In a scene from last summer's blockbuster Collateral, Tom Cruise, in fast pursuit of Jamie Foxx, throws a chair through some glass, jumps through the hole and proceeds to trip over the chair. If you've seen the movie, you know how painful the fall looked. No one would suspect that Hollywood's most universally-recognized envoy would perform the stunt himself, and that's probably the truth. But this wasn't planned.
"Yes, that hurt," Cruise says over a telephone conference call. "Going through the window, that just happened," he explains, "But the way the chair hit, that fall just occurred and we just kept going."
Cruise, who will soon turn 43, has had his share of injuries over the years, given the dangerous roles he frequently takes on. Come June 29, however, he'll be starring in a different sort of action film: Steven Spielberg's take on the classic H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds. The film relies more heavily on digital and CGI-animated sequences than any other film by the technologically conservative Spielberg; so while Cruise and his co-stars ran, jumped and fled from death to their heart's content, much of it was before a blue screen.
With the release of the stiffly-acted Revenge of the Sith nearly a month ago, much has been discussed on the detrimental effects of being forced to act compellingly sans compelling surroundings. Critics attacked George Lucas for sacrificing the central human drama element for cutting-edge digital animation, saying that if the actors came off as weak, it was because they were speaking to the floor. Needless to say, there's already considerable fear that the effects-heavy Worlds will succumb to the same problem.
Cruise is quick to note, however, that he was able to find a grounding in his digital surroundings. "What Steven did," he explains, "was... a pre-visualization, what we call pre-viz for short, where he designed a lot of the effects on computer - the staging." He continues, saying how Spielberg "would then go to the set and alter it, but it gave me an idea of what I was looking at, what we were seeing."
In Worlds, Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a working-class guy from New Jersey whose life has more or less fallen into shambles. Estranged from his family and unsure of what direction to take his future, his town is suddenly invaded by fleets of aliens who, of course, want to destroy Earth. The extraordinary circumstance more or less eliminates the detritus of his failures; his sole mission becomes to protect his children to the best of his ability.
In other words, War of the Worlds is about the most predictable summer blockbuster imaginable, at least on paper. But what attracted Cruise to the project, besides working with Spielberg again, rests in the way it emphasizes the humanity of its characters. Unlike the Wells novel, the film "is told from a subjective point of view," which Cruise believes more adeptly relates our experiences to the fantastical nature of the story - and also makes it scarier. "It is a film that is going to be terrifying," he candidly warns. "It is going to be quite frightening."
Worlds, if nothing else, is sure to bloat Cruise's flimsy reputation as a mega-action star. Over the years he certainly has appeared in his share of big-budget, blow-'em-up action flicks (Mission Impossible, Top Gun), but he also has tackled many arty, character-driven films (Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut). Nevertheless, the culture-at-large commonly associates him with the first type.
But Cruise has built thick walls around himself and comfortably repels the mischaracterizations laid upon him. "What is important to me is that I make the movies I want to make," he explains. "What people say about me doesn't matter. It really doesn't. I get to make all the movies that I want to make and I am incredibly proud of that"
