It’s well known that Stanley Kubrick was a demanding filmmaker, infamous for doing an innumerable amount of takes and even driving some of his actors to the brink of insanity.
In fact, this obsessive control on every minutiae detail lasted up until his very final film, 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” which had its production go on for a whopping 15 months.
Harvey Keitel, who originally played Victor Ziegler, one of Tom Cruise’s character’s patients on ‘Eyes’, recently admitted that he quit the film, in the middle of production, after Kubrick made him shoot a scene 68 times.
The scene in question had Ziegler walking through the door. That’s it. Kubrick didn’t like the way Keitel was walking. By take 68, the actor allegedly had it. This is according to actor Gary Oldman.
“Harvey Keitel just said, ‘I’m outta here. You’re f*cking crazy,’” Oldman claimed. In a recently unearthed interview, Keitel called Kubrick a “genius,” but added that the legendary filmmaker “did some things I objected to.”
Keitel didn’t want to specify, only adding that he conducted himself in a way that “I didn’t like […] that I found disrespectful.” He then admitted that he was fired, by Kubrick, eventually replaced by Sydney Pollack.
So, did Keitel quit or was he fired? I bet it’s the former. Kubrick would rarely fire anyone from his crew, he took great pleasure in driving his actors crazy.
From everything that I’ve read about Kubrick, his obsession with multiple takes only really started when he had a monitor in front of him, which began on “The Shining,” and continued with “Full Metal Jacket” and “Eyes Wide Shut.”