Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Woo could not have been more different that Brian De Palma. He planned out every scene in models, playing with cars and guns and people like a child. On the set he would sometimes express his satisfaction of a take of a dialogue scene but Tom would countermand him and ask for it be done again. De Palma, on the other hand, would simply walk away when he knew he had it in the can.

  Woo’s command of English was, at best, hesitant and this encouraged Cruise as producer to take more control. He had also grown exponentially in confidence since he entered movies two decades previously. He fired the production designer and brought in Tom Sanders from ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ The director of photography was another Australian victim. Tom didn’t like the look Andrew Lesnie was giving the picture and had him fired in favour of Jeffrey Kimball who had shot ‘Top Gun’. Lesnie had subsequent reason to be grateful to him. He was now free to do ‘Lord of the Rings’ for which he won the Oscar as Best Cinematographer.

  The love affair with Woo, however, was uninterrupted. Woo brings a connoisseur’s camera eye to the city of Sydney and Computer Generated Imagery had advanced to the point that Ethan’s mask for Sean, a pay back trick at the end of the movie, is not Latex but a green screen rendering of Sean’s real face which Ethan is able to tear off.

  Not that undiluted praise should be attributed to Woo. As Paula Wagner says: “Tom has creative input in everything. I couldn’t do it without him. Making a movie is like being in a war zone. You’re constantly problem solving. Equipment can break down, the weather will go bad. But you have to stay on schedule because that’s how you stay on budget.”

  After shooting each day and night, Tom returned to his Sydney home where Nicole and the children lived. There his life was strictly private. His chief of staff, Michael Doven – the ‘Dovenator’ as Tom calls him when he is in a good mood - had been to the Australian Pinkerton Agency and hand-picked a selection of bodyguards for twenty-four hour protection.

  In post-production Cruise was more hands-on than ever. In ‘Mission Impossible’ he ordered a remix of the score because he wanted to hear more woodwind. In ‘Mission Impossible: 11’ he and composer Hans Zimmer went for a simple guitar score rather than enormous orchestration. It both enhanced the thud of the bullets and the emotional moments between Tom and Thandie.

  Does Ethan destroy the Chimera, save the girl and annihilate the baddies? The answer is as predictable as the reactions of the press and the public. ‘A preadolescent action orgy, ‘if not the worst movie of the year, the most insulting and infuriating,’ were some of the former although Cruise did have his fans, But A. O. Scott in The New York Times clocked the genre: ‘If Mr. Cruise peeled off his face and turned out to have been Chow Yon Fat all along, the movie might have been saved.’

  It was saved – it grossed $525m world-wide leaving the two Mission Impossible movies just $19m short of a billion dollar gross. As pointed out earlier. the gross may be relevant to the star’s percentage but nowhere near the studio’s take. However a survey in 2003 was to show that the studios were to take almost five times as much revenue from home entertainment – television, VHS and DVDs - as from cinemas.

  Why should there be such a wide divide between critics and bright film writers and directors? The answer lies in part in where they are coming from. The best American adventure films owe a lot to the philosophy of Joseph Campbell. His book, ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (1949) is a study of the myth of the hero. He used James Joyce’s word ‘Monomyth’ to explain that not only did most heroic tales have a common pattern, but the hero’s journey could be a metaphor for the culture as well. Hitchcock put it more succinctly: “A film is its own country.” It has its own rules and practises, necessary for compressing time. The art of the action movie is to bring the hero up against a number of insuperable barriers – and overcome them. At its worst this can be ‘with one bound Jack was free; at its best, much more ingenious. While some critics can accept absurd scenes such as the hero holding the rifle fire of a posse of enemies with a single (inaccurate) revolver, they cannot accept that no-one ever puts on a latex mask (which would take more than the film’s running time.) In ‘Mission: Impossible’ country such things are givens. The film maker has entered into a conspiracy with the audience that, while in that country, they will suspend their disbelief.

