Vanilla Sky – Chicago Tribune

Now Its Personal

The contradiction that is Tom Cruise may be most apparent in the current issue of Vanity Fair. One of the spread’s full-page photos of him — the only one in which he’s wearing a shirt — is accompanied by the large-print quote, “Honestly, people should mind their own business. . . . My personal life isn’t here to sell newspapers.”

Or, one would assume, magazines — although the comment comes in an article touted on the beefcake cover as “Tom Cruise: The Naked Truth,” with an introduction that reads, in part, “Evgenia Peretz gets him talking about the breakup of his marriage, the Scientology factor, and his current leading ladylove, Penelope Cruz.”

If mixed signals are being sent here, the 39-year-old actor isn’t complaining. “Here’s the thing: I’m talking about it,” he said while in Chicago last Thursday (the day the magazine hit the newsstands) to promote his new film “Vanilla Sky,” which opens Friday. “When you look at something [printed elsewhere], they just keep taking and twisting and running a story where they don’t care what I say about it. There’s no interviews with Nic or myself or other people; they just take it and spin it and twist it.”

Nic, of course, is Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s wife of 10 years until their split earlier this year. No, this story is not going to delve into why the couple broke up because Cruise is right: It’s none of our business. The explosion of entertainment media has fed an unseemly notion that reporters have the right to ask celebrities personal questions that they wouldn’t ask their own friends.

Yet if you tuned into “Access: Hollywood” a couple of weeks ago, you would have seen Cruise being asked whether he intends to marry again, and he flashed that multimillion-dollar smile of his while offering a variation on the answer “maybe.” And you may recall that Tom and Nicole — yes, we’re somehow on a first-name basis with them — weren’t exactly press shy during the happy years.

A People magazine cover story from June 8, 1992 declared the pair “Crazy for Each Other” in an update on their 18-month-old marriage.

“Yes, we like being together 24 hours a day,” Cruise was quoted in the 1992 piece, though he had made the comments on “Oprah” and not to the People reporter.

“He doesn’t generate the beginning article on `Here’s how great my marriage is,’ ” “Vanilla Sky” director Cameron Crowe said after sitting in on this reporter’s interview with Cruise. “It’s like they get him on his way into something that he’s doing to support what he loves, which is producing movies and being in movies, and they take that and blow that into a cover piece.”

Thus people have followed Cruise’s career and life as if it’s just another movie or serial. They’ve experienced his divorce from Mimi Rogers and subsequent marriage to Kidman, the couple’s adoption of two children and their grueling two-year shoot together on Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Now that the soap opera has heated up with his break-up with Kidman and his publicist-confirmed romance with “Vanilla Sky” co-star Cruz, it’s no surprise people feel they have the right to tune in.

Does Cruise look back and think he did anything to open doors to his personal life that now can’t be closed?

“I don’t discuss really anything,” Cruise said softly. “What occurs in my personal life between us is personal. It really is between Nic and myself. . . . And just because I discuss something one day doesn’t mean I necessarily have to or feel obligated to discuss it further. A lot of things that are printed are interpretation at times or secondhand, thirdhand stuff.”

Easy access?

Still, people have had access to Cruise’s life in a way that they haven’t with actors such as, say, Robert De Niro or Dustin Hoffman. Why?

“I have no idea,” Cruise said. “I’m just living my life and doing my work. I have no plan with regard to that.”

“Is it because of the characters?” chimed in Crowe, who was relaxing on the floor alongside the couch where Cruise was attentively perched with his elbows on his knees. “I wonder that sometimes. Like `Rain Man,’ the guy in `Rain Man’ — you ache for that guy, who travels one inch. You know him.

“So then the movie’s over, and you want to know him more, and all that’s available is articles or the opportunity to read an interview, so the interviewer wants to get in there in a more personal way because people connected with that guy more. Some actors that have played those off-putting or challenging characters that aren’t emotional, they get to stay on the movie screen, you know what I mean?”

“I don’t have perspective on it,” Cruise said. “I don’t think of my life that way.”

“Musicians that have touched me personally, I do want to know more about personally,” continued Crowe, whom Cruise tapped to direct “Vanilla Sky” after their positive experience together on “Jerry Maguire.”

Cruise can say he lacks a plan, but he at least makes an effort to maintain control. He, Crowe and Cruz were accompanied to Chicago by Hollywood’s most formidable publicist — Pat Kingsley, who has represented Cruise for years. At a press conference for local media, still cameras were barred despite the presence of TV cameras (hence the reporter/artist’s rendering on the cover of this section), and although Cruise remained unfailingly affable without once rolling his eyes at a question (the same can’t be said of many A-list stars), he also never gave the impression of letting down his guard.

