Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Cruise certainly endows Lestat with his own charisma in the movie – and more. “As an actor it’s very challenging because you really have to root this character in emotional reality so you’re not playing attitudes. I always thought it would be wonderful to show Lestat’s sense of humour because he’s such a bright character. You’ve lived that long, you’ve read every book, you can play any instrument you wish.”

  With Tom and Brad and vampires it came as little surprise that the film had an opening week-end of $36m but word of mouth was not strong enough to make its US box office sky high, although $105m was pretty respectable with a little more than that earned world-wide. The critics were unusually divided but there was more praise for the scenery and the music than the plot.

  Anne Rice changed her mind about Tom. She took out two page advertisements in The New York Times and Vanity Fair praising the filmmakers. "I was honored and stunned to discover how faithful this film was to the spirit, content, and the ambience of the novel, Interview With The Vampire, and of the script for it which I wrote."

  This did seem a little bit like patting herself on the back. But she graciously changed her opinion of Cruise. “I thought Tom captured Lestat perfectly. He got the incredible strength of Lestat. He got the sense of humour of Lestat. He got the boldness of Lestat who is a strident powerful personality.”

  The only discordant note was a confirmation that Brad Pitt and Cruise had not become best buddies. Pitt puts it in elliptical language. “Tom and I walk in different directions. He’s North Pole and I’m South. I always thought there was this underlying competition that got in the way of any real conversation. It wasn’t nasty by any means, not at all. But it was just there and it bugged me a bit.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sherry Lansing became the first woman to break the male stranglehold on the Hollywood studio system. In 1992 she became President of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group with the power to decide which films the sixty-two year old studio would make. She was to hold the post for the next twelve years. Producers on the lot said Lansing was most susceptible to heart-warming movies such as ‘Forrest Gump’. Although she did make an astute investment in Fox’s ‘Titanic,’ her policy veered towards the risk-averse with a predilection for remakes such as ‘The Stepford Wives’, ‘Alfie’ and ‘The Italian Job’ none of which did very good business.

  However her presidency did coincide with Cruise-Wagner moving into the old Howard Hughes offices on the lot with a team of ten people to go through the innumerable scripts Cruise was sent every week, and to work on new creative ideas.

  According to Wagner, it was Tom who called her up one day in 1994. “I’ve got this great idea for a movie – ‘Mission: Impossible’” He would, most probably, have known, the rights were owned by Paramount but nobody had seen the wide-screen potential in this small-screen TV show.

  The television series ‘Mission: Impossible’ had been co-produced by Paramount and Lucille Ball’s company, Desilu, and in its seven years on CBS had been a huge earner for the studio.

  What Paramount knew it needed for Tom was the American equivalent of a James Bond and this series had it in spades, not in the character of the boss of the IMF but in his daredevil action man, Rollin Hand. IMF, incidentally, stood not for International Monetary Fund but Impossible Mission Force.

  ‘Mission: Impossible’ had been the brainchild of Yale graduate, Bruce Geller who, having had a couple of flops with his Broadway musicals, went west to Hollywood for the less glamorous but more financially rewarding work of writing for television series such as ‘Have Gun Will Travel,’ ‘The Rifleman’ with Chuck Connors and ‘Rawhide’ with Clint Eastwood.

  He knew that to the armchair viewer familiarity meant compatibility. People liked to see the same team each week and even relished the same set up. Thus James Phelps was offered a new job every Sunday evening by listening to a tape that began “Good evening, Mr. Phelps”, your mission, should you decide to accept it”, and then outlines the mission, ending with the caveat “As always, should any of your IMF force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good night, Jim.” The tape would then self-destruct in five seconds, going up in the proverbial puff of smoke.

  This was the masterstroke of Geller’s creation: the IMF were a bunch of loose cannons, with no back up from the cavalry if things went wrong. Did Jim ever turn down a mission? Not in seven years he didn’t. He always went upstairs to select the team by pulling photos out of his cabinet. They were nearly always the same: Willy Armstrong – strong and silent; Barney Collier – technological boffin; Cinnamon Carter – intelligent cheesecake and the aforementioned Rollin Hand (played by Martin Landau who was replaced after four years by Leonard Nimoy aka Mr. Spock because Landau wanted too much money). The photos got the episode off to a speedy start and also enabled Jim to show the viewers any guest stars who might be on board and, frequently, some of the villains. IMF members liked to put on latex masks to disguise themselves as villains so it helped to know what they were going to look like.

  Missions included capturing nuclear warheads, retrieving a wire recording which has vital information on it and unfixing rigged voting machines in the country of Valeria. Such places were a source of pleasure to MI aficionados. The Cold War was still at its most trenchant in 1966 with Leonid Brezhnev breathing fire from the Kremlin and CBS did not want to upset the Eastern Bloc. So a whole slew of new nations joined the global map – Valeria, Santa Costa, Veyska – and, even better, new languages. Thus delicious phrases such ‘Belten Attachen’ (do up your seatbelts), ‘Fumin Prohib’ (no smoking) and ‘Neurlogkal Institut’ were the ligua franca of those Europeans who opposed the IMF.

