‘An infinite trailer that is all effects, no affect.’
Richard Schickel, TIME MAGAZINE
‘It's the worst kind of convoluted thriller -- it can never unravel satisfactorily because there's nothing simple at its center, just more confusion.’
Mick LaSalle, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
‘The film is painful in at least one way - its waste of good actors’"
Stanley Kauffmann, THE NEW REPUBLIC
‘Humorless, charmless and flat.’
Hal Hinson , THE WASHINGTON POST
There was a little consolation in a positive reaction from The New York Times – ‘A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.’ Stephen Holden - but Times readers barely coincided with Tom’s audience.
The film was released on a Wednesday in 3012 theatres to run up to the Memorial Day holiday the following Monday. By midnight on Wednesday Paramount knew they had an enormous hit on their hands, the computers reporting takings in excess of $10m. The film would go on to do $181m domestic and $275m overseas ($27m in the UK) making a worldwide gross of $456m. ‘GoldenEye’, Pierce Brosnan’s first Bond film, had received rave reviews six months earlier and, although it was the most successful Bond to date, took $125m less than ‘Mission: Impossible’.
Why then the disparity between the critics and the international public? Many of them approached the film from the wrong angle. The plot was too complex and convoluted for in-depth analysis. What they might have concentrated on was the relationship between Cruise and his public. The one thing they wanted to see him do was overcome insuperable odds and, in this, he gave it to them in spades.
How much went into Cruise’s pocket is hard to estimate. Usually on a movie he might get a twenty-twenty deal: $20m up front and twenty per cent of the gross. But it was a different matter when the star was the co-producer.
The deal is that Paramount would pay for the production costs, prints, marketing and distribution. The gross that is quoted is not the rental that comes back from the cinema owners; they hold on to around 50% of the box-office, sometimes more but usually less in the case of blockbusters.
The split between Cruise-Wagner Company and Paramount would be based on the gross and probably 50-50. But every production contract is different – and secret – although normally a studio writes a window into profit share – say between $86m and $100m - where they would take $15m clear as their undiluted profit. Based on these calculations Tom should have made 17 cents from every gross dollar – more than 70 million dollars.
Nicole, too, had been earning her keep. In late November 1993 she hosted NBC’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ which featured Mike Myers and Christina Ricci. In New York she studied at Lee Strassberg’s Actor’s Studio to add a knowledge of method acting to her Australian classicism. Withstanding competition from Bridget Fonda, Holly Hunter and Jodie Foster, Gus van Sant cast her as the upwardly mobile Suzanne Stone Maretto in ‘To Die For’ – based on the novel by Joyce Maynard and deepened into a black comedy by Buck Henry. Suzanne luxuriates in her fame when she finally makes it onto TV as a weathergirl in her New Hampshire town and finding her husband a hindrance to her new celebrity and knowing divorce might harm her public persona, she gets a younger lover to murder him. The husband, incidentally, was played by Matt Dillon who had had a much larger role than Cruise in ‘The Outsiders’.
Slightly worryingly Nicole confessed “I identified totally with Suzanne because I was pretty naughty when I was growing up. I went through my rebellious teenager turn-my-mother’s-hair-gray stage. I stayed out all night. I was a terror.”
Tom took Isabella to Toronto where the film was being shot and, after lunch with Nicole, they would go off and enjoy the city sights. Canadians proved less intrusive than their southern neighbours.
The film was not a huge hit but Kidman was, winning the Best Actress Award from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Broadcast Film Critics, the London Critics’ Circle, and the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical. She was also nominated Most Desirable Female in the MTV Awards. She was never to equal her husband’s achievement in actually winning this but she did win MTV’s Best Kiss for ‘Moulin Rouge’. This is a shared prize and the other recipient was Ewen McGregor.
Cumulatively these accolades and her Saturday Night Live helped her beat Sandra Bullock to the part of Dr, Chase Meridian in Joel Schumacher’s ‘Batman Forever’. Tom’s sparring partner from ‘Top Gun’, Val Kilmer, had taken over the cape from Michael Keaton and now became Nicole’s sparring partner as they indulged in fiery boxing matches – something that was not likely to have been taught to young ladies at the Actor’s Studio. The film had a captive audience, generated $183m in the States alone and if you didn’t know who Nicole Kidman was by then, you did now.
She acknowledges this leap forward in her professional fortune. “The breakthrough was a combination of ‘To Die For’ and ‘Batman Forever.’ It was a good one-two punch. People would come up and compliment me on my work in both films. That was nice – but, of course, they would always get around to asking about Tom.’
One reason Nicole had had something of a movie gap after ‘My Life’ was due to tragedy. She had been obliged to audition by the New Zealand director, Jane Campion, for the leading role of Isabel Archer in Henry James’s ‘The Portrait Of A Lady.’ The two women knew each other since Campion had done most of her work in Sydney but still saw part of Kidman as a television actress in the medical series ‘A Country Practice’ back home. Campion was at the apogee of her career. She became the first woman to win Le Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with ‘The Piano’ and went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and an Oscar Nomination as Best Director.
