December 2008 | blackfilm.com | VALKYRIE | An Interview with Tom Cruise and Bryan Singer

December 2008

VALKYRIE | An Interview with Tom Cruise and Bryan Singer

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VALKYRIE
An Interview with Tom Cruise and Bryan Singer
By Wilson Morales

December 22, 2008

Cruise: Yeah, we were making a film not for a release date, to be honest. I know today that everything is about a release date.

Singer: On 'The Usual Suspects', we made it and a year and a half later it was released.
Cruise: Even February was never a firm date. This is a film that's made for a broader audience. We also never wanted to say, 'Hey, we want to put this into awards season.' That's not even why we moved to Christmas. Christmas is a great time for audiences. It's the biggest time of year for people to go and you want to put your film in a place that it can have that opportunity, being available to as broad an audience as possible. That's the nature of the film. As I said, we could've taken this film and made it two and a half, three and a half, four and a half [hours]. It could've been a very different kind of movie than, right from the beginning, a suspense thriller. Actually, yes, when you know the history, these events occurred. They really did occur. When I read the script I thought, 'That had to be a movie convention.' Stauffenberg going to Hitler the day after D-Day, I went, 'Well, that's cool.' Then you find out that it really happened. There's actual dialogue in the film that I discovered were from letters, were from journals that Chris and Nathan had studied. So always for me, and I get the opportunity to work with Bryan and we go through it, the most important thing is the film because that's something that I wanted to do. As I said I want to entertain an audience and when I'm making a film that's the most important thing. I've always felt that, that you want to get it right. With any amount of limited time and economics you want to do the best that you can for the audience, for the subject matter, for whatever it is.

Watching you and Bryan talk it seems like a partnership on the film, but was it also an actor/director relationship as well? Is there a difference? How do you work together?

Cruise: I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, as a storyteller and that's the way that it is when you're going into a film like this. On a scale of one to ten I think that this film about a twenty in terms of being a challenge to make.

Singer: We spent a lot of time together. We had that ability and the nice part about Tom's interest in the project as well as his position at the studios, we had the freedom to spend a lot of time working together, working with Chris and Nathan, talking about the project. We moved to Germany and learned even more information and we talked and had more and more meetings about it, discussing it as collaborators and then once we get on the set

Cruise: I want to be directed. I enjoy that.

Singer: He becomes an actor and I become a director and it's literally, from my experience, never any difference. I knew that no matter how many takes I asked him to do it would never be as many as Stanley Kubrick did on 'Eyes Wide Shut'. We tried things and experimented and it was phenomenal because anything that you'd ask it was like, 'Lets do it –' and there was never a lack of wanting to try and never a lack of trust. Then afterwards the full support of an actor like Tom, it's that rare opportunity with Tom where as a director you always feel that no one cares about the movie as much as you do and the partnership, what you probably see here, is a relationship with someone who probably cares about the movie as much I do. That's unique and that's what you're seeing here.

Cruise: Yeah, and he loves cinema. So there's stuff where Bryan and I, McQuarrie – movies, history.

Singer: We had a lot of fun talking about history and had meetings that last twelve hours long. We'd throw on some movies, we order some drinks and things.

Cruise: Friends would come by and we'd screen films and get into history. It was great.
Singer: And tangents. We had some good experiences. We camped out in the desert when we were shooting the desert sequence and everyone's families were there. So it's been a little bit of that too, a great journey.

Cruise: It has been a great journey.

Singer: And one that comes from caring about the project.

Cruise: And as an actor I do like to be directed. I don't stand outside of myself and direct myself.

Singer: He doesn't come to the monitor. There's none of that. Some actors do that, but there's none of that.

Cruise: We've already done the research and I just like to go onto the scene and his direction was, as an actor getting direction from he gave great notes on behavior. We were just tracking. I like that in a movie, where as an actor I'm tracking with the director. I think that you see the performances that Bryan gets, they're always very interesting and I had a lot of fun doing it.

Do you find that Tom Cruise the artist and actor has to conflict ever with Tom Cruise the businessman, worrying about the cost of the film and shooting in Tunisia and ending up in California -

Singer: Cougar Buttes. I think that's where we shot. Cougar Buttes near Victorville.
Whether this runs over on it's cost and if that'll effect other films you want to make. Can you talk about that?

Cruise: I've produced a lot of films. 'Mission Impossible' was the first film I produced and then I went on and produced all the 'Mission' films, 'The Last Samurai'. I've just produced a lot of movies beforehand and so there's always the balance of art and commerce and the challenges of that. I like to look at those as opportunities as opposed to restrictions. So that aspect of it has always been there and as a director Bryan faces that. It's not just having talent in making a film, but it's also important to know that you surround yourself with great people. I own a piece of United Artists and we're starting it up and we had the writer's strike. We've got the pending actor's strike.
And a tough economy.

Cruise: Yeah, and you know what, it just comes down to having very good people that I work with. I always try to surround myself with people that I respect, that I enjoy working with. That's what we have, we have great people that we work with. I'm very happy to have these guys onboard with MGM and the gang that we have. At the studio it's actually a very exciting time with Mary Parent at MGM. It's interesting. But I am an actor first and foremost. Even though we've set it up I've never had an exclusive deal as an actor with anyone ever. Even in producing films. I produced 'The Last Samurai' at Warner Brothers. I produced 'The Others' with Miramax and I've always been very careful to not say, 'I'm just going to be with one.' I'm actor. That is my love, acting. So that's first and foremost with me.

I understand that the eye-patch at first gave you unexpected balance problems. Can you talk about that?

Cruise: I was surprised. When we started working on it, it did and especially when it was dark. I lost depth perception and balance and also in terms of visual, cinematic storytelling it was a challenge I think for Bryan too. I really respect Bryan's staging and his composition and his storytelling. If you look at his films, when I look at his movies there's something very cinematic and classic storytelling, but it's cool. I think he understands cinema storytelling. With the eye-patch he also understood that it's a different story depending on where that camera is on my face. So different profiles, shooting with the patch and the hand. Part of the research we did, all the research we did on the 19th century and 20th century stuff, but also his injuries, what Stauffenberg did and how he lived with that. The eye-patch itself and the hand, it was a challenge always going into the room and the way he shot.

Singer: If you're staging a scene on the set you really want to shoot out the set and make it look pretty and position the actors in relation to one another, but this side decides one thing and this side is the other thing and he can't see the other actor with this. So that reverses where they are and that could end up reversing where the camera is in the room

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