Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (18 page)

“Neither would I—not a problem.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen, so don’t worry about it,” Vitali continued. “I just wanted to run it past you in case we did decide it would look great—and if you didn’t want to be in it, that would be a problem.”

“No, no, no,” Goba said, stunned that they were even having that conversation. “That will be fine.”

The next day, Goba flew back to London, where he made arrangements to stay with his ex-girlfriend and her new finance. The first thing Goba did upon his arrival was  report to wardrobe, where he spent about four hours being fitted for a United States naval officer’s uniform. The following day, the limo picked him up and drove him twenty miles west of London to Pinewood Studios, one of the most respected film-making facilities in the world. It features state-of-the art sound stages, viewing theaters, cutting rooms and sophisticated lighting systems.

Still in the dark about the title of the film, the director, or his role, Goba arrived earlier than anyone else. “All of a sudden, a car pulled up and Nicole and Tom came out,” he says. “Tom was the first one out and he just kinda’ ran in and they introduced him to me and he quickly said ‘hello’ and ran right by me into the make-up room and I never saw him again after that.”

Then Nicole made her entrance. “She was more sociable and chatted with people as she came in. She was introduced to me and I guess she knew she was going to be meeting me. She stood there and chatted with me there on the stairs, heading up to make-up, for maybe two minutes or so. She was super sweet, really, really nice and relaxed and said, ‘Hi, pleasure to meet you and I’m looking forward to working with you.’

“Then she went up to do make-up. I think she and Tom had a scene together that morning—and then we started in the afternoon. I pretty much sat around all morning until they were done and I didn’t see Tom again. He disappeared and went off to negotiate
Mission Impossible II
or something.”

Goba waited in his dressing room for someone to call him. By then, he knew that Stanley Kubrick was the film’s director and he figured that he and his assistants were busy setting up the scene, whatever it was going to be. He was never given a script and still had no idea what he was going to be doing in the movie, except that it involved Nicole and may or may not involve a sex scene.

Goba was not always alone in the dressing room.Assistants came in and out on a regular basis, mostly to check on the status of his uniform, which had not yet arrived. It was three hours late and the assistants were in a tizzy. When it finally arrived, it hung on his dressing room door only a few minutes before he got the call to report to the set.

“Okay, I’ll just jump into this suit,” he replied.

“Oh, no, just throw on the bathrobe,” the assistant said.

“I was like, well I guess I’m just going to meet [Kubrick]—right?” he recalls. “So I walked out of my room and Nicole walked out of her room and the assistant director was there to take us down the stairs into the big studio.”

Goba and Nicole walked down the stairs and into a drab hallway, then into a gigantic room that housed what they called the Cape Cod suite. It was a beautifully furnished hotel room and the way the lights shined on it made it look even more lavish.

“I saw Stanley [Kubrick] there and chatted with him—super nice guy, completely normal. It was like meeting someone’s parents or something—then he said, ‘Let’s get right to it!’ I noticed it was just a bedroom and I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ Then he mentioned what we would be doing and that’s when I realized we were going to have a bloody sex scene.”

Kubrick seemed almost clinical as he explained to Goba what he wanted from him. “He’s like, okay, what we’re going to do here is Nicole will be lying on the bed on her back and you’re going to be coming in on top of her and, you know, you’re going to be caressing her arms and her dress and maybe give her a kiss and let’s get right to it.”

Goba was in shock, but he tried not to show it. He kept thinking,
I don’t believe this, I don’t believe this
! When they entered the room, it was filled with eight or ten people, all working on the lighting or making last minute changes to the set, but then Nicole asked for a closed set and everyone was asked to leave.

Then it was just the three of them—Goba, Nicole and Kubrick, who sat in a chair that had been rigged up to a trolley. He planned to operate the camera himself, not a difficult task since he only needed three levers—one to move the chair up and down the trolley, another to pan the camera from side to side, and the third to zoom the lens in and out so that he would get what he needed, anything from tight shots of their faces and hands, to medium distance shots of their entire bodies.

Once everyone but Kubrick was out of the room, Goba and Nicole faced each other and removed their robes, so that within seconds both of them were totally naked. Goba was amazed at how beautiful she was and how easily she showed him her body. But he still couldn’t believe it. What strange twist of fate was responsible for him standing before Nicole Kidman buck naked?

Kubrick set the pace with the words, “Just go at it!”

Suddenly, it was like they were two prized animals at a gladiatorial event, standing at face-off, ready to engage one another in something akin to sexual combat, as Kubrick egged them on from the shadows beyond the lights symbolically waving a red cape. She was the very image of physical perfection, with flawless skin so white it appeared blue tinged, and breasts that were small but firm, and a patch of reddish pubic hair that was well-groomed but not shaved—and he, sturdily built, but not muscled-out by steroids, all six-foot-one of him ready to do his best, his smiling face exuding an innocent schoolboy charm that immediately put Nicole at ease.       

For six days, Goba and Nicole engaged in sexual activity, everything short of actual penetration, with Kubrick shouting instructions and encouragement from his trolley, capturing on film every moment they were on film. Goba estimates that they probably acted out fifty different sexual positions.

“The three of us got together and tried to come up with different interesting positions,” he says. “They were really trying to do things that had never been done in movies before. They were going to do the going-down-on-me thing, but that wasn’t even an option. We didn’t even film a blow job scenario because it had been done and done well. We did a bathtub scene, where I’m sitting on the side of the tub with my feet in it (there was no water) and she was straddling around me, kind of facing me. We just tried to do stuff that we had never ever seen before in movies. Sometimes she would come up with an idea or I would or Stanley would.”   

