teven Spielberg, who last worked with Tom Cruise on the poorly received Minority Report, has reteamed with the superstar for another science-fiction movie that both believe will conquer movie theaters when it opens this month: A new version of H.G. Wells' classic alien-invasion book War of the Worlds.
In this updated and contemporized retelling of the oft-told tale, Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a New Jersey dockworker and divorced dad who finds himself fleeing with his young daughter (Dakota Fanning) and teenage son (Justin Chatwin) from an alien menace.
Last week, Cruise and Spielberg arrived in New York from a whirlwind world tour to promote the film. They faced flashbulbs, TV cameras and dozens of reporters from around the world to talk about invading aliens (as well as Cruise's much-publicized romance and religious views), and Science Fiction Weekly was there.
Back when you were prepping E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, it began as a different movie, a scary alien invasion movie, and you sort of turned it around and made it into a happy alien movie. At the time, you said that you didn't want to do a scary alien movie. What's changed since then, and did any of the elements of that film about family also make it to War of the Worlds?
Spielberg: You're asking what changed. You know, there wasn't anything huge that changed in my life that made me do a scary alien movie. Maybe even the idea that everybody over the years said, "Well, he's the guy who only does [happy] alien movies goaded me a bit, and I thought, 'Well, why can't I try my hand at the kind of film that Ridley Scott made when he did the first Alien?' Which is one of my favorite scary science-fiction movies of all time. And, you know, it's just something that I had always wanted to do. We talked about this for a couple of years, looking for a project to do together. That I told Tom that I'd wanted to do War of the Worlds ever since I read the book in college, before I actually became a filmmaker, I wanted to do some version of it at some point.
Cruise: So you always planned to have E.T. phone home and ... bring some of the ... E.T.s gone gangsta? That's what happened with that.
Spielberg: That could have been. You never knew what he did with that Texas Instruments device.
Cruise: He's a gangsta! E.T.'s come back to kick our butts.
Spielberg: But, no, it was not anything really conscious. It's just it's a great story. It's a great piece of 19th-century, classic literature. It began the entire revolution in science fiction and fantasy, in my opinion, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. And it ... it was something that I really respected when it was first made [into a film] by George Pal in 1953. ... And I just thought we could make a version, a little closer, a little darker, toward the original novel.
Father figures are common things in your films. Did you enjoy playing a father and, to Mr. Spielberg, was this your idea of reversing what you did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with a guy who goes with his family rather than abandoning it?
Cruise: Well, first of all, I have to say that I love how Steven Spielberg deals with families in his movies. I find them to be very real. Unique. You know ... that scene in Close Encounters, you know, with the son and the bathtub. I've always personally wanted to be a father growing up, and when we started talking about the story, you know we started talking about, "Oh, it's going to be about a father and a family," I couldn't wait to play this character. ... And then David Koepp wrote this great character. And Steven, how he directed me in that role. You know, he called me and said, "We're going to have the engines in the kitchen, you know?" ...
Spielberg: The 350 GT.
Cruise: Yeah, the 350 GT engine in the kitchen. He has such impeccable notes, and ... that's why I always show up early in the morning and I always just hang out, because I just feed off of [him]. ... We'll be around, and he'll just, you know, discover [something]. ... It happens very quickly creatively with Steven. It's his ideas, and he discovers things very quickly, and ... we're always working on the film, but, I don't know, it happens very fast. But anyway, you're asking about a father, I couldn't wait to play a father ... in this movie.
Spielberg: Well, you know, I was never really conscious of that. I know, in Close Encounters, certainly, as I wrote the script, it was about a man whose insatiable curiosity—more than just curiosity, a developing obsession, and a kind of psychic implantation—drew him away from his family, and ... only looking back once, walked onto the mothership. Now, that was before I had kids. That was 1977. So I wrote that blithely. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family to go on the mothership. I would have the guy doing everything he could to protect his children. So in a sense, War of the Worlds does reflect my own maturity in my own life growing up and now having seven children.
The film speaks to me on a lot of levels, mostly about refugees and their plight. Is that a theme in the film for you?
Spielberg: Well, it is. It's an ... unfamiliar theme to all of us, because we don't often see images of American refugees, except after national disasters like hurricanes and people fleeing an approaching hurricane in the Florida Keys, or we've seen many images of that. And of course the image that stands out in my mind the most was the image of everybody from Manhattan fleeing across the George Washington Bridge in the shadow of 9/11, which was something that was a searing image that I've never been able to get out of my head. But this ... is partially about the American refugee experience, because it's certainly about Americans fleeing for their lives, being attacked for no reason, having no idea why they're being attacked, and who is attacking them? We went to great lengths not to explain any raison d'etre for these particular attackers.
Cruise: You know, one of the things that Steven, when we first started talking about this story—and I've had the great pleasure of, you know, we were get to hang out. ... I like movies ... [where] I get to hang with Steven. I just want to hang out with Steven! You know? ... I love creating films with him. ... The choices and the things he was talking about in terms of having it being a subjective experience and the choice never to go over that hill and see what's happening over that hill.
Spielberg: That was a huge temptation, by the way. When I pre-viz'd [pre-visualized, using computer-animated storyboards,] that sequence [in which a massive battle takes place just beyond a hill where Cruise and Chatwin are arguing], I pre-viz'd going over the hill and seeing the war of the worlds, quote unquote. And I had to pull back and not commit to that, because I thought it was much more personal to the point of view of this family not to be able to see everything that Hollywood gets to see in most science-fiction movies.
Cruise: I'm giving you kind of the actor fan experience, do you know what I mean? Because I'm a ... fan always, first, of Steven's films, and, you know, then I'm his actor. But seeing him develop these ... ideas and working on the script and David Koepp ... Is David here, by the way? Where is David Koepp? He was just here. ... There's David Koepp, y'all. ... The great David Koepp. Thank you, sir.
[He] did an astonishing job, I think, on that screenplay. But, you know, you look inside that basement for 20 minutes, OK? [In a sequence in which Cruise and Fanning are trapped in a basement with Tim Robbins' character.] To be able to choreograph and sustain that kind of tension is something where you go [wow]. ... When I'm working with different filmmakers, I'll always actually go back to Steven's pictures and study his editing. See how he's telling that story. Because he gives you the environment, but ... also from a character point of view and story. It's always ... on that storyline. ... I often go back and study his stuff again and look at those sequences. And then to see him develop that sequence in the basement, even though he pre-viz'd stuff, there was stuff on the day that, it was just, he changed the whole thing on the day or, you know, the night before.
Spielberg: David's back there. You're confessing this in front of David.
Cruise: No, the pre-viz stuff, you know, David!
How much did the political situation today have to do with your decision to make this film right now, and the happy ending giving a hope to the future?
Spielberg: Because I have hope for the future, which is why I'm probably not the best person to tell a story that leaves you with nothing to hope for. But, you know, I just felt that this movie is a reflection, and there are all sorts of metaphors you can certainly divine from this story, and ... this movie, I was hoping, was more like a prism, that everybody could see in a facet ... of the prism what they choose to take from the experience of seeing War of the Worlds. So I tried to make it as open for interpretation as possible without having anybody coming out with a huge political polemic in the second act of the movie. I think, you know, there are politics certainly underneath some of the scares and some of the adventure and some of the fear, but I really wanted to make it suggestive enough that everybody could have their own opinion. But I certainly gave you enough, I think, rope to hang me with.
This is the second time work you're working together. Which one of them was easier for you, and why?
Cruise: Easier? ... I have to tell you personally, ... it just gets better. The experience of working with Steven gets better and better.
Spielberg: This was a 100 percent character. Minority Report was certainly 50 percent character and 50 percent very complicated storytelling. Layers and layers of murder-mystery plotting, where if ... any of the actors [or] if Tom even gave a suggestion that he knew what was going to happen next, you the audience would have picked it up like that, because audiences are so smart today. They pick up things so far out of left field that we, the filmmakers, can't believe that audiences have picked up on a tiny clue. So we were always concerned about giving away too much of the plot of Minority Report while we were working together, and we were working like writers on a script in our director-actor relationship, making sure that the story was being told ... well.
