The Oscar-winning screenwriter who despises “egocentric control freak” Tom Cruise
There’s a reason why saying there are two sides to every coin has become such a cliché, and examples in Hollywood don’t come much better than the bond between Tom Cruise and a pair of Academy Award-winning screenwriters.
In one corner stands Christopher McQuarrie, who claimed ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for The Usual Suspects, and has since become the actor’s go-to guy. After their first collaboration on Jack Reacher, the two have become inseparable, for better or worse.
It’s starting to feel like Cruise doesn’t go anywhere without his faithful sidekick in tow, which is largely because he doesn’t. In fact, prior to Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Digger, one of the rare films he doesn’t have anything to do with, McQuarrie was credited on eight of the A-lister’s previous ten pictures.
Clearly, cinema’s pre-eminent daredevil is more than capable of striking up a solid personal and professional relationship with an Oscar-winning scribe, not that Frederic Raphael, who won ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for 1965’s Darling, would know, since he fucking hates the man’s guts.
Stanley Kubrick hired Raphael in the mid-1990s to lend a helping hand in his long-gestating passion project, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, which eventually made it to the screen as Eyes Wide Shut. He knew that the mercurial auteur would be a handful, since that’s the way he was, but the leading man didn’t do much to endear himself to the writer.
To be fair, Kubrick’s associates didn’t get off lightly, either, with Raphael unleashing a tirade in his book, Last Post. “I have never been called a liar by anyone as I have been by the Harlan clan and by Tom Cruise, an egocentric control freak to whom I have never spoken,” he wrote.
Bizarrely, he accused Jan Harlan and Cruse of having “managed to insert some derogatory stuff in my Wikipedia entry” that was either embellished or untrue, even if it’s hard to imagine one of the industry’s biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful names using their free time to edit a Wiki page with malice in their heart.
“He did offer me a job, though, soon after you finished shooting,” Raphael continued. “The better to have me on a leash, no doubt.” As you can imagine, he wasn’t interested in reuniting with the Mission: Impossible mainstay, and he even managed to have a little dig at Cruise’s penchant for death-defying antics.
“Since Eyes Wide Shut, he has spent a lot of time running for his living, winning fixed fights, or hurtling into space,” the screenwriter scoffed. “Nothing like a helmet for heading off dialogue.” Raphael said that he’d never even spoken to Cruise before, but he obviously must have done something to seriously piss him off to cause him to go off on one like that.