The most intimate scene never made it into the film. In that one, Kubrick had Nicole stand nude against a wall, one foot propped up onto a table top and her leg flared open so that her pubic area was exposed. Then, he instructed Goba to go down on her.

“They wig-glued on this patch over her private parts and I had to actually put my face right on it and, Stanley, I think he was having fun with it in a joking way because he really wanted me to go for it,” Goba says. “I did—and he was like, ‘You’ve got to really push in there and really move your head around,’ and I’d see him laughing and she would be like, ‘Oh, God, Stanley!’ So I was really grinding away in there, with my mouth on her patch—and there was hair in my mouth, too, and I’d be pulling one out.”

The second most intimate scene actually made it into the movie, but viewers were treated to a sleight-of-hand that suggested much less on screen than was actually being delivered during filming. Goba remembers it this way: ”She’s lying on the bed on her back in a summer dress, with her legs up in the air a little bit, and he’s shooting the profile from the side—and I’m coming from the other side, leaning over her.

“The way he directed it was to tell me to obviously kiss her, run [my] hands down her body, like down the dress, and grab the bottom of the dress and pull it up all the way over her breasts—and he’s like, ‘leave it up there and have those hands continue on down and, like, grab her tits, kiss them if you want, hands all the way down her body and end up between her legs.”

Goba was shocked at the specificity Kubrick used to direct his movements. The director spoke to him as if Nicole were not even in the room. If Nicole heard directions that she did not like, she chastised Kubrick for suggesting them, but she never said “no” to anything that he suggested, no matter how explicit.

After hearing the above detailed instructions, Goba thought, “Oh, God—and she’s not wearing anything,” but, like Nicole, he did what he was told by the famous director.

“Let’s get right to it—no trial or anything,” Kubrick barked.

“My hand ended up between her legs, but I thought I could, out of respect, rest it on the inside of her thigh,” Goba says. “He was filming from the side. I figured her other leg would block what my hand was really doing, which was just touching her inner thigh.”

Suddenly, Kubrick leaned from behind the camera and shouted, “Whoa! Whoa! Gary, you’ve got to get right in there!”

Goba repeated the entire routine, starting at her breasts, moving his hands down her body, finally stopping between her legs. “So, take two, my hand ended up right on her and he wouldn’t stop filming. He just kept going. The music is playing and we have to continue like we’re into it and my hand is on her basically moving around.

“I couldn’t believe it! I just couldn’t believe it! I think he was having fun with it. It was a joke for him, but I think it went a little far for her because as the days went on, she would be, like, ‘Okay cut!’ Like this is getting too intimate, but he just let it go. It was like he was trying to have things done to piss her off—or the opposite. It was weird. He was laughing. He thought it was
so
funny.”

There is another scene in the movie, where he is on top on her thrusting between her legs. Her back is arched and her head is tilted back, a look of ecstasy on her face. The story behind that scene is that when they first tried it, Kubrick was unhappy with the way Goba was thrusting.

“I’m kind of doing the smooth movement thing,” says Goba. “After the first take, he goes, ‘Oh, no—you’ve got to really give it to her, really slam it to her.’ I think she was in pain. I was slamming so hard it was hurting me. My bones were in pain. I was really, really banging into her. I think she even pulled back or pushed me away. I think it must have hurt her. Maybe that’s what he wanted, some painful expression—the two are almost the same, right?”

As the days wore on, Nicole seemed to become more and more uncomfortable with what they were doing. Goba theorizes that it was because they were becoming friends, that in the beginning, it might have been easier for her to engage in that behavior with him because they were strangers.

To his great surprise, in between takes, she sat with him and talked. “Honestly, she was like any of your friends, completely normal stuff,” he says. “We talked about her parents flying from Australia, about dinner, what she and Tom ate, and what they cooked. Just regular, everyday stuff. At the end of each scene we wouldn’t even acknowledge what we had done. We just moved on. It was like, ‘Now what were you saying about your mom and dad?’ We never talked about the scenes we shot.”

  Goba had heard stories about Nicole’s alleged bitchiness, but he never saw anything remotely like that. “She was the nicest person I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “I had heard that when she was doing the movie prior to this one,
To Die
For,  she got such a bad reputation, that she was such a bitch. All sorts of articles were written about her, but the thing to keep in mind is that method actors get into characters for the duration of the shooting and the character in that movie was a bitch, so maybe she was staying in character. In this movie, her character was to be flirtatious and motherly, you know, kinda sweet— and, honestly, she was the nicest person I’ve met in my life, even off set.”

When they completed their last sex scene, they got dressed, barely speaking, and left the studio, never to meet again. Says Goba today: “I’d seen pictures of her before—but you see so many pictures of beautiful women doing modeling—but, honestly, when I met her, she became more and more beautiful [each day]. Probably by the end of our six days, I was smitten with her.”  

Eyes Wide Shut
ended production in January 1998, just a couple of weeks after Goba’s sex scenes with Nicole. After the movie wrapped, she flew to Washington State to begin a new project, a comedy-drama titled
Practical Magic.
A couple of weeks after beginning work on the new film, she was rushed back to Los Angeles, where she underwent a two-hour surgery for the removal of a benign ovarian cyst. As it turned out, Nicole may have been in actual pain during Goba’s bone-jarring pelvic thrusts. The thrusts did not cause the cyst, but they may have aggravated the condition.