Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  It cost approximately $50 million but flopped at the cinema, The reviews were more fun than the movie. 'Battlefield Earth should be shown only at maximum security prisons when a prisoner is tossed in solitary for bad behaviour,' was the advice of one critic, while another described the experience as 'like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time'.

  It is questionable whether it is wise to encounter some of the works of L. Ron even in print. Forrest Ackerman, his literary agent, recalled that Hubbard told him how he had a near-fatal experience on an operating table during World War II. According to Ackerman, Hubbard claimed to have wafted out of his body in spirit form and encountered a smorgasbord of information on everything that ever puzzled the mind of man. When did the world begin? Was there a God? He then re-entered his body, jumped off the operating table and wrote a work called ‘Excalibur or The Quiet Sword’ (it contained many concepts and ideas that later informed Scientology). But the book was universally rejected by publishers in New York - wisely since, according to Ron, the people who read it either went insane or committed suicide. Giving one example he said he was sitting in a publisher's office waiting for a reader to give an opinion but unfortunately never got one, as the reader walked into the room, tossed the manuscript on the desk and jumped out of a high window. Whether this was the effect of the contents or a comment on the prose the man didn't live to tell.

  So Tom Cruise prudently turned to the less lethal works of Philip K. Dick for his own foray into sci-fi. Ridley Scott, his director on ‘Legend’, had made his name with ‘Blade Runner’, based on Dick's ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, and Arnold Schwarzenegger had had a popular success with ‘Total Recall’, based on the same author's ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’. Now Cruise could see himself as the protagonist in ‘Minority Report’, a police experiment set in Washington DC in 2050 in which 'precogs' could foresee crime before it was committed and potential criminals were imprisoned for what they were about to do.

  It was to an extent paradoxical that Cruise should be drawn to Dick, whose prodigal output was largely due to drug experimentation, something Scientologists abhorred. It led to the author's premature death at the age of fifty-three, but not before he had squeezed twenty-five books, nearly a hundred short stories and five wives into his abbreviated life.

  'He was unconnected to this world,' says Jo Cohen, who did the screenplay for Tom. 'He never felt he was part of the same world as the rest of us. And he was paranoid about what was real and what was not real.'

  Dick's own explanation was: 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.'

  At any given time Cruise has a number of story ideas and pitches being developed into script form, and this one came out of the oven mouth-wateringly cooked. The rights to the material reposed with Twentieth Century-Fox, who would distribute the film. Steven Spielberg had admired Cruise in ‘Risky Business’ and watched his ascent through the ranks. When the two men were at the top of their respective professions they planned to work together.

  'We had two abortive attempts,' Spielberg recalls, 'but I guess they were not his cup of tea. And he brought a couple of things to me but they didn't work out.'

  Tom's timing on ‘Minority Report’ was more auspicious. Neither man needed to add to his accumulation of fame or fortune; both wanted to try something different.

  'Right now in my life I'm at a period where I'm experimenting,' Spielberg avowed. 'I want to challenge myself and, in turn, challenge the audience. I'm trying to find myself in my mid-fifties.'

  Spielberg and Cruise wanted to anchor the action in a world fifty years into the future which they would make as credible as foreseeably possible. So they assembled a high-powered think-tank at the Shutters Hotel before the film reached final draft and was designed. What they wanted from the experts was a predicted picture of 'future reality' as opposed to 'science fiction'. Sixteen high-powered experts from multiple disciplines were flown in, including Jaron Lanier, the man who invented Virtual Reality; Stewart Brand, who created ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ - a forerunner of the Internet; Shaun Jones, the biomedical genius who runs the US reconnaissance satellites; and Neil Gershenfeld, the expert on quantum computing and nanotechnology who runs MIT's Atoms Laboratory.

  But not all their suggestions, as Cruise recalled, were that helpful, especially the thought that Washington DC might be under water in 2054 due to global warming. The film-makers needed a city of skyscrapers with Mag-Lev cars on roller coasters so that Tom could make daring leaps from one to another.

  The Mag-Lev, part roadster, part elevator, was actually designed by Lexus. Since it was concluded that advertising will play a far more intrusive part in the future, with the ability to scan your eye from billboards and then call out your name offering a product it is known you might like, the movie provided a field day for product placement, the leading beneficiaries being American Express, Pepsi, and Reebok.

  Cruise was in awe of Spielberg. “I saw Jaws when I was just thirteen and I leapt out of my seat when that head appeared in the hole in the bottom of the boat. I dragged my family to see’ E.T.’ He is an amazing artist and he has given so many moments of complete joy. He is also an amazing person. Everyone wants to work with him and I have relished and cherished every moment I have done so.”

