’You’re never there’: After a lifetime of making movies, Tom Cruise is always looking for the next big thing

BURBANK, Calif. — When he steps in front of the camera, Tom Cruise wants two things: To challenge himself and to give audiences a movie-going experience they’ll be talking about long after they leave the theatre. Ever since booking his first major role in 1981s military school drama Taps, Cruise, now 64, has worked to channel a lifelong obsession with movies by working with influential directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, J. J. Abrams, Doug Liman, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack, Joseph Kosinski, Christopher McQuarrie and more.

Cruise has always sought out risky roles. Later this year, he’ll push the envelope again with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, a dramedy that casts the actor as Digger Rockwell, a brash billionaire who frantically tries to save the world after one of his companies inadvertently sets off a catastrophic environmental event that threatens to destroy the planet.

In a newly released trailer, Cruise looks unrecognizable, with thinning grey hair, wrinkles and a big belly as he marches around his mansion, yelling at his underlings and nursing his sickly cat.

“When all else fails, you hit ‘em with the truth,” Cruise’s elderly tycoon says to himself as he paces back and forth. “Hit ‘em with the hard truth. Just bang, bang, bang!”

“Digger got us all into this mess and Digger’s going to dig us out again,” says John Goodman, who plays the U.S. president. The movie, which Cruise shot after completing work on last year’s most recent Mission: Impossible adventure, is Iñárritu’s first English-language film since 2015s Oscar-winning The Revenant.

“It was just after The Revenant, when I had an idea, not script, not a film, just a relentless recurring obsession, that has endured through all these wild years. I knew who this character was,” Iñárritu said via video during a recent trailer unveiling on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles. “I knew how he spoke, how he survived, how he seduced reality into agreeing with him. But it took me 10 years to do this film, because I wasn’t looking for a story. I was looking for the right way of saying it.”

“People often ask me why I chose Tom to play Digger. To me, that’s like asking somebody why you drink water when you are thirsty? Because it’s what you need,” he said.

The film also stars Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde and Emma D’Arcy.

Cruise had been wanting to work with Iñárritu for 25 years

“When I saw his film 25 years ago, Amores Perros, what a brilliant film. It was amazing,” Cruise told a group of journalists during an onstage conversation moderated by film podcast host Kevin McCarthy. ” … Every aspect of that film was very thought-out, very detailed, and you could feel the powerful human voice of someone who was incredibly skilled at what they were doing.”

Iñárritu pitched Cruise his idea for Digger while the legendary actor was in the midst of shooting Top Gun: Maverick. After years of making action blockbusters, Cruise was ready to take a different type of gamble.

The film’s October release date indicates that Warner Bros. plans to push the film heavily into awards season.

“There’s nothing better than to physically and metaphorically stand on the edge of a cliff and go, ‘Let’s do this,’” Cruise explained. “I think when you see Digger, just the level of detail, the skill, the layers of making this film … He’s never made something like this before, nor have I.”

By his own admission, Cruise has been geeking out about the process of making movies since one of his earliest pictures.

“On Taps, I was there with (cinematographer) Owen Roizman talking about lenses. … I was like, ‘I don’t know what he’s saying right now,’ but eventually, you absorb it and it just makes sense as time goes on.”

With Digger, Cruise and Iñárritu are working with VistaVision — a large-scale cinematic format developed 70 years ago that yields a richer, more luxurious image on film. Until Brady Corbet’s Oscar-winning The Brutalist back in 2024, VistaVision cameras had mostly been packed away.

But the high-resolution process, which was used by Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick on Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Cecil B. DeMille on The Ten Commandments, among others, was revitalized once again by Paul Thomas Anderson in last year’s One Battle After Another.

Emerald Fennell’s recent Wuthering Heights adaptation and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia were also made with VistaVision.

“It was wild seeing the VistaVision, but also the lenses that they created to get this handcrafted look, you can see and feel the difference,” Cruise said. “Just loading a camera in VistaVision, the sound of that film going through, I was like, ‘Just everyone, quiet for a second. Let’s just hear it going through.’ It’s a beautiful thing. I love it.”

“There’s nothing better than to physically and metaphorically stand on the edge of a cliff and go, ‘Let’s do this.’”

Instead of deciding to take the part after thumbing his way through a finished screenplay, Cruise spent several days listening to Iñárritu read his script.

“Alejandro took several days during which he was just reading the script to me and I’m listening to everything that’s in his mind, so that I can understand that, and then I know how to contribute to it, and bring that collaboration together,” Cruise said. “It was beautiful.”

After sitting through a brief montage for those in attendance that recapped his 40-plus years as an actor, Cruise said Digger is the culmination of a career spent making movies.

“I have never had something that could challenge me in this way, and neither has Alejandro. And when you see this film, it’s totally original.”

With Iñárritu putting the finishing touches on the project, Cruise also was looking ahead to what might come next for him on the big screen.

“I’ve never felt like, ‘I’m there.’ You’re never there. It’s always the next dream,” he said. “The love of this art form and the passion, it’s all-encompassing.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com