The “ferocious” filmmaking process Tom Cruise called “brutal”
In the action-heavy world of Hollywood, there stands one man at the top of a hazardous mountain, a man who has no fear when it comes to performing his own stunts. Tom Cruise possesses an unparalleled commitment to the more physical side of the acting profession and has persistently put his body on the line for the good of several of his movies.
Leaping from giant buildings, rappelling from helicopters, cutting through the air on the back of a motorbike: it’s all done in a day’s work for Cruise, and there have been so many remarkable instances throughout his career that have had audience’s hands soaked to the bone as the adrenaline constantly creeps through their veins.
Still, even though Cruise is heralded within the film industry for his dedication to performing his stunts and delivering a sense of believability to proceedings without a stuntman, that doesn’t mean things were always that way. The actor once spoke of his time on the 1992 epic romance movie Far and Away, which ended up being more demanding than he’d initially thought.
“It was ferocious — I didn’t realize it would be so physical,” he once told Rolling Stone. “I really took a pounding. I had knuckles going into my back, my chest. And I really got hit in the ribs a lot. For about a week and a half, I was in constant pain.” Back in 1992, Cruise was not half the action star he is today, so perhaps Far and Away served as his introduction to the physical demands of such roles.
The actor continued, “Once I got on my knees and just said, ‘Let me have a break here, guys.’ So they’d give me some oxygen and a little water, and then I’d go back to work. But boy, was it brutal.” Today, Cruise likely leads the show, and even in his advancing years, he doesn’t need to take the break that he once had to in his younger years in the early 1990s.
Far and Away is Ron Howard’s film with a screenplay from Bob Dolman, based on a story the two had written together. John Williams provided the score, and Cruise stars alongside his then-wife Nicole Kidman as a pair of Irish immigrants seeking a new and prosperous life in America in the 1890s before becoming part of the Land Run of 1893.
Cruise described his character in Howard’s movie: “This guy I play in the movie, he was a dreamer. And maybe if he’d stopped to think about all the repercussions of what he was going to do, maybe he would’ve stopped doing it. But the film’s a hopeful movie, and that’s the way I feel about life. I still remember the days when I’d daydream about becoming an actor and whether I could really do it.”
