The experimental actor who constantly inspires Steven Spielberg: “He lives for that”
On the surface, there wouldn’t appear to be much room for improvisation on a Steven Spielberg production, with the director marshalling productions that feature hundreds of cast and crew members and an intricate number of moving parts that must be working in perfect harmony at all times.
Even in his smaller and more intimate productions, which don’t boast showstopping action sequences and bountiful visual effects like The Fabelmans, Lincoln, The Post, or Bridge of Spies, going off-book is hardly par for the course in films based on true stories or inspired by Spielberg’s own life.
While the three-time Academy Award-winning icon has spent decades testing the boundaries of what cinema is capable of achieving, he’s never been regarded as a particularly experimental filmmaker. He’s one of the best ever, no question, but at the same time, it’s impossible to imagine Spielberg going full-blown verite, avant-garde, or surrealist at this stage in his career.
That being said, working with one of the biggest stars in the business encouraged Spielberg to adopt a looser approach than he’d grown accustomed to, with the pair deciding the screenplay was more of a semi-rigid outline than something to be repeated verbatim and performed exactly as written.
If there’s one person in the industry who could convince Spielberg that an expensive sci-fi epic was the perfect time and place to add some on-the-spot flourishes into the mix at a moment’s notice, then it was obviously going to be an actor named Tom. It’s not Hanks, though, but Minority Report star Cruise.
“He’s very experimental, and he’s very prone to wanting to have the director say, ‘Let’s go off what you prepared and memorised, and let’s go off-script and try something new,'” Spielberg told the BBC. “He loves that. He lives for that. If there’s a day goes by where I haven’t given Tom something that wasn’t in the screenplay, he’ll say, ‘Where’s my prize?'”
The first-time collaboration between the most famous director in the business and Hollywood’s ultimate megastar carried plenty of expectation, with Minority Report living up to its lofty billing by delivering a thought-provoking, pulse-pounding, and complex crime thriller that asks big questions about human nature and the notions of destiny and free will.
The latter was just as important to Cruise offscreen, with Spielberg admitting that “Tom was always encouraging me to explore along with him and find things for him to that were new, and he hadn’t done before,” which gave the director’s creative energies a jolt when he was placed on the spot by an A-lister and challenged to dream up a scene, set piece, or exchange of dialogue that would provide the leading man with a brand new challenge.
Based on the many innovative set pieces in Minority Report, Spielberg was evidently ready, willing, and able to meet the challenge.
