Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Read online

  TOM CRUISE

  All the World’s a Stage

  IAIN JOHNSTONE

  2012 Revised Edition

  CHAPTER ONE

  By coincidence, I was appointed Film Critic of the London Sunday Times the same year (1983) as Tom Cruise came to prominence in ‘Risky Business’. His memorable, improvised Fruit of the Loom dance solo in that film (so known because he was clad in that brand of underpants), playing an invisible guitar to the strains of Bob Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ and posturing round his living room like a wrinkle-free Mick Jagger made a lasting impression, all the more so because it was featured in television commercials for the movie.

  I was not alone in thinking that here was a young actor (he was only 19 when he shot it) with a film star’s baton in his knapsack. And so it proved.

  During my dozen years as a critic, I observed and analysed this arrestingly handsome young man with his perfectly symmetrical features, searchlight blue eyes and killer smile. When he cropped up as Maverick, the all-American hero of ‘Top Gun’ (1986), I anticipated he was going to assume the mantle of Harrison Ford (some twenty years his senior) and rely on his undoubted charisma to play variations of himself, largely in major action movies.

  But I didn’t have long to wait to discover how wrong I was. Later the same year Cruise surfaced as a far from clean-cut pool hustler, Vince Lauria, in ‘The Color of Money’. The film was a sequel to ‘The Hustler’ and Paul Newman played an ageing Eddie Felsen no longer as fast as he had been thirty years ago. In fact it had been Newman who had suggested to the director, Martin Scorsese, that Tom was the man for the part and they didn’t see any other candidate. A great actor can smell out talent, and although he had turned Cruise down for his directing debut, ‘Harry and Son’, Newman filed his name away, knowing he could tackle a role not dissimilar to his own in the original. He was right: Cruise cleverly tainted his good looks with a less than attractive vanity; he managed to subtract fifty points from his IQ and embellished Vince with an uncomfortable nerviness, never still, like a fugitive on the run.

  Cruise seemed almost hell-bent on demonstrating his flair by playing opposite Hollywood legends from previous generations. He certainly matched Newman in ‘The Color of Money’ and more than matched Dustin Hoffman, the master character actor, whom he sought out to co-star with him in ‘Rain Man’ (1988). Once Hoffman had found the blank physiognomy and the right vocal note for his autistic savant, Raymond Babbitt, his task was to keep them up throughout the film. Cruise, on the other hand, as Raymond’s brother, Charlie, had more than a road journey to tackle. He has the character arc to follow: from an unfeeling, uncaring car salesman to someone who confronts his emotions for the first time in his life. Inevitably Hoffman got the Oscar.

  Cruise, anxious to prove that he could carry a film without the adornment of his gleaming good looks, was determined to get the part of the crippled Vietnam vet, Ron Kovic, in ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ (1989) – a man with straggly, thinning, hippy hair, an angry, unkempt moustache and an attitude powered by bitterness.

  Kovic, who had been peddling his own screenplay, couldn’t see how the smooth young actor could come anywhere near the real him. But Cruise, fully prepared, came to persuade him. When Kovic watched from a window as Cruise struggled alone out of his car into a wheelchair, the veteran needed no further persuasion.

  The still young actor (29) got a reminder that he had some way to go to match the old masters when he confronted the reigning king of the jungle, Jack Nicholson, (55) in the court martial movie, ‘A Few Good Men’ (1992), set in Guantanamo Bay, a location which later became less of a landmark as a citadel of military justice.

  Anne Rice, the author of ‘Interview with the Vampire’, followed in the footsteps of Ron Kovic by pronouncing that Tom Cruise was “wholly unsuitable” to play the lead in the film of her book. Was this going to become a national epidemic among authors, warning Hollywood that their brightest ascending star would spoil their book?

  Admittedly Cruise did not look like Rutger Hauer on whom Rice had based her main character, Lestat de Lioncourt - a tall, European, blond vampire.

  Cruise circumvented her criticism using a technique vouchsafed by Laurence Olivier to Dustin Hoffman during the filming of ‘Marathon Man’: “It is called acting.”

  The author’s criticism might better have been addressed to the curiously horror-free screenplay (by Anne Rice) or the loose direction of Neil Jordan.

  That year, 1994, I quit as a movie critic (not because of ‘Interview With a Vampire’ – with Tom and Brad Pitt in it inevitably it did reasonable business) but because John Cleese, the former Python and subsequent proprietor of Fawlty Towers, invited me to write a film with him that would use the same cast as his popular comedy, ‘A Fish Called Wanda’.

  ‘Fierce Creatures’ (1998) was based on two obsessions of John’s: his love of small furry creatures in zoos and his distaste for Rupert Murdoch of whom he pronounced: “If he could double the profit of a paper or television station by halving its quality, he would.”