So Campion wanted her to audition and also wanted to hang out with her to see if they would get along. “And then I had to wait two agonizing weeks,” Kidman recalls. “So nerve racking. But I really felt I’d earned the part. I’d read the book when I was twenty-two and felt quite connected to the character.”
Campion eventually offered her the part but then discovered she was pregnant and the movie was delayed. And further delayed when her child died in the first weeks of its life. I met her, heavily pregnant, in Cannes that year and the tragedy threw into perspective the artificial world of the movies.
Although Tom was in mid-‘Mission: Impossible’, he and Nicole thought it was time to adopt another child. The boy was born to a single African-American mother in New York on 17 January 1995 and passed to Nicole three weeks later. He became Conor Kidman Cruise. Nicole took him with her and Isabella to Tom’s location in Prague where the Hotel Praha still uses their presence there as part of its promotion. In fact there had been no hotel in Prague luxurious enough for Hollywood royalty, so an enterprising young Czech, Martin Lukes, took this former Communist Party hotel and dressed it like a film set with carpets and furniture and paintings borrowed from surrounding castles.
The Cruises had brought their own American chef but Tom would sometimes cook pasta for his entire entourage. Lukes was able to advise him on the ways of the Czechs. When Tom wanted to go shopping he was about to set out with his usual retinue of bodyguards but Martin advised him he would not be bothered if they merely walked along together. People did not expect to see Tom Cruise in Prague. And so it was - although the bodyguards followed stealthily twenty yards behind. Tom would occasionally attend production meetings wearing Conor in a baby harness around his neck.
For the Pinewood shoot he rented just about the biggest house in Holland Park in West London – twelve bedrooms, staff quarters, indoor swimming pool, gymnasium, everything that his per diem could buy. Isabella went to the local school and her parents frequented a pub in Chelsea’s King’s Road where Tom could play pool. They also roller-bladed in nearby Hyde Park, Tom sometimes pushing Conor’s pram. With the world market for such snaps being worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, paparazzi stalked them like snipers.
Cruise and Wagner were
eager to capitalise on the immense success of ‘Mission: Impossible’ with a sequel, even turn it into a franchise. While Tom earned an honest dollar in ‘Jerry Maguire’ and ‘Magnolia’, the start date of ‘Mission Impossible: 11’ was put back by the everlasting shoot on Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. More on all of these anon.
Maybe the wait was beneficial. With Pierce Brosnan in ‘GoldenEye’ the Bond series had been reinvigorated after a six-year gap. The public had an appetite for a superhero without the need to dress him as a bat, spider or wear his underpants on the outside. They also liked a lone hero – Clint Eastwood rarely had much backup – so the Impossible Mission Force was diluted to Luther and Richard. William Goldman has always counselled that you should give the best lines to the star – and the best action pieces.
Also, another influence had infiltrated the American mainstream action picture – not a recent one. It came from ancient China. At the time of the Zhou dynasty which lasted from about 1027 BC to 221 BC – the country’s longest lasting dynasty - the Emperor was, in fable, defended by the Wuxia – ‘wu’ meaning war, ‘xia’ meaning chivalrous knight errant. They were flying swordsmen in possession of more conventional martial arts skills. Early silent Chinese cinema realized the visual appeal of such warriors and the first Wuxia film, ‘The Burning of Red Lotus Monastery’, was made in 1928.
Martial arts movies were exported to the west through the Hong Kong star, Jackie Chan, and the Chinese director, John Woo, who made ‘Broken Arrow’ with John Travolta. In 1999 the two Wachowski brothers from Chicago translated the powers of the Wuxia into an artificial future with the hugely popular ‘Matrix.’
Cruise knew his action sequences had now to match this new generation so, while not actually assuming the power of flight – although he did reprise his spider-like lowering into enemy territory – hired John Woo as director of ‘Mission Impossible: 11’ and, himself, became proficient in kick-boxing, flying scissors and other martial movements.
He was determined to move on from the first film. “I never looked on ‘Mission Impossible: 11’ as a sequel in making it. I never wanted it to hinge on anything. When you look at the style John Woo brought to it. He said: ‘I want to make this an action love story.’ Hopefully we’ve imbued it with a different kind of tome and character. It still embraces the elements of a mission that’s impossible. But it’s more character rich and all the colour tones in the picture are earth, wind and fire.”
Paradoxically the critics of ‘Mission: Impossible’ had attacked Cruise’s lack of cold-blooded phlegm and unemotional logic that characterized the television serial. Not only did he ignore them; he shot off in a different direction.
He didn’t have any women on his team so he needed to recruit a love interest caught between the bad guy and himself. Kidman suggested Thandie Newton, the half-Zimbabwean, half-British actress, a protégé of John Duigan who had directed Nicole in the Vietnam mini-series and cast her with Newton in ‘Flirting’ (1991).