  There was a writers’ strike in 1988 and ABC Television crudely tried to circumvent it by recycling old MI scripts. It was not a success. Bruce Geller was not around to witness this; he flew his Cessna into Buena Vista Canyon near Santa Barbara, California in May 1978, killing both himself and his wife.

  Tom Cruise was only four when the series was first transmitted but became acquainted with it in his teenage years since it was eternally rerun on cable channels. He was a great fan.

  He was thirty when he started preparing his film of MI but he was mature beyond his years having been tutored by la crème de la crème of directors, writers and actors.

  “I enjoy producing pictures like this,” he said. “I like big pictures – it’s a real challenge. The trick of these movies is to keep the narrative going and reveal character along the narrative.”

  He was wise not to hire a director he had already worked with. Tom was now the boss and that relationship might be forgotten in the heat of the shoot. Brian de Palma, although he had had a dip with ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, knew how to create screen tension in ‘Dressed to Kill’ and had already successfully brought a TV series to the big screen with ‘The Untouchables’.

  Also he was a writer himself having worked with David Koepp on the underrated Al Pacino movie, ‘Carlito’s Way’. Tom knew this project would only work with a clever script and spent millions on writers, first bringing in Steve Zaillian who had adapted ‘Schindler’s List’ to work on the story with De Palma, then David Koepp who, besides ‘Carlito’s Way’ had adapted ‘Jurassic Park’, a fearsome action picture. Koepp is probably one of the best action writers at work in Hollywood today and he relished Cruise’s challenge. “He’s incredibly persistent and focused and he’ll drive you completely insane because he keeps coming at it and at it and at it. But then you realize because he’s gone at it, you’re going to go at it. We wanted to make a plot that was complex. We wanted a movie you’d have to bring your brain to. The character trait you notice first and that leaves the longest and clearest impression is his directness. He doesn’t dodge things.”

  Then came Robert Towne who had actually started out writing TV series such as ‘The Man From Uncle’. Fellow writers regard his Oscar-winning script for ‘Chinatown’ as near perfection – his private ey
e goes through a densely layered plot like a corkscrew and those in the business know him as one of the best script polishers in Hollywood – often uncredited, as in Brando’s death scene in ‘The Godfather’. He had written ‘Days of Thunder’ with Tom and adapted ‘The Firm’ and the two men, despite being nearly thirty years apart, had found a creative rapport with Towne’s love of unravelling complexity matched by Cruise’s instinct for the dramatic.

  Cruise knew precisely what he needed in the script for ‘Mission: Impossible’. “It’s just what I want when I go to see a movie like this.”

  Despite the bevy of writers, much of the film was faithful to the television series. It had Lalo Schifrin’s memorable theme tune. Schifrin had actually written a different theme tune for the first episode of the series but Bruce Geller didn’t care for it and replaced it with some music Schifrin had written for a chase sequence. It had James Phelps - in his first class British Airways seat - being handed a cassette by a stewardess which gave him his orders delivered in the time honoured runic of the original. The tape even went up in a puff of smoke, something that perhaps should have been a matter of concern to the cabin crew. The film begins with a crook-nosed man trying to get some vital information out of a murderer. He does so and rewards him with a glass of poison. Crook-nose rips off his latex mask and, by golly, it’s Tom Cruise. Such masks make frequent appearances on many characters throughout the movie, although one never sees them putting one on. However the state of the art has improved to the extent of seeing them take them off in one fell swoop. On television they had to do it in strips with many cutaway shots.

  The Mission, or McGuffin as Hitchcock referred to it, being the raison d’etre for the action but really an excuse for an adventure, is to trap a traitor who is set up to steal a top secret ‘NOC list’ of deep cover American agents. Things go terribly wrong as we move from Kiev to Prague to CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, to London and, by train, under the English Channel. But they go terribly right for us with a cornucopia of thrills and spills, double and treble crosses, traitors who are in fact good guys and vice versa.

  As Robert Towne said: “What is involved is writing a story to fit the action.” And if the audience don’t follow it the first time, they can always pay to see it again.

  Action sequences here included a lavish embassy ball with an IMF man in a runaway lift, an exploding fish tank, the lowering of Cruise on an eighty foot wire into a CIA vault, Tom doing his ‘Outsiders’ somersault on a speeding train and then hooking an enemy helicopter to it. When the train enters a tunnel things end with quite a bang. Tom wanted no stand-ins or stunt man and stood in front of a green screen on the back lot at Pinewood, buffeted by the air flowing from wind machines.

  Cruise is legendary for doing many of his own stunts but, according to De Palma, was less than keen in doing the scene where vast aquarium in a restaurant explodes cascading tons of water on the diners. “I’m only an actor, Brian,’ the director maintains he said. But he was persuaded to do so although De Palma adds: “I swear he could have drowned.” This seems improbable. Although the restaurant was established in Prague, the actual stunt was done under controlled conditions in Pinewood Studios. It takes quite a few minutes to drown. More likely that he would have been battered by the flood and the fake film glass. In fact he did hurt his foot.

