Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (17 page)

“He was always encouraging about me as an actor and as a woman,” Nicole told Nancy Collins for
Rolling Stone.
“The shock for Tom and me is that nobody knew us the way Stanley did. Not even my mom and dad. Nobody. It was three years with just the three of us. He
knew
us.”

Once, after overhearing interchanges between them, Kubrick chastised Nicole for the way she talked to Tom. He told her that he had been married a long time and he felt there were things, within a marriage, that a woman could not say to a man. He encouraged her to consider the impact of her words.

During filming, Nicole effectively reversed that father-daughter relationship by telling the director that he was off base in some of the scenes he had planned for her character. She told him that some of the dialogue did not ring true, in the sense that it did not seem to be something a woman would say to a man. With time, Kubrick became baffled by Nicole’s character. Sometimes after his conversations with Nicole he would disappear for a short time, then return with a better idea.

The biggest shock of working with Kubrick hit them early on, in the pre-production. The director was famous for doing many takes on each scene. What Nicole and Tom did not realize was that he had the same insecurities about rehearsals. They didn’t just go over scenes two or three times, they went over each scene twenty or thirty times, until Kubrick felt every phrase and nuance was in its proper place.

Sometimes Nicole had interesting reactions to that routine. Once, while they were rehearsing the opening scene in the movie—a party that Nicole’s character attends with her husband—Nicole got so weary after twenty or thirty attempts that she slipped away during a break and returned with a glass of champagne.

Kubrick, who never seemed to take his eyes off of Nicole when they were rehearsing, saw what happened with the champagne and thought it would be good to have Nicole’s character get drunk at the party—and so he wrote it into the script. What moviegoers saw in the finished product was a prime example of art imitating life. The most existentialist director in movie history proved himself to be a realist when it came to satisfying the creative bottom line.

That was a quality that Nicole appreciated in Kubrick. The most identifiable scene in the movie is the one in which Nicole and Tom share an erotic interlude in front of a mirror. That one scene—and the music that played in the background, Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing”—was used in the trailer and came to symbolize the spirit of the film. So who was the genius that paired the music with the scene? It wasn’t Kubrick. Before shooting the scene, the director asked Nicole to pick out a sexy CD from her collection and play it for the background music. She chose “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.”

Interestingly, Kubrick treated Nicole differently than he treated Tom or any of the other actors. He allowed her more creative freedom and he encouraged her to ad lib. When she was clever or insightful, he invariably excused himself to go to his office so that he could write her ad lib’s into the script. If he was not smitten in the romantic sense (what are the odds there?), he certainly was smitten by her creative energy.

Even so, he cut her no slack when it came to retakes. Sometimes they nailed a scene in one take, but it was not unusual for him to ask Nicole to repeat a scene dozens of times, until she was exhausted by the sheer physical effort needed to read lines over and over again. Sometimes she surprised Kubrick. Just when he thought she was out for the count, when her head seemed to be drooping, she would roll her icy-blue eyes in his direction and say, “Let’s do it one more time!”

It was the same thing for Tom, who was not used to re-doing scenes over and over again at that point in his career. Incredibly, he kept his ego in check and never faulted Kubrick for his relentless perfectionism.

Not everyone felt that way. Veteran actor Harvey Keitel was replaced with Sydney Pollack, allegedly after he came into conflict with Kubrick, and actress Jennifer Jason Leigh was replaced when she apparently balked at returning for additional filming.

For less experienced actresses like Vinessa Shaw, who played a hooker, the hard work seemed like a reasonable price to pay to be in the movie. “I remember one time, around three in the morning, I did my 69
^th
take of a scene,” she told
Entertainment Weekly.
“I heard somebody say, ‘Wow! That must be a record.’ And then I ended up doing twenty more takes.” It gave her a sense of freedom, she said, because it gave her an opportunity to explore her character.   

 In the film, Tom and Nicole play Bill and Alice Harford, a New York couple whose lives appear fairly ordinary in the beginning. In an early scene, they go to a party given by Tom’s friend Victor Ziegler (played first by Harvey Keitel, then subsequently by noted director Sydney Pollack). Bill, a physician, is called upstairs to a bathroom by Ziegler, who has a problem. A hooker that he invited to the party, ostensibly to service him in the bathroom, took a drug overdose and appeared to be near death. Bill examines her and tells Ziegler that he has dodged a bullet—the girl will recover.

Later, at the party, Bill meets a former medical-school classmate, Nick Nightingale (played by Todd Field), who dropped out of school to become a jazz musician. On that night, he is playing with the dance band, not exactly the type of music that he had in mind when he left medical school. He gives Bill the name of an after-hours club where he performs real jazz and encourages him to drop by.

When Bill and Alice return home after the party, they do the well-publicized nude scene with “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” playing in the background. Although the script did not call for them to kiss like strangers, that is the way the scene is played. There is a sense of awkwardness in which there is no visible chemistry between the two actors. Bill caresses her breast as she glances disinterestedly into the mirror. As the passion increases, Bill squeezes her on the neck, a little too hard it seems. She seems bored and he seems, at the very least, angry.

Later, as they lie in bed smoking pot, she confesses that she once had a desire to sleep with a naval officer she met in the lobby of a hotel. She tells him that she was so attracted that she was prepared to give up everything—their marriage, their daughter, everything—to spend a single night with him.