  Unfortunately for those of us who were profit participants in the film, we were to find out that few people in the main cinema-going age group (15-24) had any interest in zoos or the iniquities of Rupert Murdoch, indeed it was found that not many had even heard of him.

  Hey, we all make mistakes and the film still gets a few chuckles when it has its annual outing on the telly.

  We shot it at Pinewood Studios, the nearest structure England has to Hollywood, in usually rain-washed Buckinghamshire, forty miles to the north east of London. It was there that I met Tom Cruise for the first time.

  Since Cleese was star-co-director-writer-producer-guru-shrink of the film, it was agreed that I would be remunerated (out of profits!) as a producer to help him. Thus on an airless July day in 1996 when the temperature ascended into the nineties and sun beat down without pity on the zoo set in the back lot, I huddled with the zoo-keepers in the only available shade – an artificial stairwell leading to the bleachers of the dolphinarium.

  The keepers were no humble extras – their number included Ronnie Corbett, Robert Lindsay, Carey Lowell (a Bond girl, later to marry Richard Gere), and John’s daughter, Cynthia. Morale was decidedly low. The cast seemed to feel that our director, who had acquitted himself with credit in television drama, was all at sea when it came to directing a Hollywood comedy. This was not a proposition I felt able to argue against so, in cowardice, I invented an appointment with Pat, our animal trainer, who lived with her small mammals in the attractively named Shed 13.

  It was a happy temple to enter in times of trouble with the meerkats and lemurs and kinkajous and tamarins and mongeese and aarvark and even the tapirs seemingly pleased to see you. And so, unfailingly, was Pat – a loving, rounded Mrs Doolittle who controlled her charges in a language unknown to man.

  I was not alone. There were a couple and children and babies with her.

  Pat greeted me warmly and introduced me. “This is Iain, John Cleese’s partner. Do you know Sarah and Tom?”

  Indeed I did – but not personally. But I had seen Sarah’s wedding to Prince Andrew on TV and Tom in the movies.

  We exchanged pleasantries.

  “How’s Fierce Creatures going?” he asked me.

  “Pretty disastrously,” I replied with total candour. “What about Mission Impossible?”

  “An absolute nightmare,” he laughed. (It is possible he may not have been completely joking; he, as producer, and his director, Brian De Palma, did have many ‘creative discussions’ as befits two top professionals. But their film did go on to earn half a billion dollars.)

  “Want to come and see our zoo?” I
inquired, inwardly congratulating myself on spotting a morale-raising opportunity. It had been a closed set, always an object of intrigue in the film world.

  “You bet,” said Fergie.

  Tom drove her, Pat, assorted children and me in one of those electric carts that scuttle around film studios down to where I pointed out our assorted keepers.

  They recognised the Duchess of York, her red mane not being the best disguise in the world. But not our chauffeur in his baseball cap and dark shades.

  All eyes turned to Fergie who attracts a slightly mixed reaction amongst the British public and so it was that suffocating summer’s morning.

  Little attention was paid to the man in black. Until he smiled – that smile. Cynthia Cleese rose to her feet as did the rest. I cannot claim that morale soared as high as the temperature but, at least, his arrival broke the ennui.

  Fergie has a natural gift with people and Tom, knowing he was with fellow actors, immediately became one of the boys – and girls. I warmed to him immensely.

  We moved on to the main unit where John was rehearsing with Michael Palin. People were pleased to take a break and chat and John, on discovering Tom and Nicole had rented a house near his in Holland Park in west London, made plans for a barbecue in his back garden. Sadly Fierce Creatures spiralled downwards into such an abyss of chaos that we never managed it. But, later that afternoon, Sarah sent a van with iced tea for the entire cast and crew from the St George’s hotel in Windsor.

  Tom, it transpired, was quite friendly with the younger royals. On another, much colder, day we got a call from Paula Wagner, Tom’s co-producer, saying they had just had lunch with Princess Diana at Pinewood and suggested she come over and visit us.

  She arrived, the epitome of cool, with short golden hair, tight designer jeans and an immaculately cut blue blazer. Certainly she was the most glamorous star in Pinewood that day. Prince William was with her, very much the schoolboy in mufti, neat parting, sports jacket and tie.

  John briefly explained the scene we were rehearsing – a major exterior by the studio lake with the entire cast and a fight for a gun – and also that we were behind schedule. He wasn’t over-keen on state visits. She insisted we carry on but as the actors tried they found it pretty hard to be unselfconscious before the national icon and their future king. Diana realised this and made a tactful retreat.

  Jamie Lee Curtis missed the princess’s abbreviated visit as she had had to go to the lavatory. She wrote to her explaining this and Diana replied in her neat handwriting, waxing sympathetic on the need for calls of nature.

  When Diana died, Steven Spielberg telephoned Tony Blair and asked if he and Tom Hanks and the Cruises could come to the funeral. He, too, knew Diana who came to many of his British premieres, even suggesting he present her with a toy E.T. at his finest hour in Leicester Square.

