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Kubrick began to woo Cruise as early as 1995, after his longtime friend Sydney Pollack, who produced Cruise's film The Firm, reassured him that the young star was no brat. At first Cruise thought Pollack (who ended up appearing in the film too) was kidding when he said Kubrick wanted the star's fax number. But soon, Cruise recalls, they began "faxing each other back and forth, never really discussing the movie, just talking about airplanes and cameras." A year later, Kubrick faxed Kidman with an offer to be in the film with her husband. "I didn't need to read the script," says Kidman. "I didn't care what the story was originally. I wanted to work with Stanley."
When the notoriously travel-phobic Kubrick invited the couple to his house in the English countryside, they were surprised to find a warm family man, not the weird hermit of the press clippings. Cruise and Kubrick, both pilots (though Kubrick refused to fly later in life), ended up debating the effect of aviation on World War II. "Stanley was not what you expected. He was very open," says Cruise.
By the time filming began in 1997, the three had become virtually inseparable. The set at Pinewood Studios outside London became their home away from home. The apartment of the film's couple was modeled after one Kubrick once kept in Manhattan, but Kidman chose the books, the color of the window shades, and even added the change Cruise always leaves by their bed at home. She populated it with her own things too, leaving her makeup in the bathroom, tossing her clothes on the floor. "It's sort of messy," she giggles, urging moviegoers to check out her living habits. Says Cruise: "By the end, we felt as if we lived on that set. We even slept in the bed." When Kubrick filmed Cruise and Kidman in the nude scene that opens the film, he closed the set and operated the camera himself, intensifying the intimacy among the three of them.
Between shoots, Kidman, a former high school debater in her native Australia, would plop down in her bathrobe and curlers on the floor of Kubrick's book-cluttered office to talk politics. "I challenged him, and he loved it," she says. "It was great to work with someone you can have deep discussions with. He could alter the way you see the world."
The pace of work on the $64 million project was leisurely. "Stanley didn't work under the gun," says Kidman. "Time was the most important thing to him. He was willing to give up location to save money, but he wasn't willing to give up time." Obsessed with getting it just right, Kubrick wrote and rewrote the script while they were shooting it, sometimes faxing changes to his stars, often as late as 4 a.m.
"Stanley knew that's how he worked best. He was not indulgent," says Cruise. Even so, there were moments when they wondered what they'd got themselves into. Says Kidman: "Sometimes it was very frustrating because you were thinking: 'Is this ever going to end?'" The long shoot, and its subject matter, eventually took a toll physically on Cruise. He is reluctant to talk about his ulcer, fearing the inevitable headlines--KUBRICK GIVES CRUISE AN ULCER!--but confides that he woke up one night early in the production in terrible pain. "I didn't want to tell Stanley. He panicked. I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up. You try not to kick things up, but you go through things you can't help."