Bill is stunned by her disclosure, but before the conflict can be resolved, he is called out of the house to administer to the family of one of his elderly patients, who has just passed away. On the way over to their house, he fantasizes about Alice and the naval officer making love.

After leaving the dead patient’s home, he decides to drop by and see his musician friend. While they are chatting, the musician receives a telephone call instructing him on where to go for a super-secret private party. He confides that he has done parties for these people before. They blindfold him when he arrives and he is asked to play the piano.

Bill is intrigued and asks for directions. The musician is reluctant at first, but soon caves in to his friend’s request. He tells him he must go in costume and he must give a certain password when he arrives at the house.

On the way to the party, Bill experiences another fantasy about Alice and the naval officer. It is clear that he is becoming obsessed with her disclosure. She was not actually unfaithful to him, but the admission that she thought about it was just as damaging in his eyes. She was the mother of his child. He had trusted her.

The party turns out to be a massive orgy, during which everyone wears masks to conceal their identities. Not long after he arrives, Bill’s deception is exposed. He is brought before the entire group and ordered to remove his mask. Clearly, he is in serious trouble, but before the group can issue a punishment, a girl cries out from an overhead passageway that she is willing to take responsibility for his actions.

Satisfied that someone will be punished, the group allows Bill to leave the house, but not before threatening him with dire consequences if he ever tells a soul anything he has seen at the house. The remainder of the movie deals with the consequences of that night (the woman who helps him eventually ends up in the morgue) and with the effect of Alice’s fantasy disclosure on their marriage.

Throughout the film, Bill’s continuing fantasizes about Alice and the naval officer, all filmed in black and white, provide the story’s most erotic moments—and the film’s most visible chemistry.

~ ~ ~
     

 
During the summer of 1997, Gary Goba was living in London, England, where he worked as a model. Tall and handsome, with Robert Redford-like features, his agency liked to pitch him to potential clients as a stereotypical all-American type (presentation photos sometimes showed him dressed as a cowboy).

But Goba did not get his rugged good looks from growing up in the American West. Born in Montreal, Canada, he spent his childhood in Ottawa, Ontario, and attended the University of Toronto, where he majored in psychology and French. Part-time modeling assignments led to a full-time career after he realized it offered greater financial opportunities than a degree in psychology.

So it was in London, where he had been working for the past several years, that the twenty-nine-year-old model received a telephone call from his agent, who excitedly told him he was booked for an audition with Warner Bros. for a movie that starred Nicole Kidman. He was told nothing else about the project—neither the title of the movie nor the director’s name. That type of audition was unusual for him because he had never appeared in a movie. All of his modeling work had been for print and television.

When he arrived at the audition, he found a line of men already there, all of them models. “I waited my turn and walked through the door into a small conference room that would have seated maybe thirty people, but there was no table or chair, just an empty room,” he says. “I didn’t see anybody, but I spotted a small piece of tape on the floor and I knew to walk to the tape and stop. As I did that, I noticed a guy in the corner coming out from behind a camera and walking toward me.”

The man was Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s special assistant. He introduced himself to Goba, but he did not tell him his employer’s name. He shook Goba’s hand and asked him what he was doing in London. When Goba told him that he was living with his girlfriend while working as a model, Vitali observed that he didn’t sound British. That’s when Goba explained that he had grown up in Canada. As they talked, Vitali asked him to please remove his shirt, which he did without thinking anything about it because he was always asked to take off his shirt whenever he auditioned for modeling jobs.

“We chatted about ten minutes and he slowly, slowly backed up to the camera,” Goba says. “I thought that after that little chat he was going to turn that thing on and we’d do the formal audition, whatever that was going to be. Instead, he turned the camera off and said, ‘That’s it.’ So that’s when I realized that the audition was just more getting a feeling for the guy, rather than finding out his talents as an actor.”

During the audition, he asked about the part for which he was auditioning and he was told it was as a United States naval officer. Goba figured he would be an extra on a ship and would probably salute or something as Nicole Kidman walked past. His expectations were not high because he had never been in a movie. Why would Warner Bros. want him to be anything other than an extra?

Vitali told him that shooting for the part would begin in a couple of weeks and he would get back in touch with him soon to let him know if he had the job. After the audition, Goba waited around London for several weeks. Finally, with no word from Vitali, he figured that the part probably had gone to someone else, so he moved to Switzerland, where his mother and her family lived (Goba says with pride that he is half Swiss). It was then that the telephone calls began. Every week, he says, Vitali, or someone from his office, called him and told him that he would hear from them soon.

  That went on for several months. Finally, in December 1997, Vitali called and told Goba that they were ready, at last, to shoot his scenes. He told Goba they had already made arrangements for his flight back to London and his driver (yes, he was elevated to limo status) would be waiting for him when he arrived.

As he was hanging up the phone, Goga thought he heard Vitali say something. He yanked the telephone back to his ear and said, “Yeah, did you want me?”

“Yes,” answered Vitali. “I wanted to run this by you and ask you if you would be okay doing a sex scene with Nicole Kidman.”

Goba laughed and said, “Right! Would you have a problem with it?”

“No,” answered Vitali.