Why Tom Cruise photoshopped himself into a picture with David Fincher: “I want to be in that”
Throw a dart at a wall of great directors, and you’ll likely land on someone who has worked with Tom Cruise. He’s been in two different Spielberg movies, Minority Report and War of the Worlds, appeared in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money alongside Paul Newman, challenged everybody’s thoughts on him with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and starred in Eyes Wide Shut, the final film of one Stanley Kubrick.
One great filmmaker he’s never worked alongside is David Fincher. The modern master of the thriller has his own impressive array of collaborators and almost added Cruise to his roster when he was originally slated to make Mission: Impossible III. Production delays eventually led to JJ Abrams taking over the project, but the possibility of a Fincher/Cruise collaboration remains a tantalising prospect.
When this was still the plan, Fincher flew out to Japan to visit his potential star on the set of The Last Samurai. We know this because of Ed Zwick, the movie’s director, who relayed this story in his memoirs and on The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast.
“At one point, I happen to turn around. And it’s almost like a joke,” he said. “There’s Cameron Crowe. There is Steven Spielberg. There’s David Fincher. And I’m sitting in my [director] chair, and they’re like, all behind me. It’s like, ‘Oh – hey. I didn’t want to feel too self-conscious about this. But whoa.” Spielberg’s connection to Cruise has already been explained, while Crowe directed him in the 2001 film Vanilla Sky.
The Amblin founder then wandered off, but Crowe and Fincher stuck around, leading to a great opportunity to capture this historic moment on film. “The great part of the story is that the unit photographer saw us all together and said, ‘Hey, can I just take your picture?’” Zwick continued. “So there’s a picture of all of us – except Tom had been called away to do something.”
Zwick, Crowe, and Fincher. That’s already an impressive array of people, with a combined 7 Oscar victories between them. Unfortunately, none of those belong to Fincher, but that’s by-the-by. The photo was about to get even more star-studded because that’s when Cruise discovered that it had been taken without his involvement. “He heard about the picture later, and he saw it. And he said, ‘I want to be in that picture!’ So we shot Tom and then photoshopped him into the picture.” That’s exactly what happened; Cruise is ‘in’ the photo, grinning wildly in the background.
The Last Samurai stars Cruise as an American soldier serving in Japan during the late 19th Century. It generated a lot of discussion from Asian film fans, who criticised its depictions of Japanese stereotypes, but it was widely considered to be a triumph. “We’d been in Japan for a couple of weeks,” Zwick said of the filming process. “We shot at a beautiful monastery for about two weeks. Then, we came back to Warner Brothers, and we built this whole stage.” This is what drew the famous faces to the set. “Word gets around when the interesting things are happening,” Zwick said. “People were going to look at this old Hollywood recreation of the [19th century Tokyo] street.”
Was this photoshop incident an insight into Cruise’s fragile ego? Or a genuine moment of a Hollywood megastar getting FOMO? Who knows, but the story is hilarious nonetheless.
