Nicole Kidman Believes 'Eyes Wide Shut' Director Stanley Kubrick 'Was Mining' Her Marriage to Tom Cruise for the Film's Inspiration

Nicole Kidman is spilling some serious tea about the creation of Eyes Wide Shut.

In a recent interview, the Big Little Lies star claimed the film's director, Stanley Kubrick, used her former marriage to Tom Cruise — who was her costar in the flick — as inspiration for the 1999 movie.

"I suppose he was mining it," Kidman, 57, said of the filmmaker's fascination over her romance with the Top Gun actor, 62, which came to an end in 2001. "There were ideas he was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions."

"I do remember him saying, ‘Triangles are hard. You have to tread carefully when it’s a triangle,'" she recalled. "Because one person could feel ganged up on. But he was aware of that and knew how to manage us."

"When Tom and I first started with Stanley, it was at his home, and we didn’t even go over to the sets at Pinewood [Studios],” she remembered about working on the cult classic, where she and Cruise respectively played the characters of Alice and Bill. "Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, 'Are we ever going to start?' And we just wouldn’t start. We were getting comfortable with each other, comfortable enough to throw out ideas."

While they continued to create the project, Kidman noticed parts of their life began blending into the story. "I’m quite up-front, and Alice becomes quite up-front, particularly when she was stoned…although that wasn’t me when I was stoned. I was just naturally like that. Up-front," she pointed out. "I smoked when I was younger. But it definitely wasn’t of interest then."

"I suppose that was why he cast me. That mischief, that provocative nature, he found that out and it got more imbued into Alice,” Kidman added. "The scene where I drop the dress…that was me. That wasn’t written. That was my dress from my closet. This is how I take off the dress, Stanley.’ Because I had a lot of clothes, we weren’t paying to buy clothes. And Stanley had come over and I was showing him all these beautiful dresses. That’s how that happened."

The Hours actress also got candid about how Kubrick was adamant she and her then-husband share a trailer on set. "We had a home ten minutes away, but we lived in that trailer. Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, ‘You’re not each getting a trailer. We can’t afford it,'" she explained.

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The LA Times conducted the interview with Kidman.