This was experiential. This was a character journey. And everything we talked about was about Tom's character, Dakota's character, you know, Justin Chatwin's character, Tim Robbins' character. It was all about who these people were, and in a sense this ... freed us up to explore behavior more than we had a chance to explore in Minority Report.
Cruise: I had a lot of fun on Minority Report. I had even more fun on this one. And the next one is going to be even more fun. [Laughs.]
This picks up on the unique ability of science fiction to put across social and political ideas in a more oblique way. Science fiction has looped into your career on a number of occasions. Can you explain what it means to you as a vehicle to talk about issues that may be important, or if it's more subconscious?
Spielberg: Well, I think that science fiction is not a subconscious thing at all. Science fiction for me is a vacation. It's a vacation away from all the rules of narrative logic. It's a vacation away from basic physics and physical science. It just lets you leave all the rules behind and just kind of fly. I mean, we as a human race, we don't fly. We envy the birds. I envy Tom, because he actually flies jet planes, and I don't do that. I'm too afraid to fly. But he flies jet planes. He does fly. But for most of us who don't, science fiction for me gives me a chance to really soar. And this is why I keep coming back to science fiction, because ... absolutely, there are no limits to where the imagination can go.
Now the challenge of science fiction is that, to tell a credible science-fiction story, you have to then turn around, having said all that, and impose certain limits. And I have to impose limits on myself. There were a lot of directions that I could have taken the story that I didn't, because it would have made it almost too fantastic. ... This could have been much more like Independence Day or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, or it could have been much more about, you know, the army versus the extraterrestrials, and there could have been huge battle scenes and Tripods going down and soldiers blowing up. I didn't want to go there. I wanted this to be in a sense, in a strange way, a little more of a cousin to Saving Private Ryan in the genre of science fiction, in the way that it was much more of a story told through a first-personal point of view. So I did impose limits, and David Koepp imposed limits on how ... we shape the screenplay and then how we caused all the characters to seem as realistic and normal as we are. And that was very important to me. But science fiction as a genre is the great escape for moviemakers.
Cruise:: ... I dig going to science-fiction movies. I always have. ... You look at science fiction and the role that science fiction has actually played in our culture, because .... they were dreaming and pushing for the space race, it was the science-fiction writers, you know, during that pulp-fiction era that were writing about space and then creating that, trying to get them to not think about blowing each other up. ... You know, let's get the race going. ... I find it fascinating, you know, when we were preparing Minority Report, the research that Steven had done. ...
Spielberg: Science fiction can sometimes suggest really cool ways of exploring the universe. Like the astronauts are completely inspired by science fiction as kids, and they want to join the space program. Science fiction has done a lot, I think, to encourage the people who really have to spend the money at NASA to go out into space. Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey did amazingly positive, proactive work in that field.
Cruise: I wonder if the astronauts are going to use War of the Worlds to try to raise money to go out to make sure we don't get invaded.
Spielberg: I don't know. It all depends if we're going to take the Reagan Star Wars thing out of mothballs and put that up again. I just think that the whole field of science fiction, as Tom was saying, and science-fiction stories ... really inspires young people to think and imagine and think that anything is possible. Anything is possible. And my movies go from, I think, historical dramas to science fiction. I love going back and forth between history, where I really am contained, and I have to pretty much be more of a reporter, a photojournalist, than an imagineer, and science fiction, where I don't have that many, you know, constraints on where we can take these stories.
A question from Us Weekly magazine asks about Katie Holmes: How does Cruise plan to top the romantic proposal he made at the Eiffel Tower with the wedding?
Cruise: Do you have to top it? I didn't know that was, like, a pre thing. I don't know. We haven't decided yet. We haven't decided yet. I don't know. We'll see.
Spielberg: That's great. 20 minutes went by before that question was asked.
Cruise: [Laughs.] That was impressive, I know!
A question from the Boston Phoenix newspaper: One of the things changed from the novel was having the aliens laying dormant for eons rather than coming out of the sky. ...
Cruise:: I was there when he came up with that idea. It was instantaneous. I was there when Steven came up with that idea. I thought it was a great idea. Lying dormant. ... The machines are lying dormant.
So what resonance did that have for you as a Scientologist?
Cruise: In what way?
Well, in that some of the tenets of Scientology deal with the past of aliens on this planet ... .
Cruise: That's not true.
No?
Cruise: No. [laughs] Whaaat? What paper are you from?
Boston Phoenix.
Cruise: Boston what?
Boston Phoenix.
Cruise: Is that a good paper? Really?
I don't know how to ... It has no resonance whatsoever. There's absolutely no relation to that whatsoever.
Spielberg: That idea, that was just something that I came up with, and I came up with it just because I didn't want to do the old death-from-above cliche that we've seen so often in science-fiction movies, where you look up at the sky, and it's raining down terror and death on you. I thought it was much more logical that this ... growth could have been living with us, inside of our Earth, for eons before the time was right, and ... they made their plans. And so I just thought that was a more of an original way of introducing a threat, not from above, but right where we least expect it to come, ... sort of an extraterrestrial threat almost from the inner reaches of Earth.
Cruise: And if you're interested in Scientology, you should read Evolution of a Science or Fundamentals of Thought, and [they] will give you a greater understanding of what Scientology is. There's a book called What Is Scientology?, and you can get that and read that for yourself.
So many of the scenes are very realistic. What does each of you believe is real as far as alien life forms on other planets. Is it out there?
Spielberg: Yeah, it's definitely out there. You know that. I think we all know that we're not alone in the universe. I can't imagine that anyone believes that we're the only intelligent life form, only biological life form, in the entire universe. I certainly can't imagine living without that belief that ... this universe is teeming with life.
But I'm a little less sure in my 50s than I was in my late 20s whether we actually have ever been visited. I used to answer this question back in the days of Close Encounters in the '70s. Wow, was I convinced that we had been visited. And you know why I'm not as convinced right now? Because of the millions of video cameras that are out there today that are picking up less photographs, videos, of UFOs, alleged UFOS, than were being picked up in the 1960s and '70s and '80s. Now why is that, when there's 150 percent more video cameras on the face of the planet today? Why are we seeing less from up there? Maybe we're in a cold spell or a UFO drought. I don't know. Maybe ... that's it.
Cruise: [Laughs.] A UFO drought! I don't know, I think it's supreme arrogance to think that we're the only [life] ... in all the universes of all the universes. ... I'm a very practical person, you know? Unless I meet them one day, you know, I don't know. ... It was fun. ... Of course, when we were on the set ... you know, all of us, you know, ... we'd all go, OK, the aliens are going to come down here, and we'd be very intense between the takes, you know, and Steven and Dakota and I, you know, and Tim would always look at each other and go, "Aliens, oooooh!" ...
Spielberg: Some of that ... [was] whistling in the dark, because we actually scared ourselves making this movie.
Cruise: Exactly.
What was the most difficult scene, for both of you?
Spielberg: Well, physically, the most difficult scene for me, because it involved the safety of several thousand local extras where we were shooting in Athens up the Hudson River ... was the ferry scene. And that was the most difficult scene for me, because we had to have thousands of people running, and I was terrified of someone falling, tripping, being stepped on, being run over. And thank God—because we had such a great stunt coordinator, and so many, so many dozens of stunt people actually inside the crowds, and we had many safety meetings with the crowds—nothing bad happened. But I was on edge for four days, because of the vast amount of crowds at night, running on very narrow streets. For me, that was the most anxious time in filming, and I couldn't wait for those scenes to be over, and I was happy every time we finished a take and everybody was OK.
Cruise: One thing I want to add to that was astonishing to me, having obviously made a lot of movies, produced a lot of movies, is how accurately and quickly Steven shot those sequences. It's kind of stunning.
For me, what was the most difficult? I don't know, really. ... Honestly, I had a lot of fun making the movie. I can't say .... There wasn't a day. The most difficult, hardest day was the last day of shooting, because it was over. That was the hardest day, because ... I really do quite sincerely love working with Steven. I have great admiration for you, which you know.
Spielberg: And me to you.
