If anyone has seen the Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, you may have noticed the color blue everywhere. It’s in almost every window, peoples beds and sheets are blue, the dreams and day dreams are in a blue tint, everywhere there is this neon blue.
Anybody know why it was used, or has read somewhere as to who came up with it?
Did Kubrick want it that way?
I heard he hated the movie right before he died saying the critics are going to go to town on him over it.
I haven’t noticed this kind of color thing in his other films, maybe someone can enlighten me
Kubrick frequently uses color themes in his movie. IIRC, he uses blue whenever Cruise’s character is imagining his wife having sex and red whenever Cruise’s character is tempted by sex.
Another Doper, Cervaise I believe, once posted a very insightful review of the movie in which he pointed out there’s a lot of color symbolism there. The main three colors are blue, red and yellow (for rationality, passion/lust and inebriation if I remember correctly) also green (blue+yellow) stands for disease and death, you can see it in the walls of the dead man’s room and in the hallway of the prostitute’s apartment when the protagonist finds out she has AIDS; purple (red+blue) is the color of the prostitutes dress.
Kubrick put an obsessive compulsive amount of time into planning his movies, including sets and colors and shapes and so on. It took him years to get everything done before shooting began. I can imagine (yes, I imagine, no evidence) that this sort of dithering made him loathe himself because he could never get it just right and perfect. The kind of self doubt and loathing the protagonist had was probably transposed from the director.