Tom Cruise has spoken for the first time about how he suggested to Stanley Kubrick that his then wife Nicole Kidman star opposite him in 1999s Eyes Wide Shut “because obviously she’s a great actress.”
The actor makes the rare public acknowledgement of Kidman’s thespian abilities in the May issue of Sight and Sound, the film magazine published by the British Film Institute.
Cruise will be honoured by the BFI on Monday with the awarding of a distinguished BFI Fellowship.
He joins the ranks of other BFI Fellows including giants of the calibre of David Lean, Bette Davis, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Thelma Schoonmaker, Derek Jarman, Martin Scorsese, Satyajit Ray, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, Spike Lee and Christopher Nolan.
The actor-impresario will also discuss his career In Conversation at the BFI cinema complex on London’s Southbank on Sunday evening. Cruise activity is at full speed ahead of the world premiere screening on Wednesday,May 14, at the Cannes Film Festival of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the latest,and likely final, instalment of Paramount’s Mission: Impossible franchise that began three decades ago with director Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible released in 1996.
The brief declaration about Kidman comes as no surprise to this reporter. When Kidman starred at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden in the 1998 production of The Blue Room, an adaptation by David Hare of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, directed by Sam Mendes, Cruise watched the first preview through a small window of a production booth on the side of the stage. I recall him being in complete awe after watching her performance.
In Sight and Sound, Cruise describes his collaboration with Kubrick.
“It was a great experience. I was very excited to do it. I knew Stanley’s movies very well and I was introduced to him through Sydney Pollack. So Stanley called Sydney ’cause he wanted me to make a movie. He sent me a fax.
I flew out to his house and I landed in his backyard. I read the script the day before and we spent the day talking about it. I knew all of his films. I spoke to Scorsese about him and Sydney Pollack… so I knew what he did and how he worked. Then it was basically he and I getting to know each other. And when we were doing that, I suggested Nicole play the role [of Alice]. Because obviously she’s a great actress.
Cruise continues: “I knew it was going to be a long shoot. He was like, ‘No, no, no. We’ll finish in three or four months.’ And I said, ‘Stanley, look, I’m here for you. Whatever it’s going to take we’re going to do this…’ I thought the film was very interesting, and I wanted to have that experience. When I go to make a movie, I do a lot of detailed investigation and a lot of time with the people before I commit so that I understand what they need and want and they understand me and how we can work together and really create something very special.
“It was a very unique experience – not a large crew. We arrived in the summer and basically we just started testing… the script was just an idea. We [were] constantly rewriting the scenes and shooting the scenes and then reshooting the scenes to really find the tone of the film.”
On working with Val Kilmer on Top Gun:
In the wide-ranging interview with Isabel Stevens, Cruise also talks movingly about working on the Top Gun movies with Val Kilmer who died on April 1.
“I felt so grateful that he decided to make the film. We did a lot to get him in the movie. Originally, he just didn’t want to make the movie, ‘I don’t want to be a supporting, I want to star in films.’ I was calling his agent, and Tony Scott was hunting him down and meeting in an elevator with Val, and he was like, ‘Please, Val, please.’
“You just see what a great actor, charismatic guy he was. And in that scene, what I love about what he did and how he played it, he just knew that tone to hit. He had to play it so you wanted these guys to be friends in the end. Do you know what I’m saying? And I remember those scenes like they were yesterday, acting with him, where he did the bite thing. You know when you’re acting with somebody and you just see they’re just on fire. It’s exhilarating. I love when the scene just goes to a different place. If you look at Top Gun, I think he’s in the movie maybe ten minutes. That’s the impact of an artist like that.
“And to come back all those years later, and it was amazing being on set for Top Gun: Maverick [Joseph Kosinski, 2022] because it was like time had not passed. We were laughing and it was joyous. And then we started acting and it’s just, you see it… he became Iceman. The power that this guy has, even not saying anything, to become that character. You see how even the sniff that he gave. He was Iceman. And you saw the dynamic between these friends. It was very special, to say the least, for me personally. I just tell people… you take Iceman from the first film and you look at it here, that whole journey, he became Iceman. And he didn’t even have to speak. That’s what he’s able to do. Beautiful, really beautiful. A gift that he had and that he shared with all of us.”
On acting alongside Jack Nicholson and the famous courtroom scene in A Few Good Men.
“He was finding his character. And you could see every movement slowed. He became more and more centred as we were going through it. You could tell from the way he’s sitting. He’s actually holding his hat quite tautly to generate power. He understands that lens. He’s a wordsmith, Nicholson. He’s like a crooner that knows how to carve up a monologue and knows how to carve up a scene. He can turn a phrase in such a unique way. And it’s not by chance. He knows what he’s doing. He has command over his body and his voice and he knows the camera.
“Great actors make it look easy. They make it look effortless. When you look at Brando at the beginning of The Godfather. He knows his light. He knows the lens. When they handed him that cat. That cat was only in one take and that was the scene. That was it! Coppola handed him that cat and he did the scene.
“It’s not just by chance. You work towards lightning in a bottle. Doing that scene was very much like that. It was music. Jack was there to play. I was there to play. When I’m acting, that’s my home. Acting is every moment new. Every take new. Even though you’ve got all these notes and you want to hit these certain beats. But it’s in a new unit of time and you have to let it fly. And when you’re working with such a great actor like that, you’re just bouncing back and forth and just really discovering it together. You see it, it’s on screen, it’s just there.”
The May issue of Sight and Sound is on sale next week.
The post Breaking Baz: In Wide-Ranging Interview With Sight & Sound Magazine, Tom Cruise Praises Nicole Kidman,Pays Tribute To Val Kilmer & Lauds Movie Greats Jack Nicholson & Marlon Brando appeared first on Deadline.