  Despite the eighteen-year age gap, the two men became very close friends - certainly up to the sofa-jumping moment on Oprah when Spielberg was reportedly not best pleased that the promotion of ‘War of the Worlds’ was all but forgotten amidst the promotion of Katie. They had much in common: both were all-powerful emperors of Hollywood with vast fortunes and no imperative to work. But both lived for the moment when the camera turned. More than that, they were both possessors of a Peter Pan gene, with a wide-eyed sense of wonderment and almost total absence of cynicism - all the more remarkable in Steven, then in his late of fifties.

  Spielberg could see in Cruise the same intensity that had made Harrison Ford focal in ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’. And possibly a little more.

  “Tom comes to the set word perfect and knowing precisely what he has to do,” said Spielberg. “But then he will respond to any good ideas - say four or five - that you might have on the day. And, if you don't have any new ideas, he will challenge you to come up with some because you can be sure he has got about twenty of them himself.”

  Tom acknowledged: “Film is a director's medium. Steven comes up with brilliant ideas, things I have never seen before. But it is important that we are both at the same stage.”

  Those on the set were greatly impressed by the series of waving arm movements Tom evolved to follow the pictorial imagery presented to him by the Precogs. Spielberg likened them to John Williams conducting a huge orchestra.

  Cruise delights in the danger of the new. ”I like going on a journey as an actor. I want to go to a place my character has never been before. I like challenging myself.”

  Certainly no Cruise character had ever encountered the nightmare that faced John Anderton, Head of Precrime, in ‘Minority Report’. On the evidence of the Precog Cassandras, he is used to sentencing potential criminals to the Hall of Containment where they are kept in a comatose condition in cylinders for the length of their sentence. But suddenly Anderton, the gamekeeper, becomes a poacher accused of a murder that is going to take place in thirty-six hours. He turns into a fugitive, on the run from the very people he has trained, with the near-impossible task of proving his innocence.

  “I thought that was such a great idea,” says Tom. “I was reading the other day on the Internet that there's this scientist who developed a programme that could predict human behaviour. I think they're going to test it in airports. Basically it's to spot terrorists. It's all done on computer. I'd like a system in place that would prevent crime, prevent terrorism, certainly, but when you look at the ramifications of that and the freedoms that you'll have to give up, that is something people should be aware of.”

/>   Spielberg has a more pragmatic view of the downside of too rapid an advance in technology. “Technology can be our best friend and technology can be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story. It interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.”

  Unlike ‘A.l.’, ‘Minority Report’ was an overwhelming success: 92 per cent of its American reviews were raves and it made more than $350 million worldwide at the box office alone, before doubling that in ancillary sales.

  Not unsurprisingly, both men vowed to collaborate again. But it happened sooner than they expected. Spielberg, like Tom, keeps a number of scripts on the boil and goes ahead on gut instinct. “If I were to think it through logically, I doubt if I would ever decide on my next film.”

  Something in his gut told him that the script for ‘Indiana Jones 4’ was not there yet. At the same time Tom was not satisfied with the script for his next project – ‘Mission: Impossible III’. But Spielberg had been developing an updated version of H. G. Wells's 1897 novel ‘The War of the Worlds’, which told of a Martian invasion of Earth. And David Koepp, co-writer of ‘Mission: Impossible’ for Tom as well as ‘Jurassic Park’ for Spielberg, had delivered a draft that was such a powerful read that it demanded to be shot. So Tom was happy to postpone ‘Mission: Impossible III’and ‘War of the Worlds’ went into pre-production in August 2004.

  Tom had not been born when Orson Welles made his famous radio broadcast of ‘The War of the Worlds’ in October 1938, which caused people to rush into the streets in panic, but was only too well acquainted with it. “The first thing I heard about ‘The War of the Worlds’ was a repeat of the radio play. I actually much preferred radio to television and, as a child when my mother was asleep, I would sneak downstairs and turn on the radio and listen to plays. I read the book a couple of years ago, actually before we decided to make it. And I knew its history: basically how it was written because of British colonialism. And how Orson Welles in 1938 was concerned that America and the world were being pulled into this European war.”

  When Wells wrote his novel the British Empire comprised a fifth of the globe, and the author was incandescent with rage about the wholesale extermination of the natives in Tasmania. He wanted to teach the British that no nation had the right to dominate the world, and that there were stronger forces in outer space.

  The Orson Welles broadcast had such impact because the Martian landings were presented as a series of location reports and most people missed the first ten minutes of the programme, where it was emphasised that this was a play, because they were listening to the end of the popular programme with the dummy Charlie McCarthy, operated by Edgar Bergen (father of Candice), on the other channel. Fear of war was already in the airwaves: German Jews were being deported and the pogrom known as Kristallnacht was only days away.

