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| Actor Tom Cruise waves to photographers as he
arrives on the red carpet for the premiere of the film "Collateral"
in Los Angeles August 2, 2004.
(Reuters) | It had to happen. Tom
Cruise has fallen out of Hollywood's good
graces and joined the ranks of the industry's unsavory characters. He's gone gray
and grizzled. That
blinding , boyish grin, his
trademark the last two decades, now is reserved for moments of morbidly
twisted humor.
Cruise has transformed from hit
maker to hit
man in "Collateral. It's his first turn as an all-around
bad guy, a contract killer who hijacks a taxi and forces the driver (Jamie
Foxx) to ferry him from hit to hit on a one-night spree across Los Angeles.
It's a major sea change when an era's biggest leading man turns to the
dark side after playing the action hero, the dashing romancer and the
crusader for justice.
But the 42-year-old Cruise shrugs it
off as just another make-believe soul that grabbed him.
"I really dug the story and dug the character. I just choose roles
where I go, 'OK, this is interesting, I've never played this before,'"
Cruise said in an interview.
"I look for characters that I feel are going to be challenging. This is
definitely right out there. A very, very complex character, playing this
anti-social personality."
Though he has earned three Academy Award nominations, Cruise has yet to
rise to the level of peers such as Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Sean
Penn as serious actors. "Collateral" is a reminder that Cruise has more
depth and willingness to go to dark places than his heroic turns would
imply. But, as Cruise points out, it's not like everyone he's played
before is a candidate for sainthood.
"If you look at it, I really play a lot of different kinds of
characters," Cruise said, and he chooses them for their creative appeal,
not to fit the mold of his public image.
Cruise's killer Vincent, with salt-and-pepper hair and scruffy beard, stalks the night with absolute bravado and
amorality. He's a perversely
likable villain akin to Washington's corrupt cop in "Training Day" or
Anthony Hopkins' serial killer Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the
Lambs."
In Cruise's words, Vincent is "rough
trade in a good suit."
"If Tom had played this guy a couple other times, I wouldn't have been
enthused about the notion of
it," said "Collateral" director Michael Mann ("The Insider," "Ali").
"But I hadn't seen him do anything like this character, and I know he
could, there's no doubt about it. So it presented itself as a great
opportunity to have Tom play it, and it's such a complex character in his
incarnation of him."
No stranger to gunplay in movies, Cruise had to learn a whole new style
of handling firearms, training with live rounds on a police firing range
for the first time. Mann had him repeat the art of assembling a gun and
snapping off rounds until the
weapons became another appendage of his body and the action became second
nature, Cruise said.
He also had to get into the head space of a professional killer, doing
mental drills to case out targets and bystanders, memorize details and
study locations for their layouts and exits.
"Just looking at life from that perspective everywhere you are," Cruise
said. "You get in a room like this, you go, all right, I've got three
points of egress, and I know the second I walk in, you're facing here, OK,
and no one's around there. This is the way these guys think.
"Just looking at the moral code, looking in terms of what I know about
life, he's the antithesis of
who I am and how I feel about people and humanity," Cruise said.
The movie originally had been scheduled for release next May, but
distributor Paramount pushed it back to late June, a date that would be
hard to make now. Cruise has not yet settled on a new director, and
shooting, which was supposed to begin in early autumn, has been delayed
for at least a few weeks.
(Agencies)
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Updated: 2004-08-03 15:28