Vanilla Sky – Calgary Herald

Cruzin’ along: ‘They’re just funny,’ says director Crowe of his romantic Vanilla Sky co-stars

Tom Cruise was glad-handing everyone at a press conference in Chicago recently. Much to the surprise of his handlers, he leapt off the stage after taking questions and began rubbing shoulders with reporters.

Yup, just a regular guy, except that anyone who is granted an interview with him has to sign a two-page contract restricting the rights to its use.

Woody Allen is the only other person I’ve ever interviewed who requires such a contract. Allen hates to see himself on television, so you can run the interview anywhere except New York or Los Angeles. I guess he’s not planning a ski trip to the Rockies any time soon.

In person, Cruise is charming and polite. He greets everyone he meets with enthusiasm and a dazzling smile. When he and Penelope Cruz, his girlfriend and Vanilla Sky co-star, were walking the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere this past Monday, I watched Cruise gallantly whip off his jacket and cover her bare shoulders to protect her from a chilly breeze.

As he made his way down the hallway at The Essex House in New York to do his TV interviews last week, he ducked his head into Cruz’s room with an “ola” and gave her a hug.

You can watch Cruise and Cruz in much more intimate scenes in Vanilla Sky, which opens today, but she shrugs that off.

“It’s one more day of working, and those scenes sometimes are a little more strange than the rest of the days, but you go through it as another day of working.”

Cruz is a natural beauty. Her skin is absolutely flawless and she requires very little makeup. She is soft-spoken and guarded, speaking English with a thick Spanish accent.

She says there was a lot of teasing going on during shooting. Director Cameron Crowe was especially vexing.

“They just made up Lupe (a nickname for me) one day and just kept doing it and doing it. And now most of my friends call me like that and they have changed my name. That name, I think it’s a good name, but it comes from Guadalupe, which is not my name. And I told them this doesn’t make any sense, but they kept doing it.”

One of the recurring questions in Vanilla Sky is what makes people happy? Cruz says for her the answer is love and work.

“The people that I love. And I love also working. I think there are moments that you recognize when they come back. At the time you may miss them, when you you are really in that moment, experiencing it. You can have everything and not see it.”

Crowe says he was oblivious to the romance developing between Cruise and Cruz.

“I knew that they got along. And I knew that they were both funny. That was great because I like humour on the set. Some people are kind of intimidated by Tom Cruise when they are acting with him. Never Penelope, and it was always about the characters and what the scene was gonna be. And they — they’re just funny.”

Both Cruise and Crowe were nominated for Oscars when they worked together on 1996’s Jerry Maguire, but Cruise’s movies aren’t Crowe’s toughest assignments.

“Almost Famous was tougher because it was so personal. There’s my mom standing behind me, while I’m directing an actress playing my mom. This was tough because there was some really challenging drama to do in the movie.”

Courtesy of the Calgary Herald – Kirstie McLellan – December 14, 2001