How
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Predicted the Jeffrey Epstein Saga
Cinematographer
Larry Smith joined 'It Happened in Hollywood' to discuss restoring the
prescient 1999 classic.
By Seth
Abramovitch
December
5, 2025 2:06pm
Eyes Wide
Shut, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, 1999
Back in
1999, audiences weren’t sure what to make of Eyes Wide Shut.
What
would be Stanley Kubrick’s final film (the directing giant died just six days
after screening his first cut for Warner Bros. and the film’s stars, Tom Cruise
and Nicole Kidman) revolved around a secret society of powerful figures in New
York City who took part in sex rituals with prostitutes.
When an
interloper stumbles into their affairs in the form of Cruise’s character, Dr.
Bill Harford, disturbing things begin to happen. A piano player goes missing. A
sex worker dies of a conveniently timed drug overdose. And a creepy mask
appears on a pillow beside Bill’s sleeping wife, Alice, played by Cruise’s
then-wife Kidman.
The
premise, many felt, seemed far-fetched.
Decades
later, the film has grown exponentially in influence, admiration and, yes,
plausibility, as the Jeffrey Epstein saga has shown that such a scenario is no
stranger than Kubrick’s unsettling fiction.
“There’s
so many conspiracy theories out there now, it’s hard to know what’s to be
believed and what isn’t,” Eyes Wide Shut director of photography Larry Smith
said of the film’s evocation of the Epstein case on the It Happened in
Hollywood podcast. Smith oversaw a dazzling restoration of the film for
Criterion Collection.
“But,”
Smith continued, “I think we’re intelligent enough to understand just how the
cards are stacked, aren’t we?”
Indeed,
what Kubrick captures is a world where someone like Jeffrey Epstein becomes
almost inevitable: a dark nexus of money, secrecy, impunity and male sexual
desire warped by institutional power.
Epstein’s
victims were not unlike the girls at the masked orgy, including the mysterious
woman who warns Bill, “I don’t think you realize the danger you’re in now.”
They are economically vulnerable young women viewed as disposable by the
powerful men who made up his illicit social network.
Like the
orgy sequence that turns sex trafficking into a highly aestheticized ritual,
Epstein relied on the trappings of extreme wealth (private jets, private
islands, private massage services) to window dress his own crimes. The ring
became an open secret; those who attempted to expose it were intimidated into
silence. All of that occurs in Eyes Wide Shut.
Kubrick’s
film was as much an exploration of psychosexual marital dynamics as it was an
indictment of unchecked power. It was his great genius that the film would so
presciently capture the zeitgeist a quarter-century later.
For more
on the making of Eyes Wide Shut from cinematographer Larry Smith, listen to the
full episode of It Happened in Hollywood.
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