  Steven was also a friend of Blair. They would discuss plans to expand British studios while their children played soccer in the garden at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence.

  Although the television commentators said that the famous four Americans had flown in for the funeral they were, in fact, all working in London: Tom and Nicole on the interminable shoot of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and Tom and Steven on ‘Saving Private Ryan’.

  As the assorted mourners said goodbye to the coffin outside Westminster Abbey as it began its unforgettable flower strewn journey to Diana’s childhood home, Althorp, Sarah Ferguson invited the Americans to dinner that night at her and Prince Andrew’s home.

  Tom Hanks told me it was a surreal evening that ended with Chris De Burgh singing his songs at the piano and Fergie dancing alone in the giant, empty fireplace at Sunningdale with a drink in her hand.

  ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999) may well have had a more detrimental effect on Cruise’s marriage to Kidman than it did to his career which was gushing cash like an oil well with the success of his ‘Mission Impossible’ films which he both produced and starred in. The first two made more than a billion dollars. Plus he was receiving critical acclaim in portraying some repellent characters in ‘Jerry Maguire’ (1996) and ‘Magnolia’ (1999).

  I didn’t meet Cruise again until I was reintroduced to him by Steven Spielberg in the summer of 2001. Steven had always had his eye on the young actor, even sending him a letter eighteen year previously to say how much he liked his performance in ‘Risky Business’. Now they were working together for the first time in ‘Minority Report).

  My own first encounter with Steven had come when Tom was only twelve years old. I had been working in Washington DC producing the BBC coverage of the Watergate Hearings and decided to stay on. Fortunately I got a job as a visiting professor at Boston University. In May 1974 as I was preparing to leave the academic world and fly to Cannes for the Film Festival, I noticed in the Boston Globe that Peter Benchley’s best-seller ‘Jaws’ was being filmed on nearby Martha’s Vineyard. It seemed a good idea to do a location report on it which I could maybe later sell to the BBC’s Film ’75 (I had devised the programme Film ’71 which has been going for more than 40 years.)

  Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the producers, welcomed the publicity, so I hired a crew and spent a couple of enjoyable days filming on the island.

  Steven became and remained a friend. We were not exactly bosom buddies but enjoyed each other’s company and occasionally ate together. In fact he is the only person I know who claimed he could taste the washing-up liquid on his fork when he was eating an omelette – his senses are unnaturally acute.

  Thus, over the years, I have made television programmes that emanated from his films. These were not ‘making ofs’ but stand-alone documentaries such as the history of Saturday morning serials for ‘Indiana Jones’, ‘Spielberg and the Dinosaurs’ for ‘Jurassic Park’, his relationship with Kubrick in ‘Steven and Stanley’ for ‘A.I.’ or a profile of the real con man, Frank Abagnale, and the FBI cop who caught him to go with Catch Me if You Can (2003). More than a dozen of them if you count the TV interviews.

  In ‘Minority Report’ (2002) Tom Cruise played Chief John Anderton. The film is set fifty years in the future and, through accurate mediums called ‘precogs’, crime can be predicted before it is committed. Steven did a lot of research into the period to work out what 2050 might be like, including a high powered week-end think-tank at the Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica where futurologists, ranging from scientists to philosophers, tried to provide him with a snap-shot of that year.

  My documentary, ‘Policing the Future’, dealt with that, but also looked into state-of-the art police computers – the cutting edge company is based in San Jose – and discovered that 9/11 might have been avoided had all law enforcement agencies pooled their knowledge.

  More of that later. We also talked to Tom but that was more about his character than the overview. However I went to stay with the film unit on location in a wonderfully Olde Worlde resort hotel in Virginia – a state that seems still to regard itself as part of the British Empire.

  Steven had been invited to go to Japan to the premiere of ‘A.I.’ but, as he was filming, the mountain (Fuji) had to come to Mohammed. A vast satellite dish, the sort that track space-shots, was put in place by our nineteenth century clapboard abode.

  I watched in the colonial living room as hundreds of journalists filled a theatre in central Tokyo. A couple of television cameras were set up to cover Steven. He came down after dinner, took his place to great applause (Japanese journalists would appear to be less reserved than their American and British counterparts) and conducted a press conference.

  About twenty minutes in, the doors of our living room were thrown open and Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, an Irish actor in the current film, burst in.

  It was not planned. They were pretty high: Colin, I suspect, on the local brew and Tom, I suspect, on his own adrenalin.

  They leant over Steven’s shoulders and, even before Tom spoke, a gasp went through the Tokyo theatre. Before he even said “Hello, Japan�
��, the reporters were on their feet, applauding. It was evident that he was popular in that country.

  Tom promised that he would come over and visit them when ‘Minority Report’ opened and the applause grew to a crescendo. Many, I think, knew he was soon to film ‘The Last Samurai’.