Eyes Wide Shut Moving Mirror

[GianniRanzuglia]

Hi All

In Stanley Kubrick’s, Eyes Wide Shut, there’s a scene where Nicole Kidman’s character is staring at a mirror before she opens the mirror and retrieves a small bag of weed hidden inside the compartment. While she does this, the mirror swings open and we should see the camera but we don’t!

How did Stanley and his team hide the camera from the moving reflection, CGI wasn’t available back then, are there double mirrors involved?

I’ve attached a video of the scene for reference. Note that I’m not referring to the use of spiral composition that is mentioned in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWcKo2IyLU

Thank you all!

Topic

[Mike]

Skyfall scene.

This set always intrigues me. You certainly stop eating your popcorn when watching this scene, you are not sure at first which one is JB but hoping he is the victor. Very impressive imo and wonder how it was conceived, you must have played around with different background scenes so why did you choose the jelly fish sequence and what were alternatives.

[Shorsh]

Es obvio que la cámara está debajo del eje de visión. Por eso no se refleja en el espejo.

[dmullenasc]

The camera is shifted to the right, just outside of the right edge of the mirror to be out of the reflection. It swings open and close fast enough to not see the camera, which is looking through a camera port hole cut into the set, so it’s a black square that passes through the mirror.

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 4 days ago by dmullenasc.

[Roger Deakins]

I would like to point out that one shot in 2001, the scene in which they discover the obelisks, involved the compositing of some 28 separate elements onto a single piece of negative. Imagine passing that same negative through an optical printer 28 times to overlay these elements in perfect registration. And you don’t think Kubrick would have loved to use CGI?

[Author]

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