‘I have them read it to me’<\/p>\n
Cruise, 64, said he approaches a new project as a listener rather than a reader.<\/p>\n
“What I do with directors and writers is, I don’t read the scripts. I have them read it to me. I have them read it to me because I don’t want my ideas to invade it yet. I want to understand: What is their communication? They’ve been working on it, and they have things that are just there,” he said.<\/p>\n
The set-up is deliberately simple. “So they come to me, and I just sit there, and I’m like, I want you to read it to me.”<\/p>\n
Listening as an audience, not an actor<\/p>\n
What he’s testing in those sessions is not the dialogue or his own part. It’s whether the film works.<\/p>\n
“I’m the audience. I am a movie; I’m a popcorn guy. Like, I’m a meat-and-potatoes, popcorn guy. Is it moving me, or am I invested? Am I not invested? Where am I engaged? Where am I not engaged? That’s just who I am,” he said.<\/p>\n
For a star known for obsessive preparation, it’s a notably passive first step, and one that puts him in the seat of the person buying the ticket.<\/p>\n
Then come the questions<\/p>\n
Once the story is in his head, the interrogation starts. Cruise said he wants to know how a director plans to shoot the thing, down to the lighting, the lenses, the wardrobe and the choreography.<\/p>\n
“We get to a place where I start to understand, and then I’m like, ‘I know how to contribute to that motion.’ Now, it sparks ideas, and I kind of have certain ideas that I have and certain things that I’d like to play with. And then, I don’t necessarily talk about it. I just do it.”<\/p>\n
He added: “I’m not going to sit here and say I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. I hear all the notes. I know the lenses. I know the choreography. I know tonally what they’re going for.”<\/p>\n
For Digger, that reading process reportedly stretched across several days with I\u00f1\u00e1rritu.<\/p>\n
Six hours in the make-up chair, cut to one<\/p>\n
The same conversation produced another glimpse of how Cruise works.<\/p>\n
For Digger, he is buried under heavy prosthetics, and he told the Kelce brothers he worked with the make-up team to cut his time in the chair from six hours to under an hour.<\/p>\n
He also addressed his reputation for intensity on set directly, saying he expects a lot and is upfront about it, and that the rumours about him are true.<\/p>\n
What Digger is<\/p>\n
Digger marks Cruise’s first film since Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in 2025, and his first original film outside a franchise in over a decade.<\/p>\n
Directed and co-written by Alejandro G I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, who won back-to-back best director Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant, it is a satirical black comedy. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate described as the most powerful man in the world, who unleashes a disaster and then sets out to prove he is humanity’s saviour before it destroys everything.<\/p>\n
The cast includes Riz Ahmed, Sandra H\u00fcller, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg, John Goodman as the US president, Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Burn Gorman and Robert John Burke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘I have them read it to me’ Cruise, 64, said he approaches a new project as a listener…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-624756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}