  It would be more than three years before Germany declared war on the United States. But on 20 March 2003 the United States had invaded Iraq. Was Spielberg's film a statement about this? “I didn't make this movie out of anger,” he told me. “I didn't make this movie to attack an administration. I have no issues about colonialism because it doesn't exist any more in that way. Although in America we do have imperialism [the policy of extending a country's power by military force], have had for five years. There is much more unilateralism happening under the Republican administration today than has ever happened in my experience before.”

  Tom was less political in his outlook and, informed by his Scientology beliefs, more humanitarian. “For ever it has been man killing man for territory, for beliefs, for not believing. Man trying to dominate man. But man's common enemy is drug addiction, illiteracy, immorality. These things are rotting our societies at the core. I have travelled around a lot and every culture has that. That is the real war of the worlds today.” On the subject of aliens he was curiously unsure, considering his religion claims that Earth was originally populated by them. “I think it's quite arrogant to think we're the only living species in all of the universes. As far as alien abduction is concerned, nothing like that has ever happened to me. I tend to believe what I've experienced, and I don't know for sure.”

  Even Spielberg, creator of two of the greatest alien films ever – ‘E.T.’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ - was wavering in his beliefs. “Do I believe in alien visitation? I certainly believe that out in the universe there are millions of intelligent civilisations thriving. But today I am less of a believer that we have been visited than I was twenty-five years ago. I don't know if Area 51 was a place that was used to dissect a spaceship and transfer the occupants to Wright Patterson Air Force Field in Dayton, Ohio as the story goes. I'd certainly like to believe it's true, but I know a couple of Presidents who have not been clued in as to the existence of any hard evidence that we've been visited.”

  Millions of Americans believe they have been temporarily abducted by aliens who, they frequently say on their return to Earth, molested them sexually. The screenwriter David Koepp isn't so sure. “If aliens are so intelligent, they're probably not going be interested in coming here to do anal probes,” he told me, with a smile. “I just think that that's so overstated. It's such a human-centric point of view that intelligent life elsewhere would be interested in our asses.”

  Koepp had transported the story from nineteenth-century England to modern New Jersey, so that American - and international - audiences could better empathise with the plight of the protagonist, Ray Ferrier. Cruise came up with the crucial element that made the story more penetratingly poignant.

  “I wanted to play a father in the film. This is a very intimate story about a family. There is this estranged, deadbeat dad but he has to become the friend of his weekend children. It's a film that represents what parents feel and talk about: how far you're going to go for your child.”

  In a paradoxical way Spielberg wanted to have his cake and eat it with regard to the casting of Cruise. He needed a star name to sell what was a very expensive movie; he also needed a good actor who would make the horror of a world gone mad credible and terrifying; and in both respects few came better than Tom. At the same time he wanted the audience to empathise with an everyman figure so that they, like him, would be caught up in the madness. “I'm trying my best to de-Cruise Tom,” he confessed to me. “I want him to be a real blue collar worker, a real guy from Bayonne, New Jersey, who works a cargo container crane at the port. And I want him to blend in, to become like a lot of people so that he represents our own fears and our own resourcefulness to survive.”

  That he achieved this aim was, in large part, due to a female. It was a fact, wholly unreported in the press, that Tom fell in love on ‘War of the Worlds’. When they were not shooting, he and she would hug and cuddle and laugh. When they walked on to the set it was, inevitably, hand-in-hand. He filled an iPod with a thousand songs and gave it to her. She, in turn, knitted him a scarf. Her name was Dakota Fanning, and she was ten years old. She played his daughter in the film.

  Spielberg had spotted her talent when she was only eight. In his television series about alien abductions, ‘Taken’, she not only played the final product of the alien-human melange but narrated the series as well.

  Her faith in Tom was touching. In the film, giant Tripods overturn the ferry in which they are trying to escape. Cruise had to jump fourteen feet down into the studio tank for the close-ups and he persuaded Dakota to do it with him. “I had to take her to the bottom of the pool and then we had to come up with her holding onto my neck. I actually had weights that I had to hold onto to keep me down. We had to hold our breath for a long time and after the first take I said to her, 'If there's anything you don't feel comfortable about, tell me,’” and she said, ‘Maybe you could come up a little faster, Tom.’ He roared with laughter at the thought of such a polite request.

  Later, the couple are attacked not by aliens but by fe
llow human refugees, thugs with steel bars who want to hijack their truck. First the stunt arranger, Vic Armstrong, choreographed the incident, making it frighteningly real. Then Spielberg moved in and earmarked his shots. But Tom, sensing the fear the child might experience, made it his duty to see there was no risk that an accident might harm Dakota and insisted that the scene could be aborted at any moment.