“I couldn’t believe it”: the Tom Cruise-produced independent movie he called stunning
Independent cinema and Tom Cruise don’t exactly go hand-in-hand, with the A-list megastar having spent the last four decades working almost exclusively with major studios on major projects.
He doesn’t produce a lot of movies that he isn’t starring in, either, but there have been rare exceptions to the rule. In fact, the Top Gun and Mission: Impossible figurehead has only lent his name to six features where he didn’t play an on-camera role, and even at that there are simple reasons behind several of them.
Cruise executive produced Alejandro Amenábar’s supernatural horror The Others because then-wife Nicole Kidman played the lead role, while his friendship with Cameron Crowe saw him do much the same on Elizabethtown, and his close bond with writer and filmmaker Robert Downe encouraged him to produce his directorial efforts Without Limits and Ask the Dust.
That leaves the biographical drama Shattered Glass with Hayden Christensen and Joe Carnahan’s debut crime thriller Narc as the outliers. In the case of the latter, Cruise explained to the BBC that he was so blown away by the rookie’s work behind the camera that he felt compelled to get involved.
“I just thought it was a stunning film. That’s all I can say,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it was a first-time director. When you watch this movie, you just see that Joe Carnahan is a great filmmaker and I think the performances are stunning. I sat down with Joe, and he said, ‘Will you help us out?’. So I said, ‘OK, I’ll help you out.'”
Narc follows Jason Patric’s undercover narcotics cop, who returns from suspension to investigate the murder of a young officer. Teaming up with Ray Liotta’s rogue officer hellbent on avenging the death of his partner, he gets drawn into a dark and dangerous world where nothing is quite as it seems.
Cruise revealed that after he saw the film, he was “calling friends and telling them about the movie” to try and lend an assist. Narc premiered at Sundance in 2002 and almost went direct to video until he and producing partner Paula Wagner were so taken by it that they came aboard as executive producers.
As a result, Cruise’s long-time home studio Paramount ending up striking a multi-million dollar deal to have it released on the big screen, where it would go on to earn more than $12million in ticket sales. It was far from being a resounding smash hit, but it may have never seen the inside of a multiplex at all were it not for an industry power player shouting its praises from the rooftops.
To give an indication of just how enamoured Cruise was with Narc, it was the first time ever he’d produced, or executive produced a feature from a filmmaker he didn’t have a pre-existing personal or professional relationship with, putting Carnahan in a class all of his own.