  The reductio ad absurdum of literal and pedantic criticism is well exemplified by a colleague who disliked Kevin Costner’s ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ because, in reality, Robin could not have ridden from Hastings to Sherwood Forest in a single day as he does in the movie. There are a couple of problems in this approach: 1) In Costner country he can; 2) Robin Hood did not exist. Neither, for that matter, did Ethan Hunt. Nor did James Bond.

  Bond had a licence to kill. With the ‘Mission: Impossible’ series Tom Cruise had created, in the words of Lord Thompson of Fleet when he won the franchise for Scottish Television, ‘a licence to print money.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  While Tom was flexing his muscles as the all-action hero of the first ‘Mission: Impossible’, Nicole was flexing her mind as she approached the inscrutable role of Isabel Archer in Henry James’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ directed by Jane Campion.

  The combination of Campion and Kidman was irresistible on paper. Campion had always been a favourite of the Director-General of the Cannes Film Festival, Giles Jacob, who brought her to the attention of the international critical community with boldly experimental films like ‘Sweetie’ in which the eponymous heroine, a disturbed young woman, apes the behaviour of one of Jonathan Swift’s houyhnhnms as she climbs trees and excretes on people. Jacob’s faith in Campion was rewarded in 1993 with her all-conquering film, ‘The Piano’ which won the Palme d’Or. Kidman, too, post ‘Batman’ and ‘To Die For’ was at the top of her game.

  Both women took their collaboration extremely seriously. Kidman was ordered by her director to treat the role as a vocation not a part and banned her from frivolous twentieth century pleasures while she was in the corseted straight-jacket of a nineteenth century gentle woman. Nicole readily agreed to these restrictions. “I felt quite connected to the character. The Portrait of a Lady is about a woman who makes the wrong choices in life. She has all these opportunities and then chooses the wrong man. It’s about her wanting to explore the dark side as far as she can go. I’ve certainly been there and done that.” She revealed. “It’s the most personal film that I’ve made” – something she was wont to say of several of her roles.

  Sadly her sacrifices were unappreciated by the audience who did not find the film a twentieth century pleasure, less because of her than because of an unfathomable performance by John Malkovich as a con-artist and the fact that Campion appeared to have lost the plot – at least, Henry James’s plot. In the next decade she was never to recapture the flourish of her early work. ‘The Portrait of a Lady’s’ most enduring contribution to cinema was to enhance the career of Viggo Mortensen, later to find fame and fortune as Aragorn in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ the trilogy made by Campion’s fellow-countryman, Peter Jackson.

  Nicole needed a rest after her Campion ordeal and Cruise had a little loose change from the success of the first Mission Impossible film, so in the spring of 1996 the couple decided to rent a sumptuous yacht and take the children and their entourage down the coast of Italy. Their marriage was going through the best of times although, unknown to them, it had run half its course. Earlier in the year they had flown to Sydney for the wedding of Nicole’s sister, Antonia – a television presenter. Tom got on well with the Kidman family although her father specialised in psychology which ran counter to the precepts of Scientology. But Tom was less doctrinaire in those days and Nicole tended to honour Scientology rather in the breach than the observance. Besides, he put his private jet at the disposal of the wedding party.

  They had a caring, beneficial partnership: she would help him with his movies (like finding Thandie Newton) and he would rehearse her at home for ‘The Portrait of a Lady
’, playing the John Malkovich part – rather better than Malkovich one would imagine. In many ways they were mirror images of each other; literary licence would have them as identical twins, like Sebastian and Viola in ‘Twelth Night.’ They were both beautiful, talented, rich, hungrily ambitious, enjoyed being film stars and the world-wide fame of being one of the most famous couples of the decade.

  It was a relaxing cruise, interrupted only by Franco Zefferelli (who had discovered Tom for ‘Endless Love’) inviting himself on board for drinks when they passed his villa – he was dissuaded – and Tom saving the lives of five people off the island of Capri. He spotted that their yacht was on fire and managed to get them on board his just as it sank.

  1996 was a good year for Tom saving people. At the London premiere of ‘Mission Impossible’ he lifted two small children, who were about to be crushed, out of the crowd in Leicester Square and, before that on the rainy night of March 4th he was driving through Santa Monica when he witnessed a woman being knocked down by a hit-and-run driver on Wilshire Boulevard. He went to her aid and followed the ambulance to UCLA Medical Center, staying with her as she underwent tests that revealed bruised ribs and a broken leg. She was an aspiring actress, a twenty-three year old Brazilian, Heloisa Vinhas, who was working tables and had no money to pay her $7000 bill. So Tom took care of it. At the time she was too traumatised to realise who her Sir Galahad was but later found out. “Of course I know who he is,” she said. “He’s famous everywhere, even in the North Pole. Tom is a very nice man – the best.”

  Pat Kingsley, Tom’s then publicist, observed: “If ever I was to get into trouble, I hope Tom Cruise is nearby” – which he frequently was since she shadowed him from about four feet at every premiere and public occasion.

  Soon reality had to give way to fantasy and it was back to work. Tom had already committed to the former Rolling Stone journalist, Cameron Crowe, to play a sports agent, ‘Jerry Maguire’. The thought of mingling with real football players – just as he had in films past with fighter pilots and racing car drivers – was more irresistible to him than the money.

  Nicole, on the other hand, glad to be rid of her Edwardian corset, plunged into Tom territory as the Acting Head of the White House Nuclear Smuggling Group - not a widely known post – in ‘The Peacemaker’.

  For some years producers had been trying to come up with the right big screen role that would turn George Clooney, aka Dr. Doug Ross of ‘ER’, into a movie star. Early attempts had misfired. ‘One Fine Day’, a romance with Michelle Pfeiffer had been hampered by the lacklustre direction of Michael Hoffman. The actor had been ill-advised to don the cape for ‘Batman and Robin’, by some measure the worst of the Warners’ series that attracted reviews that might have sent other mortals scampering back into the emergency room, viz ‘George Clooney is the big zero of the film, and should go down in history as the George Lazenby of the series’ and ‘It is as bad as you think.’

  Nothing daunted Steven Spielberg and his company, Dreamworks, had faith in the leading man of their internationally successful television series, and offered him the chance to play an action hero without the rubber-wear. Steven entrusted the producing to his main lieutenant, Walter Parkes, and Branko Lustig, who had co-produced ‘Schindler’s List,’ and gave Mimi Leder, one of the ground-breaking directors of ‘ER’, her first chance to direct a feature. The story was based on a book –‘One Point Safe’ by the Irish investigative reporter Andrew Cockburn (father of Olivia Wilde – Alex in ‘The O.C.’) and his wife, Leslie that revealed the fact that, despite the end of the Cold War, Russia had never itemized its nuclear weapons and there was always a danger that some fanatic might pinch one.

  This happens. And Clooney, as a military agent, and Kidman, as the aforementioned scientist, are sent to stop him. After the traditional ‘meet-cute’ – the scriptwriting device by which the couple start out mistrustful of each other while we the audience know ahead of them that they will end up as an item (Jane Austen pioneered this in ‘Pride and Prejudice’) - Leder, and her writer Michael Schiffer, essay the challenging task of marrying complex details of the realpolitik of the splintered chaos of the post-Communist East with a red-blooded action movie. Commendable though this is, it builds obstacles into the flow of the film. If the audience, having temporarily suspended their disbelief, has to deal with rational thoughts about the real world – would an atomic bomb in the UN truly help the cause of Bosnia? – it then takes artful legerdemain to lure them back into the world of the movie. There, Clooney and Kidman hurtle via unpronounceable towns from Emamshahr to Azerbaijan through gunfire and flame, on foot by helicopter and plane until it is Mission Accomplished.

