(5 of 5)
Anya Kubrick, one of the director's three daughters, goes further. She regards Eyes Wide Shut as "a very personal statement from my father. He felt very strongly about this subject and theme, and he honed down in it exactly the ideas, principles and moral philosophies he had lived by." Large among them, she says, was the idea that "we are all both good and evil, and if you think you have no evil in you, you're not looking hard enough." Her mother Christiane says the film reflects Kubrick's belief that "most of humanity is not quite bright enough to know what they want and plan how to get it." He did. But like everyone who knew Kubrick, she is at an angry loss to explain the public perception of him as a reclusive, obsessive misanthrope. John Calley, chairman of Sony Pictures and an old friend, spoke for many when he described Kubrick as a man true to an uncompromising vision who always "remained decent, with a family he loved, yet wise, fun, kind and not follow-the-leader."
That such a life revolved around the creation of dark visions of human nature and striving may be counted as an irony. In the end, people who really care about movies always knew, as Steven Spielberg put it, that when you saw one of Kubrick's movies, "you committed yourself to its being part of your life." When the dust of its release settles, it is a virtual certainty that we will be able to see Eyes Wide Shut, in all its challenging richness and strangeness, as Kubrick's haunting final masterpiece.
--With reporting by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles