Buzzine finds Tom Cruise friendly, relaxed, and willing to share his thoughts about his new movie, as well as his views about film-making, his life, and his very busy career.

Emmanuel Itier: What was it about the role of Claus von Stauffenberg that made doing this film so irresistible to you?

Tom Cruise: When I read the script, I first thought about how incredibly suspenseful this was — really a great thriller. The director, Bryan Singer, is someone that I’ve always wanted to work with, since I saw his film The Usual Suspects. We actually met at the premiere of Mission Impossible — the first one. I said, “I want to work with you.” Then, when I put the script down, I thought, “This story can’t be true. How much of this is actually true?” From sitting down with Bryan then and finding out that it’s a true story, I just thought it was great. I’d never heard of it before. I wanted to work with him, so off we went.

EI: How do you define personal success?

TC: Personal success, for me, is raising my kids, my family. That, as much as I love movies, has always been the priority. I also feel happy that my family is healthy and happy and doing well. That is the most important thing and always has been.

EI: What is your idea of career or professional success? Bryan Singer said he feels that success is about creative freedom.

TC: I have to agree with Bryan, as far as making films. I’m going to do this for the rest of my life, and to have the ability to make the kinds of films that I’ve been able to make and work with the kinds of people that I’ve been able to work with… I just love movies. It’s something that I’ve told people before. When I was making Taps or Risky Business, there were moments where you’re there and you think, “I just want to enjoy these moments, because I don’t know if it’s going to end right here.” Then there were certain moments when I had the opportunity to work with Paul Newman, to work with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman and [Martin] Scorsese and Oliver Stone and [Steven] Spielberg — the people that I’ve been able to work with –- like Bryan Singer. So many times in my career, people have said, “Well, why are you doing that?” That’s even back as early as when I was going to do Top Gun or Born On the Fourth of July, the things that Dustin and I went through on Rain Man.  Of course, Interview With A Vampire was another one. I’ve always chosen things that I felt would be challenging, but I’ve always wanted to entertain an audience. That’s what I feel very privileged to do. I feel that I’ve been fortunate in having that kind of success.

EI: Do you think Valkyrie is an important movie in terms of it coming out at the same time as other Holocaust movies? It looks at World War II from a different angle than the others. Is it important in the sense that people should look at a country like Germany not in the whole but in its parts?

TC: It’s definitely an important story because I didn’t know about it, but I also want to entertain audiences. It’s important to know, of course, that it’s not everyone who fell into that Nazi ideology. I grew up wanting to kill Nazis, wanting to kill Hitler. As a child, you’re looking at it and you think, “Why didn’t someone just shoot him?”  Bryan was always very specific about what this film was going to be. This was a suspense thriller about killing Hitler. When Bryan wanted me to come onboard and we started working with Chris [McQuarrie], Bryan, and Nathan [Alexander], every time we’d start talking about the Holocaust and the different characters, and trying to put as much into that story as possible, Bryan always went back to, “This is a piece of entertainment. This is a suspense thriller about killing Hitler.” So throughout the film, the more you know about the history and you study it, there are so many moments that we were able to put in there with his children. The moment where his daughter is saluting him — of course, on that day, July 20th,  his son was indoctrinated into The Hitler Youth. Knowing Stauffenberg, who despised the Nazis,  these little moments like that Bryan wanted to seed in there… His daughter saluting him, and him not being able to have that conversation with his children. Down in the bunker and looking at his family, the tension falls into  him thinking about Valkyrie — he has to come up with the idea.  I think that most Germans who know the story intimately thoroughly understand that. It’s also there for a broad audience. We wanted to bring this movie to a  broader audience.

EI: When people watch you and Bryan talk, it seems like a real partnership on this film, but was it also an actor/director relationship? Is there a difference? How do you work together?

TC: 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. He loves cinema.  Bryan and I and McQuarrie share interests — movies, history… Friends would come by and we’d screen films and get into history. It was great.  And as an actor, I do like to be directed. I don’t stand outside of myself and direct myself. We’ve already done the research, and I just like to go onto the scene and, as an actor getting direction, 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.

EI: Does Tom Cruise, the artist and actor, ever conflict with Tom the businessman, now that you are running United Artists? Did you worry about the cost of the film and originally planning to shoot in Tunisia and ending up in California? If Valkyrie runs over on its cost, will it effect other films you want to make?

TC: 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 and The Last Samurai. I’ve  produced a lot of movies  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 writers’ strike. We’ve got the pending actors’ strike…

EI: We’re also in the midst of a crisis in our world economy.

TC: Yeah, and you know what? It just comes down to having very good people.  I always try to surround myself with people that I respect.   I’m very happy to have these guys onboard with MGM…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 an actor. That is my love — acting. So that’s first and foremost with me.

EI: Is it true that, at first, the eyepatch gave you unexpected balance problems? Can you talk about the decisions about when to use the eyepatch and when it shouldn’t be used?

