Tom Cruise is known to be a student of film, the rare movie star who likes to speak at length about camera lenses and the crafts behind filmmaking. But one secret to his success? Getting directors to read to him aloud so he can better understand their visions.
He says he’s done this with multiple directors, including Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the filmmaker behind Cruise’s upcoming prestige play Digger.
“Alejandro took several days during which he was just reading the script to me and I’m listening to everything that’s in his mind, so that I can understand that, and then I know how to contribute to it, and bring that collaboration together,” Cruise said at a recent trailer event launch for Digger on the Warner Bros. lot.
During the event, he said multiple times that Digger is the culmination of his 40-year career, and it seems that will be the selling point in the coming months as promotion ramps up in preparation for release and an eventual awards campaign.
Indeed, the project is both a departure from his recent history and a return to form for the actor, who has spent the past decade almost exclusively in the world of franchise filmmaking. His $1.49 billion box office grossing Top Gun: Maverick “saved Hollywood’s ass” (to quote Spielberg), while his Mission: Impossible pushed the boundaries of action filmmaking and generated countless headlines for Cruise’s commitment to doing his own stunts.
Digger unveiled its first trailer to the world Monday, with Cruise almost unrecognizable under makeup and prosthetics. It’s the type of film Warner Bros. hopes will remind the world that in addition to being one of the last remaining movie stars, Cruis is also an Oscar-level performer who has been nominated for acting three times (1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1996’s Jerry Maguire and 2000’s Magnolia, in addition to a nom for producing Top Gun: Maverick).
A few days before the trailer hit online, Cruise assembled a group of journalists to the Warner Bros. lot for a moderated Q&A and meet and greet (complete with a giant shovel that he scaled for a photo-op).
Cruise revealed that he was an instant fan of Iñárritu’s 2000 film Amores perros, inviting people to his home to screen it, even though the two would not meet for a few years later.
Iñárritu was not available to join Cruise for the Warners event, but he sent a video from London, where he is finishing Digger. He said that after 2015’s The Revenant (for which he won the second of his back-to-back directing Oscars), he had the idea for Digger, and spent years developing the movie, before approaching Cruise around seven years ago.
It’s Cruise’s first character actor style role since he wore prosthetics to play studio exec Les Grossman in the comedy Tropic Thunder.
“The transformation he went through was astonishing. ‘Alejandro, it took me 40 years to become this character,’ he told me once. And I think we both know what it means to carry an entire career into a single moment like this. We both knew that throughout our journeys, we had never done anything even close to this,” said the filmmaker in the video sent to the event.
Cruise re-iterated that the film is unlike anything that he’s made before.
“I have never had something that could challenge me in this way and neither has Alejandro when we went in, ever. And when you see this film, it’s totally original,” said Cruise.
Audiences will find out for themselves on Oct. 2.
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