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

Can you talk about the joys of being the dad of the most adorable two year old around and are you

Santa this year?

Cruise: I'm going to be Santa. I'm always Santa.

And what's it like being the dad of a toddler?

Cruise: I love it. I love being a father. I always wanted to. As a kid, a couple of things, I couldn't wait to grow up. I remember being four and five years old that I always wanted to work and grow up. I just always had that. I remember I always wanted to be a father. All three of my kids, I've enjoyed every part of it. I feel lucky to have teenagers and to have the toddler also, to have the journey of both happening at the same time. All my kids, I love them. I'll be Santa.

In the research did you find anything new out about Hitler and his followers?

Cruise: I did. I thought that I knew. I know a little bit about history. I enjoy it. I fly War Birds. I fly the P-51's myself and by the way, all the airplanes are real. There are no computer generated airplanes. All of those planes are real.

Singer: And we're really in them too.

Cruise: We're in them.

Singer: In the Wolf's Lair we actually shot in the room and there wasn't enough room. There was only enough room for the actor's and myself and the pilots and the cameraman. So they gave me a quick lesson on how to do makeup.

Cruise: About thirty seconds before we got on the airplane because we were losing light.

Singer: It's a hundred degrees in there and he's sweating and I'm swatting his face with this little pad.

Cruise: As he's directing. 'Look out the window. Look out the window!'

Singer: But it was exciting. Tom took me, I digress, formation flying with a group of pilots in the P-51 Mustangs and the Sea Fury over the deserts in California doing aerobatics in these incredible aircraft. It was enthralling and a real good ramp up in heading to Germany and doing this.

Cruise: Getting back to learning, the scene where Stauffenberg goes to Hitler's summer house, up there in Berghof, it's challenging. I was thinking for Bryan how he was going to direct that and the focus on Hitler. I've grown up with the footage of Hitler at the rallies and to see him particularly during that time period where he wasn't out so obviously…I mean, obviously he was insane, they all were utterly insane. But to create that eerie and bizarre and terrifying feeling, that sequence, all the detail where Goebbels is looking at [Marshal Hermann] Goring, all these little looks, that's really setup when look at the rise and fall of the Third Reich. He talks about what it was like during that time period. Bryan was totally accurate to the behavior and what was happening during that time period.

Singer: That meeting actually took place, between Stuaffenberg and Hitler. It was his first time meeting Hitler and the big six. It was the day after D-Day and the thing that Stauffenberg noticed and went home and told his wife, it's not in the film, but we keyed off this testimony, that Goring had on makeup. There was distrust between them clearly. The allies were at their door. Hitler was detached from what was going on and the only one that seemed to have a clue was [Albert] Speer, but he was just the architect along for the ride. All of those characters, it was like this, and what he did was walked over and held Stauffenberg's hand and acknowledged his injuries and his heroism as a way of mocking his own people. He would do that. He was always playing one against the other. It was how Hitler rose in politics, through flattery, promises and backstabbing. He did it with Stalin. He did it with the German people and eventually that's how the war ended. So it was nice to be able to put hints of that kind of detached laconic Hitler that the public didn't get to see in the Berghof scene and in a scene that genuinely happened and all the specifics of that leading up to it. The reason that we have such, particularly in the third act of the film, detail is because the Gestapo did such a stunning investigation into this assassination attempt and trials were held and filmed. So we had the benefit of all those facts and all of that information to inform our story as well as the research we'd done and talking to a lot of people who were with Hitler.

Cruise: I was surprised at how Stauffenberg at the beginning might seem like a movie convention, him interrogating Generals. He did that. He had those conversations with Generals exactly in that way and would have those kinds of conversations.

Which is why he ended up in Africa?

Cruise: Which is why he ended up in Africa. He had actually court martialed friends of his for war crimes. His uncle was concerned for him and arranged for him to go to Africa. He was that outspoken with Generals. He was a supply officer. He wasn't necessarily on the front lines, but he was behind them saying, 'What's happening? How can this happen? Why is this happening? This guy is a liar. This is not the country that we want, that I wanted.' The amount of desperation and pain for him, because he loved his country and wanted a moral country, but one that was a part of and participated in the world, not annihilating it. Not the Holocaust. Not world domination. He was a man that was able to really think for himself within all of that propaganda and recognized very early on that insanity. At first he was thinking, 'Someone has to stop him. Lets overthrow him.' Then it was, 'Someone has to shoot that bastard.' That's a quote of his as early as 1938. Then suddenly being moved into the place after Africa, his uncle sent him away, and it's ironic that those injuries actually put him in the position of high command where he got on the inside and realized that the only way to stop this was from the inside. He really recognized that it wasn't just enough to kill Hitler. You had to have something that was going to put people in a position where they're going to follow you because you have that oath. As an American, to open a film like that, it just struck me as being so creepy, getting people to not be able to think for themselves.

Singer: The army was compelled to make an oath. An army of ten million people in Germany were compelled to give an oath to Hitler personally.

Did you think of 'Day Of The Jackal' in making this?

Singer: Not so much. I hadn't seen it in a while so no. But movies like that were discussed.
In the sense that people know going in what the ending is?

Singer: Yeah, we did talk about that.

Cruise: If you look at 'Apollo 13' and 'Titanic' or any film that's made out of a book, people know how it's going to end. I had an idea when I read it and of course I've heard of the briefcase and the table, but there's no way that…when I read it I thought it was so surprising to me, the story and the details. I was surprised in reading it that I was that caught up in it. I was ripping through the pages.

Singer: To say that we know how it ends, you might if you know history, but I don't think audiences know the full degree of how this particular story ends. That's an important thing.

Cruise: And that didn't matter when I read the script.

Can you talk about using the P-51?

Cruise: I love it. We didn't use the P-51 in the film, but of course I did have to do a straffing run in the Panzer Division in my P-51 in California. So I was very happy that we shot it there.

Do you know what you're doing next?

Cruise: I'm waiting for things to come in. I've been working with writers and filmmakers and am going to wait to see what comes in.

VALKYRIE OPENS ON DECEMBER 25, 2008

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