  It is a well made, complex yet predictable film with Clooney moving through the movie with pace and grace and Kidman pertly alert, a little older than she was as a surgeon in ‘Days of Thunder’ but still very young for the head of the White House Nuclear Smuggling Group, Acting or not.

  Why then did it gross $41m in the United States box-office to ‘Mission: Impossible’s $181m – less than a quarter of the take. There is little doubt, especially today, that if Clooney and Cruise were to go head-to-head in a charisma competition who would be the winner. The two men know each other, indeed Tom flew over with the children to Bratislava in Slovakia to reunite the children with Nicole – and play some basketball with Clooney. “They wouldn’t let me play,” Kidman recalls stroppily. But what Tom didn’t do was to impart to Clooney what really makes an action hero. It is insufficient for him to be in danger; he must be danger. There has to be a continual suspense that he himself might explode in anger or madness or both, such is the nerve-wracking intensity that never leaves him.

  Gorgeous George, on occasion, gives the impression that he has just stepped out of his trailer before the scene begins or that he has a first class return ticket to JFK safely in his inside pocket. Tortured Tom is living in a two-hour world of strife and evil and constant jeopardy. He has no other place to go. The fact that ‘The Peacemaker’ had its origins in well-researched journalism may have hampered the film’s chance of being a more unfettered popular thriller. Paradoxically, the strength of Tom Cruise’s next film was due largely to the fact that it was based in well-researched journalism.

  Cameron Crowe is one of a rare breed in Hollywood – a journalist turned film maker. It seems strange that when one of the most innovative and original periods of post-war film making was driven by the French new Wave in the 1950s and 60s that no-one attempted to replicate the phenomenon in America or England. Film writers from Cahiers du Cinema turned their talents from comment to creation. Men like Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol laid down a body of work that was vital and provocative. Films like ‘Ma Nuit Chez Maude’, ‘Claire’s Knee’, ‘Fahrenheit 451’, ‘Jules et Jim’ and ‘Weekend’ didn’t remain in the cinema when you left; they remained in your head. “Film is truth twenty-four times a second,” Godard somewhat pretentiously declared – but his work and that and his colleagues certainly stimulated the mind and provoked discussion.

  Cameron Crowe grew up in San Diego, California, a precocious, talented and sickly child – he had nephritis, a form of kidney disease. At fifteen he was writing for local papers and later contributing to Rolling Stone. Because he looked so young he was later able to enrol, undercover, in high school at the age of twenty-two and find out what life really was like there in the early eighties. The resulting book and movie, ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982), painted a true portrait of the prevalent teenage lifestyle centring round malls and fuelled by sex, drugs and rock-and roll, every bit as eye-opening as Truffaut’s film about disillusioned Parisian teenagers twenty-three years previously, ‘400 Blows’ – and much funnier.

  Truffaut and Jean Renoir were prominent among the film makers whom Crowe studied as he was preparing to direct ‘Jerry Maguire’. The film had begun as an attempt to portray contemporary American man – “that faceless guy who puts on a suit a
nd tie every day.” After a year of research – visiting unsuspecting businessmen in their offices and making notes of their behavioural patterns - a friend pointed out to Crowe a picture in the Los Angeles Times. It was of two stern-looking men in loud shirts and sunglasses. One was a sports agent and, the taller, his client. So Crowe – never a jock himself at school due to his illness - switched to an examination of the business side of sport where the big deals ran in tandem with the flourishing of talent, and top players were sold like slaves of yore.

  “I thought the world of sports agents was something that hadn’t been written about,” says Crowe. “Where can you get a more highly concentrated pursuit of pure money? I wondered: what if love and honour attempted to flourish in that world? And so I embarked on little wild journey of research. I watched a lot of football and travelled with the teams. I just clanged around the NFL for a few years and picked up conversations, went to people’s homes and saw what their world was like.”