Tom was entranced by the Cambridge-educated actress and suggested to Robert Towne that he craft a part around her. Although the writers came up with well-honed dialogue for the moment the two meet to show their mutual attraction, Woo managed to convey it silently on a series of glances, something he says he borrowed from the film of ‘West Side Story’.
Equally the plot needed to be pinioned around the action scenes that John Woo could offer up to Towne and the Star Trek writer, Ronald D. Moore.
There was another essential as Tom Cruise recalls: “When you are making one of these movies you sit down and say: ‘What do I think is cool?’ I love motorcycles.” (True - whenever possible Cruise conjours up a pair of designer shades and jumps on a motorbike in his movies, the James Dean of the 80s and 90s.)
Also Cruise reveals an alarming, but perhaps prescient, part of his childhood. “As a kid, when I got to the edge of a cliff I wanted to jump off. I didn’t want to kill myself; I wanted to fly. I never had a problem with heights. I love climbing.”
So he did his own mountaineering climbing up and then hanging from a mountain ledge in Dead Horse Point in Utah fifteen hundred feet above the ground. “I do it because it’s fun. I’m not a great mountain climber but things like that excite me.” Woo filmed him from a helicopter. “John said: ‘Just look at the view. Look at the beauty. Look how awesome this world is.’ So that’s what I’m thinking.” Stars do not live by their fingertips alone so, in fact, he had a safety wire attached to him which would later by computered out of the finished shots.
With these three factors and the Cruise factor, the creation of ‘Mission Impossible; 11’ was a perfect Hollywood example of the cart leading the horse.
Despite the huge success of the first film, Paramount chiefs insisted on seven million being cut from the budget. Paul Hitchcock, the film’s English executive producer, came up with the simple solution of losing the Spanish location and shooting in the Australian outback for Spain. This made sense but everyone was wary about Tom’s reaction. Not only was he looking forward to a sojourn in Spain, he wanted the prestige of his production shooting on three continents.
So a meeting was arranged at Paramount on Melrose Avenue to try and settle the matter. Unfortunately when the participants turned up, Tom was not there. He was in New York. Although a two-way video conference had been requested it turned out to be one-way – Tom could see the producers and executives but they could not see him – a bit like Charlie in ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ It added to the general nervousness. “No Tom”, and the whole movie could go down the pan.
Before the main business of the meeting could be put to him, Lizzy Gardiner, the chirpy Australian costume designer who had won an Oscar for ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ and drawn further attention to herself by collecting it in a dress made, apparently, of American Express Cards, asked to go first as she had a plane to catch. Tom said he wanted to wear his hair a little longer for the movie and, perhaps inspired by his Eastern director, described a more flowing outfit. Lizzy, in her reaction, spoke with Australian bluntness. “If you dress like that you’ll look like a donkey’s bollocks,” she said.
An icy hush fell on those assembled. Nobody, but nobody, had spoken to Tom Cruise like that since he had become the world’s number one star. The silence seemed eternal.
“Well, how would you like me to look?” came the disembodied voice.
“Like Steve McQueen in ‘Bullitt’ she said. “Designer clothes but not new. They’ve worn in.”
More silence. Then – “Yeah, not a bad idea.”
After that exchange, dumping Spain was dealt with expeditiously. The star was probably still envisaging himself as Steve McQueen.
The plot of ‘Mission: Impossible 11’ was simple in its explanation, complex in its exposition. Scientists in Sydney have genetically created a disease called Chimera for which there is initially no cure. When one is invented - Bellerophon - the boffin taking it to the States thinks he is being is escorted by Ethan. But no, it is a renegade IMF man, Sean (Dougray Scott), who rips off the serum and then rips off his latex Ethan mask before parachuting away. Ethan, ascending a perpendicular peak, gets his ‘mission’ statement from Anthony Hopkins through the legs of some sunglasses which he prudently pitches away as they self-destruct in five seconds.
Now he has to find the Chimera plant, the profitable anti-agent, Bellerophone and Sean who has brutally injected his ex and Ethan’s future girlfriend Nyah (Thandie Newton) with the disease. She goes AWOL with just five minutes to live (Hitchcock’s ticking clock – a most effective way of building tension.)
As Anthony Hopkins, an uncredited mission controller, says: “It’s not Mission: Difficult, Mr. Hunt, it’s Mission: Impossible. Should be walk in the park for you.”
It proves more a ride in the park as Etha and Sean have a biker battle on Triumph Speed and Daytona motorbikes like the horseback knight-errants of yore. “When you see what John Woo does with motorcycles!” Cruise enthuses.
“I want to scare
the audience,” he adds. “I want to thrill them. John Woo watched the way I walked. It’s just raw action. Throughout the fight scenes, when things come dangerously close, that’s all real. We had a great stunt co-ordinator. I just dislocated my finger once and that was it. I never really got injured. The exciting part of acting – I don’t know how else to explain it – are those moments when you surprise yourself.”
Plus the Wuxian mastery of slow-motion action interpolated in the fights with double-cuts to reprise certain takes and the sense of weightlessness as Ethan and Sean go for each other’s throats.
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 20