Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh originally played Victor Ziegler and Marion Nathanson. After Keitel and Leigh had shot some scenes, Keitel was dismissed from the production. His scenes needed to be reshot, but Leigh was not available to reshoot them (due to a scheduling conflict with eXistenZ (1999)). Consequently, Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson were brought in to play the respective roles.
Melissa Joan Hart auditioned for a role in this movie.
According to writer Frederic Raphael, the final form of Bill's family name (Harford, as opposed to Scheuer in the original story) was inspired by a debate about Bill's character. Raphael felt Bill should be Jewish as in the original, but 'Kubrick' insisted Bill and Alice be "vanilla" Americans, without any details that would arouse any presumptions. Kubrick said that Bill should be a bit like Harrison Ford - hence the name Harford.
In order for the film to be given an R rating in America, some scenes contain computer-generated people in the foreground obscuring some of the more explicit sexual action.
When Bill Harford returns to Soho, a sign painted on the side of a building prominently features the name BOWMAN. David Bowman is a character in director Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
One of the patients who Tom Cruise cancels is called Kaminsky, the name of one of the hibernating crew that HAL kills in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The mask that Bill Harford wears with his costume is modeled from the face of Ryan O'Neal, a reference to Barry Lyndon (1975).
The password "fidelio" (from the Latin root "fidelis" meaning "faithful") refers to Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio". In the opera, Fidelio is a woman who disguises herself as a man to save her lover.
In the film, Todd Field plays a character who dropped out of medical school ten years earlier. Ten years before this film was released, Todd Field played a character who dropped out of medical school in Gross Anatomy (1989).
This film contains clever in-joke references to almost all of Stanley Kubrick's films, including his first feature Fear and Desire (1953). At one point we see a scene from Blume in Love (1973) on a TV set. "Blume" was directed by Paul Mazursky, who made his acting debut in "Fear and Desire".
A real estate agent's sign that appears briefly in shot at the end of a street carries the name Vitali. The newspaper article that Bill reads announcing the death of Mandy mentions that she was a model and that she had been involved with a designer named Leon Vitali. Leon Vitali is one of Kubrick's longest-serving colleagues and also plays Red Cloak in "Eyes Wide Shut".
Director Stanley Kubrick died just four days after presenting Warner Bros. with what was reported to be a final cut of the film, after a legendary long shoot.
A VHS copy of the movie Rain Man (1988) is seen in Alice and Bill's bedroom on top of their entertainment stand during their marijuana-enhanced argument.
Numerous recurring shots of Christmas trees with colored lights (in almost every room/apartment) and wedding rings.
The tremendous hype around the release of this film resulted in several rumors about the plot. The most widely circulated was the mistaken rumor that in the film, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman played married psychiatrists having affairs with their patients.
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