In a conversation with Radar Online‘s Jebediah Reed, the legendary R. Lee Ermey — star of Texas Chainsaw Massscare: The Begining — says something surprising about Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut. “Stanley called me up all the time,” he says. “He’d call at three o’clock in the morning and say, “Oh, it’s 10 o’clock over here.” [Laughs] “Yeah, well, it’s three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well.

“He called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him — exactly the words he used.

What did he mean?, asks Reed. “[Kubrick] was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn’t real forceful. That’s why he didn’t appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit.”

Ermey is a colorful, impudent rightwing mouth-off type, but watch the Kubrick acolytes try and characterize him as a deranged nutter in response to this.