Eyes Wide Open

¿I¿ve never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I¿m a successful film-maker ¿ in that a number of people speak well of me...¿ Stanley Kubrick Frederic Raphael first worked with Stanley Kubrick in the 1970s. Since then he has worked with him at various times but no project has been as intense and demanding as his collaboration with Kubrick on his final film Eyes Wide Shut which was finished just before Kubrick¿s death in March 1999. This memoir will be about this collaboration and will be written in a cinematic form ¿ partly prose, partly film script. It will be a movie on the page and will give the reader a chance to ¿hear¿ the thinking, attitudes and methods of a great director woven with many anecdotes about stars he worked with along the way such as James Mason, Kirk Douglas, Marisa Berenson, Leonard Rossiter, Brando, Gregory Peck and many more. The long conversations between Raphael and Kubrick, usually conducted on the telephone, were not only about the problems concerning the film but also about many other things from Julius Caesar to the Holocaust, the films of Kieslowski and Tarantino. Kubrick was unusually revealing about his early life in the cinema and of the reverses and humiliations which he had to endure.