Christ — 6 years ago(June 07, 2019 06:19 AM)

This is one of the longest film shoots ever. It took 3 years to complete. It holds the record for longest continuous film shoots, which took 15 months. Those are the Tom Cruise New York scenes. What takes place in an hour on film, took over 15 months in real time.
But there's NO reason this should have taken that long. CGI didn't play a role here, as in Avatar, that requires a lot of post-production work to perfect.
Nor did it have a story boarded extravagant action sequence using practical effects, like the truck and Steel Mill chase in Terminator II, which would take a lot of time to shoot, due to constructing the set, doing several takes to perfect, and then edit.
This was a low budget drama, where the vast majority of the film was Cruise walking around 2 blocks of New York City.
The only scenes shot outside of NY were the orgy scenes. That was filmed at a castle in the UK. I think Tom Cruise was the only actor to travel on that trip, hence why all the masked orgy attenders were played by British actors.
The orgy scene is about 15 minutes of the film, but given travel time, renovating the interior for the film, getting all the actors together, it should not have not taken 2 months tops. I'd say 3 weeks, but I'll give it 2 months.
The rest was filmed on a NYC street and long scenes inside of shops and houses. You can do that in…3 months.
To put in perspective, Halloween only took 20 days to film.
The Blair Witch Project took 8 days.
The Dark Knight Rises, the same length as this Eyes Wide Shut, only took 6 months, and had considerably a lot more to do: way more locations to move around, action set pieces to construct, costumes to make, etc.
Just filming the opening plane sequence in TDKR should take just as long to film and edit as the entire Eyes Wide Shut movie.
There's no reason this movie should have taken over 5 months to complete.