Is Tom Cruise finally ready to jump off the action train and get back to acting again, a la his marvelous turns in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” Michael Mann’s “Collateral,” or Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money”? Well, the “Mission: Impossible” series is over—at least for now—and Cruise’s next role is a long-awaited return to drama with auteur Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s next untitled film. So it feels like the tipping point is here, and filmmaker Cameron Crowe, who directed him in “Jerry Maguire” and “Vanilla Sky,” thinks this pivot to drama—and what could be a Paul Newman-style late period—might be right around the corner.
READ MORE: Cameron Crowe Once Had Tom Cruise Tapped To Play Phil Spector In Unproduced Biopic
In a new interview with the New York Times, Crowe doesn’t hedge his opinion, calling the shift “imminent” and framing it as a deliberate move back toward character work. “I see that there’s a time coming, and it might have already started, where he’s going to segue into character roles as strongly as he segued into doing action movies of the highest quality,” Crowe explained. “That Paul Newman character phase is just around the corner and will fry people’s minds.”
To underline the point, he recounts a dinner-table nod from Clint Eastwood. “I have the same lawyer as Clint Eastwood, and he invited me to a dinner party. He sat me next to Clint Eastwood, and I was so nervous. What do you say to Clint Eastwood?” Crowe recalled. “So I’m sitting there and Clint Eastwood leans over and says, ‘Tom Cruise.’ And I go, ‘Oh, man, Tom Cruise. I love working with Tom Cruise.’ And he goes, ‘In a hundred years, they’re gonna look back — that’s the career, Tom Cruise’s career.’”
From future arcs to the moments that calcify into myth, Crowe pivots to the boom box that launched a thousand parodies—and how John Cusack almost wouldn’t do it in “Say Anything.”
“He felt like it was a subservient act: Why does Lloyd have to be a wuss like that? We struggled with how to get that scene,” he explained.
“The legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs knew that we’d been battling. We had actually shot the scene where Cusack had the boom box on the hood of a car, and he was saying, ‘That’s more what I would do.’ Laszlo leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t worry, there’s no film in the camera.’ On the last day, as we were losing the sun, he said: ‘I found a place across the street that would be good, and the car is parked there. Let’s get him across the street and see if we can get it.’ So we ran across the street. [John] said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ So he’s holding up the boom box, literally kind of pissed that he’s having to do it one more time. And you knew it watching in the monitor: That was the perfect emotion for the scene.”
Cusack’s resistance began even earlier, and the movie had to win him over in stages.
“He wanted to dial down his Cusackness when I met him. He was like, ‘I can’t do another teen movie.’ I’m like, ‘It’s really not a teen movie, I swear.’ I think Cusack grew up on that movie in a lot of ways,” Crowe said.
“The first time I saw him, he was facing away from me in a coffee shop in Chicago. He hadn’t even turned around, and I knew he was Lloyd Dobler. Then he turned around and we started talking and he said, ‘I’m never gonna do this part because I don’t wanna be that John Cusack guy again in that way.’ We were fighting with that perception of earlier-period Cusack throughout the entire making of the movie — into the session where we worked on sound after the film had been shot. He watched one of the scenes and said, ‘Oh, yeah, all right, I guess I do get what you were going for.’”
“The Uncool:” is right around the corner and arries on October 28 via Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Watch the full podcast interview below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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