Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg go back a long way – all the way back to 2002, at least, when they made Minority Report together. But recently, rumours have flying that Cruise and Spielberg had fallen out over Cruise's big mouth.
All those rumours were put to rest, however, when Tom Cruise – the crafty little joker – snuck up onstage during a Chicago International Film Festival gala honouring Steven Spielberg and managed to steal all the limelight for himself offered a heartfelt tribute to the man who directed the film where Tom Cruise told Dakota Fanning to shut up for two hours, then gave some giant alien robots the lurgies.
Although War Of The Worlds was Tom Cruise's biggest box office hit ever, the way he went about promoting it was slightly offbeat – all of his shouting at Brooke Shields for taking pills that stopped her hurling her newborn baby against a wall and proposing to Katie Holmes in Paris maybe could have overshadowed all of the talk of scary aliens that Steven Spielberg was intent on.
Word was that all of the Tom Cruise War Of The Worlds kerfuffle had driven a wedge between Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg, and the two of them seemed to go on divergent paths for a little while: Steven Spielberg wanted to make videogames and confusing films about advanced gravitational field theory, while Tom Cruise immersed himself in the world of placenta cookery and babies that only probably exist. Maybe, we thought, Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg would never make a hokey sci-fi film together again.
But maybe we were wrong – Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg were reunited at the weekend during a Chicago International Film Festival gala honouring Spielberg's work. Cruise surprised everyone present by walking out from the wings while Steven Spielberg was being handed his award, to discuss how brilliant all of Steven Spielberg's films were. Except The Terminal, which Tom Cruise thought was a bag of shit. Speaking to CBS with Spielberg, Cruise said:
"I had the great pleasure of meeting Steven. You took me to dinner when I was a young actor. I've seen every one of his films many, many times. I actually study his films."
So maybe this meeting was the start of a new Tom Cruise/Steven Spielberg partnership. Or maybe it was a lazily-masked effort by Tom Cruise to play ball so that studios would still make films with him after he pissed his reputation everywhere with Mission: Impossible III. One or the other.
Read more:
Tom Cruise surprises Steven Spielberg – People
[story by Stuart Heritage]
