The only director who refused to make a Tom Cruise movie: “Look, it’s just not for me”
When Tom Cruise approaches a director and asks them to shoot one of his movies, they almost always say yes, because he’s Tom Cruise, and Tom Cruise generally gets whatever he wants.
It isn’t always a match made in heaven, though, with David Fincher and Joe Carnahan both signing on to helm Mission: Impossible III before dropping out, citing creative differences. Since Cruise was the producer, leading man, and most powerful person on the production, it’s easy to infer who those creative differences were with.
Befitting his position as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Cruise had directorial approval on everything he’s involved in as a producer. It’s easy to tell who he enjoys working with, too, since Christopher McQuarrie, Doug Liman, and Joseph Kosinski are the only filmmakers he’s worked with more than once in the last 20 years.
Even in the case of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, all it took was one meeting between the four-time Academy Award-winning auteur and the A-list megastar before the announcement was made that Cruise would take top billing and produce the director’s first English-language film since The Revenant.
That said, most rules tend to have exceptions. In Cruise’s case, he was completely taken aback that he’d been rejected because he’d known the filmmaker in question since he was a teenager, and they’d recently wrapped production on their first collaboration, which was an unqualified success on all fronts.
By the mid-1990s, the diminutive actor was already well established as the industry’s most bankable name, but he was missing that one thing that separates regular movie stars from certified superstars: a potentially career-defining, recurring role in an ongoing and incredibly lucrative franchise.
For his first picture as a producer, Cruise sought to remedy that by informing Paramount that a big-screen adaptation of the TV series, Mission: Impossible, would be the ideal first project for the company he’d freshly founded alongside his creative partner, Paula Wagner. He even knew who he wanted behind the camera, only for them to turn him down.
“I originally went to Sydney Pollack, who was my friend since I was a kid, you know, 18,” he informed BFI. “And I asked him, we’d done The Firm, and I spent a lot of time trying to convince him to do it, he finally had me over to his house, and he said, ‘Look, kid, it’s just not for me. It’s not what I want to do next’. And I was so bummed.”
Pollack doesn’t immediately jump out as the ideal candidate to direct a big-budget espionage blockbuster, but neither did Brian De Palma at the time. Much to Cruise’s devastation, the two-time Oscar winner wasn’t interested, and it would have been fascinating to see how the brains behind Jeremiah Johnson, Tootsie, and Out of Africa would have fared behind the camera.
