‘Stay Classy, Portland’: 7 Film and TV Projects That Bailed on Their Original Settings

Eyes Wide Shut

The Stanley Kubrick film, released in 1999, is set in contemporary New York City — but you may have noticed that it often looks nothing like New York City. That’s because the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman thriller shot mostly in England.

The disorienting sense of location serves the film, which is based on the 1962 novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler and was originally set a hundred years before 1999, in Vienna. The main characters, Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford and Kidman’s Alice Harford, feel themselves feeling lost and adrift when they realize their marriage isn’t as solid as they once imagined

Here’s one of the scenes in Eyes Wide Shut where New York really does look like New York. It features Scottish treasure Alan Cumming doing a quite solid American accent, and an ad lib that Kubrick loved so much he asked Cumming to do it again and again.

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