"You spend the first two weeks waiting for the . . . that you think Tom is to manifest itself. And after a year and half, you realize that is not who he is. . . . He gets a bad rap."
"He is a really great guy," chimes in McQuarrie. "He's a generous person. He works very hard. He is exceedingly professional. There is no hierarchy of any kind on the set. We would have . . . somebody's mother came to visit the set and Tom would spend the afternoon having lunch with that person's mother."
Cruise is more subdued about the vagaries of being Cruise. "I can't spend my time worrying about it," he says. As a kid, he moved constantly. "I was always the new kid. I went to different schools and I would hear back rumors about where I came from."
Now it's the same phenomenon, but "on a world stage, and sometimes it gets even very extreme and you've got to laugh about it. And some of it you kind of go, OK. OK, as in breathe, be Zen, ignore what you cannot control."
For those who are not Cruise-ologists, here's a recap of the various bad news that afflicted the Cruise world in the last few years. Besides the various dents to his image, Paramount severed its longtime relationship with the superstar after the so-called underperformance of "Mission: Impossible 3." Cruise rebounded by taking over United Artists, but earlier this year his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner, left amid charges that the duo was not productive enough. Their first film, the political drama "Lions for Lambs," was perhaps the biggest bomb of his career.
Cruise began his image rehab this summer with a hilarious turn as a vulgar studio head in "Tropic Thunder" and received a Golden Globe nomination for his hip-swiveling.
Still, the task is not yet complete. A lot rides on "Valkryie," a $90-million thriller that doesn't exactly shriek holiday good cheer. (Reviews have been mixed to negative.)
The film itself has been dogged with controversy, including the German government's initial reluctance to let the filmmakers shoot in Berlin's Benderblock because of Cruise's practice of Scientology (a policy later rescinded) and changing release dates. And, oh yes, Singer, who's made such films as "X-Men," is also coming off "Superman Returns," a blockbuster so ill-received that it could have conceivably killed the franchise.
