Little Children director Todd Field is calling actor R Lee Ermey out over his "slanderous" comments over Stanley Kubrick's last film.

"Stanley called me about two weeks before he died," Ermey told Radar Online. "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."

Field played Nick Nightingale in the film.

"The polite thing would to say No comment. But the truth is that... Let's put it this way, you've never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director," Philip revealed in an interview with slashfilm.com. "Stanley was absolutely thrilled with the film. He was still working on the film when he died. And he probably died because he finally relaxed. It was one of the happiest weekends of his life, right before he died, after he had shown the first cut to Terry, Tom and Nicole. He would have kept working on it, like he did on all of his films. But I know that from people around him personally, my partner who was his assistant for thirty years."

Kubrick was Todd Field's mentor and friend.

Field even claims that Kubrick told him to stay away from the Texas Chainsaw actor: "And I thought about R. Lee Ermey for In the Bedroom. And I talked to Stanley a lot about that film, and all I can say is Stanley was adamant that I shouldn't work with him for all kinds of reasons that I won't get into because there is no reason to do that to anyone, even if they are saying slanderous things that I know are completely untrue."