Sharing with the public

In the interview Cruise said he learned early in his career that his personal life was not solely his own.

“It slowly dawned on me,” he said. “I remember the Rolling Stone article where my father was interviewed before he passed away [in 1984], and when I was told that, I was taken aback, like, `Whoa!’ I didn’t even know that was going to happen . . . .

“It’s funny. When you’re a young actor, it’s a strange place, because I realized people were trying to define who I was before I could really define who I was. . . . I look at these guys, and I can see all of the leeches and the bloodsuckers that are trying to come in and get a piece. All your `friends.’ So there’s a lot of lessons to be learned, and I just really stuck true to what I wanted to do and kept it all about my work.”

At the same time, Cruise doesn’t convey nostalgia for the days before anyone expected him to share his life.

“The thing is, my personal life, I’ve got nothing to hide, so I don’t care,” he said. “I think that at times my life is probably so boring to them that they’ve got to make things up. At this stage you don’t spend too much time worrying about it. You fight what you can. There’s a certain point at which you’ve got to slap people on the wrist and say, `Hey, man, come on. You guys are getting a little crazy.'”

(The publications and individuals targeted in his multi-multimillion-dollar lawsuits might quibble with his slap-on-the-wrist characterization, but then again they’re the ones who made and subsequently retracted claims about his sexuality.)

At any rate Cruise’s participation in the publicity machine serves a specific purpose: to whip up business.

“It all goes to one thing: I’m here because when I go to work and I make a picture, I recognize the responsibility that I have — that I’ve been given a privilege of being able to make a film, something that I love, and when I make a film, I have a lot of room and leeway, maybe more than others, in terms of how I can protect the production,” Cruise said. “So with that, my goal is for the studio to make their money back and then some. That’s it.

“If I make money afterwards, that’s good, but it’s not the reason that I make pictures. So part of that is to go out and communicate the ideas of the film, and I’ve got [no problem] with talking about different issues that I feel strongly about or some things about my own life.”

Full-out promotion

Crowe knows firsthand how helpful that Cruise boost can be. “My first experience was `Jerry Maguire’ where he said early on, `Look, I want you to know, I am a kind of guy that doesn’t feel like my work here ends on the last day of filming. It continues. I support the movie around the world, and I just want you to know that.’

“And I never saw the effects like I saw the effects of him going around the world to promote `Jerry Maguire.’ He helped people understand that it was a movie about an American sports agent, but it was also a story about the heart. He did it personally.”

Cruise faces at least as tricky a selling job with “Vanilla Sky,” which the actor helped produce. The movie, what Crowe calls a “cover version” of Alejandro Amenabar’s 1999 Spanish film “Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes),” encompasses elements of romance, thriller and mind-warping science fiction, and it plays off of Cruise’s pretty-boy image by making his character grotesquely yet realistically scarred for much of its duration.

In fact, with the exception of last year’s “Mission: Impossible” sequel “M:I-2,” one could argue that Cruise has been applying his star power to more challenging films than just about any of his superstar peers: 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Magnolia,” which earned him an Oscar nomination for his wickedly funny turn as a misogynistic men’s empowerment guru; and now “Vanilla Sky” and the upcoming science-fiction thriller “Minority Report,” directed by Steven Spielberg and due out next summer.

He also executive produced Amenabar’s English-language debut, “The Others,” which starred Kidman and was the surprise hit of the late summer.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone like that that can do so many things at the same time,” Cruz said in an interview afterward. “He was producing the movie and was in every scene of the movie as an actor, and he’s capable to come back to the moment immediately, come back to the character . . . . He still values that he can do the job that he likes, that he has that opportunity in life. And I like seeing that in him.”

Now that “Vanilla Sky” is about to open, Cruise is back in the headlines, magazines and TV shows, sometimes by choice, sometimes not.

Given that one of Crowe’s key additions to the material from “Open Your Eyes” was the sense of how much popular culture permeates our daily lives, the director didn’t feel equipped to speculate on how the publicity about the Cruise-Cruz pairing might affect the way moviegoers view the film.

“With this movie,” Crowe said, “it’s just more pop culture coming in and slapping us around.”

To Cruise, a fixture of that pop culture, the goal is to keep your eyes on the prize.

“The important thing is you just keep going,” he said. “The important thing is my family’s doing well. I’m able to make the films and push forward, and that other stuff a lot of times, I don’t live and breathe it. I just don’t.”

He would let his guard down on his own time. But now he had a date to keep with “Oprah.”

Courtesy of Chicago Tribune – Mark Caro – December 12, 2001