After more than a quarter century, Stanley Kubrick‘s daughter has addressed a long-held rumor about his final film.
On Monday, Vivian Kubrick insisted she “definitely would have found out” over the years if there was a missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which supposedly draw a connection between the film’s elite secret society and the Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring.
“You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut,” she wrote on X. “It’s a story that has been circulating for many years, so let me tell you what I actually know and don’t know.
“For context, my father always had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished, specifically to prevent the studio from later re-editing his work or creating alternative versions.
Vivian continued, “There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died. This will be very disappointing to many people, but I certainly did not hear anything about a missing 20 minutes at the time, nor have I heard anything since that would confirm such a section ever existed.”
While Vivian admitted she “was not in a position” to know what happened immediately after her father’s death, as she had to fly from Los Angeles to England for the funeral.
She explained that the “only alteration I heard about at the time” was the use of CGI to obscure some nudity in the orgy scene in order to secure an R rating. “But I did not hear that any shots or scenes were removed,” said Vivian, explaining that the movie reached picture lock before his death.
Vivian noted that the University of the Arts London is in possession of her father’s archive, including production materials and other records for Eyes Wide Shut, so they would have the best knowledge.
“So even if 20 minutes had in fact been removed after his death, I seriously doubt we should expect a surviving video or digital copy, unused negative or other obvious physical record of it to be sitting somewhere today,” she added. “But the absence of such material cuts both ways: it does not prove that those 20 minutes ever existed in the first place.
“That is as far as I can honestly go. I never heard of a missing 20 minutes at the time, I have never subsequently seen or been shown any evidence that such a section existed, and I know of no surviving material that establishes that it did.”
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)
“I cannot tell you what may or may not have happened during the 30-some hours immediately after my father’s death; I was not there. But unless substantive evidence emerges—and I do not regard stories from certain people who, in my opinion, are inventing them after the fact as evidence; people often want to sensationalize their part in a story, if indeed they even had a part—the story that 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after his death remains, to my mind, an actual conspiracy theory, not an established fact,” wrote Vivian.
Vivian concluded that she’s “certain” if 20 minutes had been cut from the film, she “definitely would have found out about it eventually,” adding, “Once the fog of agony had lifted, I involved myself very closely in protecting my father’s work and took that responsibility extremely seriously.”
Kubrick died of a heart attack at age 70 on March 7, 1999, just days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family and the stars of the film.
