If you don’t know the story of filmmaker Todd Field, who directed the critically-acclaimed “Tár” (our review) this year with Cate Blanchett, it goes a little bit like this. An actor in small indies, and some blockbusters (Jan De Bont’s “Twister”), Field moved up to writing and directing and knocked it out of the park on his first try. His directorial debut, “In The Bedroom” (2001), was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. His follow-up, “Little Children,” was nominated for three Academy Awards, and it seemed like the world was Field’s oyster for the rest of his career.
But as we now know, “Tár” was Field’s first film in 16 years, and he ended up in development hell on dozen of projects over the years (READ MORE: The Lost & Unmade Projects Of Filmmaker Todd Field). And as much acclaim as Field had with his early films, it turns out all of them were fraught with difficulties.
The backstory of Field’s directorial career was that he received a significant boost from both Tom Cruise and the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Field had a small part in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” and while a minimal role in about no more than three scenes, the film was an extremely long shoot, and he befriended both Cruise and Kubrick and soaked up as much from him as possible.
“I started the first day of the shoot, and I was there for the very last day of the shoot, which was the orgy sequence,” Field told Happy Sad Confused recently. “So that was October 1996, and I wrapped the end of January 1998, and that was for three scenes, three scenes! I was probably there nine months out of [an] eighteen month [shoot]. Stanley would allow me to look at dailies and allow me to stand on set behind him, so as a student of film, it was an incredible privilege in so many ways that experience is impossible to talk about….He understood that I wasn’t just interested in acting.”
As detailed in the HSC interview and a recent New Yorker profile, Cruise was the one who urged him to make movies. “Tom Cruise was a tremendous person to spend time with,” Field said. “He came to serve Stanley in every possible way. Urged might be too mild of a descriptor. Cruise practically commanded him to make movies, and a dinner told him matter-of-factly. “Honestly, it was really Tom,” Field said about the person who pushed him to direct. “He took me aside, and he said, ‘you’re going to make a feature film. And I said, ‘yeah, I will; I went to film school.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re going to make a feature film; you got a few months now, what are you going to do?”
Field told him he had an idea based on a 1979 short story by Andre Dubus called “In The Bedroom,” but he probably couldn’t get the rights to it. In typical supernova Cruise motivation, he bluntly told him, “You’re just making excuses. Figure it out,” Field remembered in the New Yorker piece. And a few months later, lit up by Cruise, he did just that, secured the rights before “Eyes Wide Shut” was done filming, received “extremely valuable advice” from Kubrick, and eventually made the movie.
But as Field detailed on HSC, while the film was met with great enthusiasm and acclaim upon its 2001 Sundance Film Festival premiere, he was devastated to learn that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax—legendary for his meddling in the films he had bought, often trying to recut them to his whims—had bought the film.
“I was weeping in the bathroom,” Field told the New Yorker about what happened when he learned Weinstein had bought the film (he told HSC he was about to “throw up”). Distraught, fearing Weinstein would ruin the movie he called Tom Cruise and the superstar gave him a strategic plan of action that worked that eventually worked
“I called up Tom Cruise and said, ‘Something terrible has happened.’ He basically said, ‘This is how you’re going to play it. It’s going to take you six months, and you’ll beat him, but you have to do exactly what I’m going to tell you to do, step by step.’ “
The plan was essentially to let Weinstein do what he wanted, wait for it to test poorly and then hit him with the rave reviews that came out of Sundance, and Weinstein would eventually get bored and relent. The strategy worked, Weinstein let Field release it as initially intended, and on top of the five Oscar nominations, it grossed more than 25 times its budget, unheard of for an indie film of that size.
So thank Tom Cruise for saving “In The Bedroom”? The irony and horror of all that is that even after all that goodwill accrued, Field still had a hard time on his follow-up film, “Little Children,” and the studio, New Line, was totally disinterested in releasing it.
“Little Children” was greenlit by Bob Shaye, but by the time the film was made, he had exited, so the film’s allies were gone. Even then-New Line exec Toby Emmerich warned Field he should “take the film to another studio otherwise he would bury it, and that’s exactly what he did,” Field recalled. “He never really released the film. We had a trailer that came out six weeks before it was released, which was back then—no Internet [in the same way it is now]—it was all theatrical in front of one movie, and [that] was a disaster. And they never released the film on more than 42 screens, ever, even after we got Oscar nominations.”
Like Cruise, Field seemed to have allies and boosters everywhere. He recalled that Meryl Streep even tried to help save its release at the Golden Globes. “Meryl Streep stood up at the Golden Globes that year—also they didn’t show a clip from the film even though it was nominated for Best Picture, in large part because [New Line] made sure we didn’t have a clip—and essentially did a 30-minute plea with theater owners to show the film.”
By all accounts, “Tár” has been Field’s only great experience with a studio, Focus Features giving him carte blanche to write whatever he wanted, but those early experiences sound rough. Let’s hope there are more of that in the future—plus no major decades-long delays between films— and less of the Miramax and New Line experiences. “Tár” is in theaters now, on Demand too, and we named it the Best Movie of 2022 in our group film poll.