  The hardest thing about being lowered into the computer room was that Cruise had to starfish out his limbs and not dare lower them for fear of setting off an alarm. It wasn’t done by editing and different angles. The first assistant director, Chris Soldo, remembers: “If you look at the scene uncut it is amazing. He was just under such control with his body.”

  Cruise confessed: “It was just a joy to work with the actors and to create roles for them.”

  With himself as the newly named Ethan Hunt – ‘hunt’ is obvious and ‘Ethan’ maybe from the John Wayne character in ‘The Searchers’ – there was no real need for any other top star names, especially as there was no romance. Jon Voight had played the Ron Kovic character in Jane Fonda’s ‘Coming Home’ but since then his career had tailed off a bit. Cruise revived it by making him Jim Phelps. He also cast a couple of Brits – Kristin Scott Thomas and Vanessa Redgrave. Sadly the former gets killed in the first act as her performance was much more persuasive than the uncomfortable Redgrave. Similarly of the two French players, Emmanuelle Beart was curiously colourless (a love scene between her and Tom was shot but subsequently removed from the movie) whereas Jean Reno, the marvellous Spanish-Moroccan character actor with the hooded eyes who made his breakthrough in Luc Besson’s ‘Nikita’ enchanted the screen with his every move. Ving Rhames (Ving is short for Irving), the African-American graduate of New York’s High School of Performing Arts and well-toned star of ‘Pulp Fiction’ was to become Ethan’s main man as Luther and remain with him through the next two Mission Impossible films.

  Although De Palma had his preferred Director of Photography and assistant directors, Tom re-engaged almost the whole stunt crew from ‘Interview with the Vampire’ under Lee Sherward: Keith Campbell, Gary and Greg Powell, Dinny Powell, Chrissy Monk, Jamie Edgell, Dean Forster, Keith Campbell, Graeme Crowther and Sarah Franzl. This was going to be a big stunt film and he wanted a top stunt team who would do almost anything. There has always been an argument as to whether there should be an Oscar for stunts but the countervailing argument is a) stunt men would undoubtedly kill themselves in an attempt to outperform each other and b) if a stunt is any good the audience shouldn’t notice that the actor has been replaced by a stunt man. There are so many stunt people shot by the second unit on a Bond film, where no actors did their own stunts, that the main unit sometimes refer to themselves as the ‘dialogue close-up unit.’

  But Tom did several stunts, not just the aquatic restaurant scene and the Peter Pan descent in Langley, but on ‘Vampire’ as well and gained great respect from the British stunt crew. With his need for speed and passion for everything from sky to scuba diving, he felt most relaxed hanging out with them between takes.

  The exterior location shoot in Prague did not go as smoothly as they hoped. “Prague ripped us off. They’re still getting used to democracy,” said Tom. “But we made some mistakes with our negotiations and that we have to take responsibility for.”

  In fact he had a meeting with Czechoslovakia’s legendary president, Vaclav Havel, the poet and playwright who had been imprisoned by the Russians for his dissidence but led his country when it found its freedom in 1993. After pleasantries had been exchanged – Havel had been a friend of Milos Foreman as a young man – it was suggested to him he could perhaps stop the overcharging. He effectively passed the buck, suggesting they have a word with the prime minister, but the mayor of Prague and various avaricious entrepreneurs were the continuing recipients of big bucks from Paramount.

  Robert Towne was impressed by the thirty-two-year-old producer’s tenacity. “Tom was really under the gun with this picture. It was the kind that could have gone over a hundred million dollars just by batting your eyelashes the wrong way. We were working in countries where the governments and civil service were barely under control, with a script that wasn’t finished and a lot of high-tech shit to shoot. It was a lot to handle.”

  Cruise and De Palma (twenty-two years his senior) found an effective modus operandi and kept any creative collisions behind closed doors and away from the set. “Of course you have arguments,” said Cruise. “How can you make a movie and not have arguments?” But De Palma was emphatic in what he wanted and it was his desire to end the movie with a bang – the exploding helicopter – that prevailed over Towne’s more cerebral conclusion. This seemed out of kilter with the style of the ice cool IMF and alienated many critics. Not the public though; they loved it.

  The shoot at Pinewood Studios in a country where the civil service is under control proved much smoother with, as mentioned in the first chapter, a visit from the future King of England and his mum.

  With a film of this order a studio
may throw as much money as a film’s production budget into its marketing. This is a science. Paramount had set May 22 1996 as an opening date for ‘Mission: Impossible’ to go for the blockbuster summer holiday audiences. Top Gun had opened on May 16 exactly ten years earlier. But for all of 1996 the studio had been what is known as ‘tracking’ the film, i.e. identifying how aware people were of it and how interested they were. Thus it was able to see where it needed to increase the marketing spend, maybe in television, maybe in young peoples’ magazines. Some research companies are bold enough to make box-office predictions on the tracking but these are somewhat speculative save, surprisingly, in Japan.

  First though, the critics. The early reviews read like a death warrant