Cruise: And I just knew I was going to miss it. It was a story, when David Koepp wrote this screenplay, I have to say it's the best screenplay I've ever read that came off. I told David this. You could just see a man inspired. The story flew off the page. ... I actually received 84 pages, and I could tell with Steven, ... Steven was like, "Oh, I'm going to send it to you." And I was like, "How is it? How is it? How is it? How is it? How is it? How is it?" I can be quite an excitable person. I don't know if you know that about me. [Laughter.] He said, "Oh, just read it and call me afterwards." I read 84 pages, and when it was over, ... I tell you, I was jumping on the couch! [Laughter.]
Spielberg: I remember that it was only on the telephone for me, but I could hear something squeaking. The first thing we both asked David was, "When do we get the rest?" and David was like, "Oh, it will show up in two months."
Cruise: When we ask when he's going to have it, "Oh, a couple months." And there it was. So thank you, David Koepp. Thank you, sir.
You have both worked with children before. ... Dakota Fanning ... is just unbelievable in this movie. What are your impressions of working with her? Did she remind you of Drew Barrymore from E.T.? Tom, you worked with her. What impressed you most?
Spielberg: I think we all agree that Dakota Fanning has a gift. And she has an incredible extraordinary gift that, thank goodness, she does not question, and she actually doesn't know how to answer questions about it. And that is also her gift: That she's unaware of how talented she is and how quickly she understands a situation in a sequence, how quickly she sizes it up, measures it against how she would really react in a real situation, and tells you the truth every time I say "Action!" She just tells you the truth. It's extraordinary to see how consistent she is in her pure, unadulterated honesty.
Cruise: And she's just lovely. You look at the sequence, the Beach
Boys sequence [in which Cruise sings a Beach Boys song as a lullaby to Fanning]. You can hold her in two-shots and masters. She's just enormously talented and is so much fun to work with. ... I like surprises. We'd do that stuff. And Steven and I had so much fun. It was her birthday, and we had the pink balloons, and we had the Coldstone Ice Cream. You know, because you can have a laugh with her, too. ... You see it. You just see that very unique talent. ... And also, she's just really ... She's a terrific person. She has impeccable manners, too. She'd write thank-you letters. ...
Spielberg: She'd communicate with all my kids. All my kids are huge fans of hers. My little girls were sending her notes, and she was answering every one of them and sending them back through me. And we had a whole mail service between my two youngest and Dakota the whole movie. It was amazing.
But I got to tell a story. She also knows how to play with this guy. ... So we'll be ready to do a scene, and we'd all be blocked, and Dakota would say, "Is it OK if I stand right here?" [Mimes inserting her head in front of Tom. Tom bursts out laughing.]
Cruise: I know, I know!
Spielberg: So this little routine begins ...
Cruise: We start teasing each other, you know?
Spielberg: Dakota has her close-up, and the camera's right here, and I say "Action!" And Tom just puts his head like that, you know? ... They had this little sparring thing throughout the entire movie, which was so delightful to experience that. ...
And you talk to her like we talk to each other. You don't talk to her like a child. And, by the way, I'd never talk to children as though they were children, especially in my professional work. I never talked to Drew like she was 7 years old. ... There are certain kids that are so smart, they understand what you're saying. You don't have to perform for them at their level.
Tom, are you stung or puzzled by criticism that love and religion might have distracted from the movie in your exuberance?
Cruise: No. [Laughs.] No. ... Listen, I really don't pay attention to it. It doesn't bother me, you know what I'm saying? There's really nothing to say, outside of I just don't pay attention to it. I do my work. I live my life. And ... it's never affected anything before. It doesn't matter, you know? What do I do? I make my movies. And I live my life in the best way that I feel that I can. And I can't control what people are going to say or do. They're going to say and do what they want, and the thing is, it's not ever going to change how I live my life. Thank you.
Tom, every cast member says that you have unbelievable energy. Is there a secret to your boundless energy?
Cruise: My interest in life, quite honestly. I'm interested in life. I'm someone who will get excited about living. I'm interested in people. There are things in my life, in Scientology and tools that I've spoken about before, that help me to overcome barriers and problems, and that has been extraordinary in my life. I have the privilege of doing something that I love. I do see it as a privilege. I'm truly proud of the life that I have.
Spielberg: And I have half his energy, and I'm still going strong.
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Also in this issue:
The cast and crew of Undead
