Spielberg and Cruise — their names are synonymous with commercial success. Put them together for a summer blockbuster?
Look out box office.
That’s simple moneybags thinking. The more intriguing notion is that their careers are intersecting just when each has been making the most challenging films of his career.
“Minority Report” is ” part of the experiment,” Steven Spielberg said while in Chicago earlier this month. “It’s part of the experiment of how to change the form, how to tell the story in a different way, how to know what’s safe and what’s dangerous and risk the danger as opposed to the safer choices.”
“I think audiences like that,” Tom Cruise interjected, sitting at Spielberg’s side in a hotel conference room.
Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” last summer boldly alienated viewers who thought they would see a sweet, futuristic “Pinocchio” fable, not a difficult, haunting tale of a robot boy abandoned by his mother (and Creator).
Cruise has played one tormented soul after another since turning on the charm in “Jerry Maguire” (1996). His characters in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” and Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky” were built to be experienced, not loved, and even his one calculated action film, John Woo’s flawed “Mission: Impossible 2,” was more glum than joyful.
Now comes “Minority Report,” which opens Friday. Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, it is Spielberg’s second straight hallucinogenic science-fiction film and stars Cruise as John Anderton, the head of the Justice Department’s Pre-Crime unit in Washington, D.C., circa 2054.
The movie envisions that murder in the nation’s capital has been eliminated through the use of Pre-Cogs, a trio of shaven-headed psychics who float in a pool and are able to predict killings before they occur. All Anderton and his team must do is nab the would-be perpetrators after viewing the Pre-Cogs’ murder visions on a large screen. But when Anderton appears as the perpetrator in one of these visions, he runs.
If you’re looking for light, turn-off-your-mind summer escapism, you’ve come to the wrong place.
“I like pushing the envelope,” Spielberg said. “It helps to have a lot of money and to have lots of success, because I’m not as afraid as I used to be. I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid of getting bad reviews. I’m not afraid of being criticized as I used to be.
“And I think my films are showing that I’m not really afraid anymore, and I’d rather meet a challenge and fail than do `Harry Potter 3′ and make a lot of money and have children adore my work but feel that I got no kick from that Champagne.”
A father-son dynamic
Although “Minority Report” marks the first time they’ve worked together, Spielberg and Cruise project a familiar, almost father-son dynamic. When the 55-year-old director entered the room, he gave Cruise’s shoulders a paternal squeeze. Earlier, Cruise playfully hugged Spielberg from behind as the director was wrapping up an interview.
Wearing a long-sleeve gray T-shirt, blue jeans, braces on his teeth and a few day’s stubble, the floppy-haired Cruise still looked positively youthful for someone who will turn 40 on July 3. He was ultra-friendly and ultra-alert, with a firm handshake and a laugh that went off like a car alarm.
Spielberg, with his worn brown leather coat, graying beard and wire-rim glasses, gave off a wise, laid-back vibe, as if talking about movies were the most relaxing thing in the world.
The two said they had been trying to work together for years and finally connected on “Minority Report,” which lingered in development limbo until Scott Frank (“Out of Sight”) was able to deliver a script that connected the mystery’s dots to Spielberg’s satisfaction. (Jon Cohen, who shares the screenwriting credit, wrote an earlier version when “Speed” director Jan De Bont had the project.)
“Tom is the only human being that could have played John Anderton,” Spielberg said. “There’s nobody else I could have cast or would have cast. To see a strong man crumble takes a lot of ability and a lot of skill, more than seeing a weak man fall apart. And Tom is a very strong man.”
The director said he was particularly wowed by one of Cruise’s most recent performances.
“Tom really opened my eyes in `Magnolia,'” Spielberg said. “That scene with the dying father was the greatest moment I’ve ever seen Tom do. It was a sustained scene. It wasn’t short. It was a climactic moment, and made me think, I want that. Give me that.”
“And I’m glad you did,” Cruise said, laughing.
Anderton’s dark side stems from the disappearance and presumed death of his young son and the subsequent collapse of his marriage. While off duty, he buys illegal drugs and watches holographic home movies of his now-destroyed family.
“I’m always haunted by trying to get the family back together,” Spielberg said. ” `E.T.’ was about that. `Close Encounters’ was about that. So many of my movies are about loss of family and regaining family. I don’t know why I’m so compelled to tell those stories. I’m sure it stems from my own divorce — not just my own divorce, but my parents were divorced.”
A magical excitement
Cruise said he associated Spielberg with the word “magical” and was excited to be involved in the filmmaker’s creative process.
