eyes Wide Shut
Vivian Kubrick, born in 1960, the younger daughter of Stanley Kubrick, for decades could not escape the rumors about the cuts to Eyes Wide Shut, rumors that are resurfacing with greater force due to the highly polarized political debate in the United States. The memory of Stanley ends up being dragged into the discussion, casting him as a presumed abused hero who would have exposed dark power practices tied to pedophilia. Vivian joins other reliable sources in saying that there is no confirmation at all of these phantom 20 minutes. We translate the entire message on X, because it is very interesting, also as a reminder of a certain intermediate workflow of the era, between analog and digital.
Dso this is as good a moment as any to finally address the matter of the missing 20 minutes of Eyes Wide Shut. A story that has circulated for many years, so let me tell you what I know and what I don’t know.
Context: my father always made sure to burn the discarded material after a film finished, to prevent the studio from reassembling his work later, or offering alternative versions. There has been much debate about a twenty-minute removal from Eyes Wide Shut after his death. It will disappoint many, but back then I never heard anything about these 20 missing minutes, nor did I hear anything that to this day confirms that this section ever existed. I suppose you can stop reading here. But if you’re curious about the details, continue reading.
Naturally I’m not in a position to know anything that happened just before or right after my father’s death. At that time I lived in Los Angeles, writing the score for another film. I flew to England, utterly traumatized, to be there for the funeral preparations and burial. I had to return to LA the day after the burial, grief-stricken and exhausted, to complete the soundtrack I was contractually bound to finish, and I barely managed to do so. I wasn’t really there, in every sense, for any subsequent discussions.
The only change I learned of at that time was the use of CGI figures to cover some nudity in the orgy scene, a Warner Bros. request to stay within the R rating. But I heard nothing about frames or scenes being cut. When my father died, the Eyes Wide Shut cut was complete, the film was nearing the final stages of post-production: it had just been shown to studio heads, I suppose with a provisional soundtrack, because the final sound mix and some of the music still had to be completed.It was 1999, a time when films were still distributed on film. I was editing on Avid, but one must not confuse this with the permanent digital archives we have today. The Avid material consisted of standard-definition video transfers of the dailies, at 720×576, used for editing. They were working copies, not a high-resolution preservation of the original negative. There were no high-resolution digital versions of every take somewhere on a server, as people rightly expect today.
There were, of course, 35mm dailies prints, as well as the original cut scenes in the form of negatives. In the end, long after the film was finished and released, the 35mm dailies and the original negatives of the cut scenes were burned. The master negative of the finished film and the material derived from it were, of course, preserved. Once the edit was locked, the original negative was physically cut to match the assembled edit. After the negative was cut, you couldn’t simply go back and rework the film: each cut destroyed a frame at the start and end of the shot. The finished-film master negative was used to create the interpositive, from which internegatives were derived, and those were used to make 35mm prints for theaters. The original negatives of the cut scenes did not go through that process, because those shots were not part of the finished film. Someone might say: “But if there exists a cut with those 20 minutes, shouldn’t it be preserved on the Avid!” But editing a film with Avid did not mean that all that material would be preserved indefinitely. It wasn’t yet an era in which every fragment of the editing process was automatically kept for decades on servers. I don’t know whether any Avid material from the film still exists. This is a question for the University of The Arts in London. They maintain the official archive of my father’s papers, production material and everything else spanning his career, including Eyes Wide Shut. But as far as I know, no Avid dailies cache survived. So even if 20 minutes were removed after his death, I seriously doubt we should expect to find a video, a digital copy, an unused negative or anything else somewhere. But the absence of such material has a flip side: it does not prove that those 20 minutes ever existed.To be honest I can’t go further. I’ve never heard of a 20-minute cut at the time, nor have I ever seen, nor been shown any evidence that such a section existed, and I don’t know of any complete material that could prove it. I can’t tell you what may have happened in the roughly thirty hours after my father’s death: I wasn’t there. But unless concrete evidence emerges—and I do not consider the stories that some people invent post hoc as proof, people who want to sensationalize their role in this story, assuming they had one—the story of the 20 minutes removed from Eyes Wide Shut after his death, in my mind, remains a conspiracy theory, not a proven fact. I conclude, and I am sure of this: if 20 minutes had been cut, sooner or later I would have discovered it. Once the fog of grief had lifted, I would have devoted a great deal of effort to protecting my father’s work. I took that responsibility very seriously.
Comments