CANNES, France — It’s been 30 years since Tom Cruise attended the Cannes Film Festival and it’s clear that the festival wants to make up for lost time.
Perhaps that’s why, prior to a talk with the actor billed as a “Rendezvous with Tom Cruise” — which itself took place ahead of the evening premiere of Cruise’s sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” — the festival played a nearly 15-minute-long clip. of Cruise’s filmography, hyperbolically scored on Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra.” As the actor and audience watched from their seats, the movie Cruise hit the action star, Cruise the dramatic thespian, and Cruise the romantic, though the latter section, in which he threw woo on a bevy of leading ladies, notably omitted Cruise’s ex-wife and three-time co-star Nicole Kidman.
“It’s wild to see this reel,” Cruise said after taking the stage. “It’s like living in ten minutes – very trippy.”
Cruise spoke to a largely unmasked crowd in the Salle Claude Debussy, including hundreds of journalists and a team from Cruise’s agent, CAA. “After all we’ve been through, it’s a privilege to see your faces,” he said. He noted that “Top Gun: Maverick” had been detained for two years because of the pandemic, though he declined to show it on a streaming service in the meantime. “Not going to happen!” said Cruise to applause.
The 59-year-old star insists that his films be given a long theatrical window, a mandate that has at times brought him into conflict with studio heads, who are eager to fill their streaming services with star-driven content. And in an era when big names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sandra Bullock have no problem appearing in movies for Netflix, Cruise remains a rare endurance.
“There’s a very specific way to make a movie for the cinema, and I make movies for the big screen,” Cruise says. “I know where they’re going after that and that’s fine.” He said he even called theater owners during the pandemic to reassure them: “Just know we’re making ‘Mission: Impossible’. ‘Top Gun’ is out.”
Cruise is a discursive speaker who jumps from one anecdote before it’s done to land on another, and then another. (Perhaps that would be an esoteric set piece in one of his action films?) But it was striking how often he returned to his formative experience shooting the 1981 film ‘Taps’, where he performed opposite George C. Scott and found himself again. fascinated by the way filmmaking worked. Cruise said that while shooting, he thought, “If I could do this for the rest of my life, I’ll never take it for granted.”
And in the absence of challenging questions from his interlocutor, French journalist Didier Allouch — who was mostly content to laugh at nonsense like “You’re absolutely extraordinary” about his interview subject — Cruise had the freedom to essentially tell his own story of being a determined student of cinema and his fellow man. (And “Cranes,” of course.)
“I was the kind of kid who always wrote goals on the wall of what kinds of movies I liked or what I wanted my life to be, and I worked toward those goals,” Cruise said.
Although the conversation turned more and more towards bland generalities – “I’m interested in people, cultures and adventure,” Cruise said more than once – it sparked a big laugh when Allouch asked why he was so determined to do his own stunts in the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which will soon receive the seventh and eighth episodes shot consecutively.
“Nobody asked Gene Kelly ‘Why are you dancing?'” the star replied.