“The ideas come so naturally and flow so easily out of his mind,” Cruise said, noting that he was constantly surprised by Spielberg’s ability to wing it on such a complex, high-tech, high-budget production. In one memorable image, Cruise and Amy Morton (one of the Pre-Cogs) clutch each other, his firm profile pointing one way, her apprehensive stare directed the opposite way with her chin on his shoulder.
“That frame, it says so much about the story,” Cruise said. “It says so much about the characters. It says so much about where they are and where we are as an audience. That’s just something that he found right there in the day. He was just like, `Oh, look at this. This is cool.’ And there it is.”
“The discovery process is what makes it most exciting,” Spielberg said. “It’s a little less exciting sitting in a drafting room drawing storyboards before you’ve been on the set at the actual location. When I get to the location, I throw my storyboards out because I think of new ideas.”
This isn’t the first time Spielberg has eschewed storyboards, those preliminary sketches of how a scene should look, on a movie in which every image seems carefully planned. He didn’t use any on “Saving Private Ryan.”
“`Saving Private Ryan’ was an experimental film,” Spielberg said. “I thought we should have storyboarded it, but I didn’t because I wanted to see what I would come up with experiencing what it was like to shoot the whole film in continuity.”
“Yeah, I came out to the set,” Cruise said, turning to Spielberg, “and I remember I was there the day before you did the Steadycam shot. You said, `Oh, I came up with this great thing today,’ and that’s the Steadycam shot where the tanks come in.”
Summer was considered a risky time to release “Saving Private Ryan,” which proved a massive success. The same could be said of such a moody cautionary tale as “Minority Report,” but neither director nor star expressed concern.
“You don’t know at all,” Spielberg said. “You know when you make a sequel to a huge hit movie that you’re going to at least have a big opening weekend. You know you’re going have some success. But every single movie really is an experiment.”
“Yeah,” Cruise said. “`Raiders [of the Lost Ark],’ did you really know that audiences would want to see something like that?”
“They didn’t want to see it,” Spielberg responded. “We opened to $8.6 million on the opening weekend.”
“I saw that opening weekend in Valley Forge, Penn., when I was making `Taps,'” Cruise said. “I’ll never forget it.”
“Yeah, you and about 3 1/2 million other people, and that was all,” Spielberg said. ” `Raiders’ to this day has the best legs, excepting `E.T.,’ of any movie I’ve ever directed. That movie went on to do $250 million in the first year starting at a level of $8.6 million. That was insane.
Jumping to conclusions
“George [Lucas, the movie’s producer] and I thought we’d failed. We were in Hawaii together when the grosses came in, and George said, `Well, that’s all she wrote.’ He said, `I hope you had fun because I had fun.’ I said, `Yeah, I had fun, but I sure wish more people had gone to see our movie.’ And we mourned the failure of `Raiders’ in the first weekend because of the opening. And in the second weekend it did like $8.5 [million] and the third weekend it did like $8.4 [million], and it was just a miracle.”
Spielberg had the opposite kind of experience on “A.I.,” which Kubrick had been developing before his death. “The public abandoned the movie the second weekend,” Spielberg said. “It was the biggest dropoff I’ve ever had on a movie I’ve directed. It fell 65 percent the second weekend.
“When people didn’t get `A.I.,’ that’s when I knew I had really made a Stanley Kubrick film. That’s when I knew when I was successful, when they didn’t get it, because Stanley often joked about how they never really got `[Dr.] Strangelove’ or `Clockwork [Orange].'”
“Yeah, Stanley would have loved it,” Cruise said.
Cruise said his career choices also seem more logical in retrospect. “`Born on the 4th of July,’ people thought I was out of my mind,” he said. “And `Rain Man’ also.”
Cruise’s longevity as a box-office king is impressive, but Spielberg’s may be even more so given how few directors, especially of his generation, have managed to work at peak powers for more than a decade.
“My theory is, sometimes directors don’t really want to continue,” Spielberg said.
“Their reflexive energy compels them to work even when their hearts are not into it, and then their choices aren’t as careful as to what they do next, and they take films that they didn’t accept 10 years before, and their films start to flag because in their hearts they’ve really retired.
“I’ve had a lot of directors tell me that. I won’t tell you who said this, but a very famous director said, `I should have retired 20 years ago.’ “
“Wow,” Cruise said, shaking his head.
“I promise you I just never have had that feeling,” Spielberg said. “Not once have I ever contemplated not making movies. It has to do with wanting to keep working more than anything else.”