TC: 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. I really respect Bryan’s staging and his composition and his storytelling. 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 and shooting with the patch and the hand.. The eyepatch itself and the hand — it was a challenge always going into the room and the way he shot. There are moments when you’re making a film like this where you have to take the audience along and build that tension. In every scene, you have to move that story long, but in every scene, you’re also revealing more about the character and the characters. So there are certain things very early on that Bryan wanted to do. That scene with Tom Wilkinson where he says, “I’ll hear you say it, Colonel” — there are certain things that Bryan knew, from a story sense, how you want to build to those moments. I love movies like this, where there are little pieces that build to a moment. There are rhythms and structure to a movie that I love as an audience. When I read a script and I’m seeing a movie, I see it like an audience and not necessarily as a filmmaker, particularly when I get caught up in the picture. So that moment was something from the director that he knew what he wanted in that moment. Even subtle things too. Physically, you don’t necessarily see the hand or you see that it’s missing, but the reveal of that is what it’s built towards. So you see it in the bed. There are certain moments, and how he shot it, where he was very specific with it. That stuff is a lot of fun — working towards building that moment.

EI: For you, what were some of the rewards and challenges in playing this character?

TC: Well, the rewards were that I thought it was a very exciting film to be a part of, and I wanted to work with Bryan Singer. I loved Chris’s script. Reading a script like this…rarely do you sit down and read something where you’re just turning the pages. It was also a story that I’d never heard before, and to be able to work with these actors…  For me, I want to entertain an audience, as I’ve said, and I thought that this was a very compelling story and would be a fascinating film. That’s what I like. That’s what I’m looking for in film. When I’m making movies, it’s about us. It’s not about me. It’s about the journey that we all take together, getting to have those kinds of conversations. To be there, we got to shoot in Berlin at locations where these people were.

EL: From the soldiers’ formations to the assassinations, the choreography was amazing and quite ominous. In acting this and shooting it, what was the physicality and movement like for you to do?

TC:  I just want to add a couple of things from a production standpoint about the choreography. Doing a lot of these films, the bomb sequence and such –  since this is a suspense thriller, that it needed that kind of dynamic choreography. You had to go in and be very specific, because then going in and editing these pieces together, they weren’t just thrown together. That was all very well-thought-out.

From top to bottom on the production, we really had a lot of help and support from the Germans — the production stuff that they gave us. Even the wardrobe itself, the look of the film. The whole point is trying to give the audience that visceral feeling of being on the edge of their seat, even down to the wardrobe. We went through and studied a lot of films and wondered ‘why does it look sometimes like people are wearing wardrobe with these films?’ It looks like wardrobe. So in sitting down with Tom Sigel and talking about the kind of film that he used and the lighting that he used…also, wardrobe with Joanna Johnson and the kinds of fabrics and studying the fact, also, how each guy would make their own uniform. The level of the detail in the film from top to bottom, even down to Hitler’s signature when he signed it was, to the best of our knowledge, exactly the signature that he timed at that time period. The same with Stauffenberg. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that we filmed-geeked and history-geeked out on.”

EI: Bryan explained that people were blindfolded when they were taken to homes of people who collect Hitler’s furniture to see what it looked like. Were these collectors they Neo-Nazis?

TC: I don’t know. Look, there are certain things that you go, ‘I don’t want to know.’ [Laughs] But we’re very happy to have the desk, his office. I wouldn’t do that. For the director, it was good for him to have it. I didn’t need that. I’ll read about it. He can tell me.

EI: During your own research, did you find out anything new out about Hitler and his followers?

TC: I did.  I know a little bit about history. I enjoy it. I fly War Birds.  I fly the P-51s myself. There are no computer-generated airplanes. All of those planes are real. We’re in them.

EI: Did you enjoy flying the P-51?

TC: I loved it. We didn’t use the P-51 in the film, but, of course, I did have to do a strafing run in the Panzer division in my P-51 in California. So I was very happy that we shot it there.

EI: Bryan also talked about there not being enough room in one of those planes. He said that he got a quick lesson on how to do your make-up, because he was padding sweat off of you.

TC: That was about thirty seconds before we got on the airplane, because we were losing light. As he’s directing, it was like, ‘Look out the window. Look out the window!’ Getting back to learning, the scene where Stauffenberg goes to Hitler’s summerhouse 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 Goring (Marshal Hermann), all these little looks — that’s really set up, when you 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. 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.

EI: Which is why he ended up in Africa…?

TC: 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. Let’s 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.

EI: How do you think movie-goers feel when they see a historical movie like Valkyrie, in which they know what the ending is going to be?

TC: 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, and that didn’t matter when I read the script.

EI: What’s next for you?

TC: 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.

EI: You’ve gotten a Golden Globe nomination for your performance in Tropic Thunder. That must make you happy…

TC: Yeah, that was fun. That was incredible!