One can understand why they were happy to retreat to Berlin to discuss the minutiae of the Nazis for hours on end, make a film about brave men banding together to take down the greatest villain of the 20th century and watch a ton of movies together. "You know we are film geeks," says Cruise.
"And he's worked with every filmmaker that we would be talking about!" says Singer, recalling how they would grill Cruise for firsthand dope on greats such as Kubrick and Spielberg.
Singer says he's been obsessed with Nazis from a very young age. "I had these two friends that were German, and . . . we had a little Nazi club." The kids didn't know what Nazis did exactly, but they were fascinated by the spectacle. One day, Singer, who is Jewish, arrived home with a homemade swastika armband scrawled in crayon. "My mom saw it. She, wow, she exploded at the sink. I will never forget [that] and the lecture."
As kids, McQuarrie and Singer made various 8-millimeter films about Nazis in Singer's backyard, and once faux-executed a buddy in his basement using a blood pack attached to fireworks.
"Nobody got killed during the making of the event," jokes McQuarrie.
And "Valkyrie" isn't the first feature film Singer has made about a Nazi -- he also directed 1998's "Apt Pupil."
As a kid, Cruise himself had "a German helmet that had blood on it."
"It was always how we are going to kill the Nazis and how we are going to kill Hitler," he said. He also liked to watch WWII documentaries, which left him with a lifelong love of airplanes. (He actually owns a P-47.) "I would look at these images and, of course, I always wondered why didn't someone just shoot Hitler." Once he started working on "Valkyrie," Cruise got what sounds like a personal seminar in Hitler and the Third Reich, led mostly by McQuarrie, who went so far as to actually interview 91-year-old Rochus Misch, Hitler's last living bodyguard. Cruise refused to go on that fact-finding mission. "I didn't want to meet him," says Cruise. "Evil is still evil. I don't care how old you are."
While Singer and McQuarrie led Cruise into an examination of Nazi Germany, he unwittingly also led them into a study of the circus that follows him.
"There was some crazy" stuff, says Singer. Early on, he asked Cruise to come to a coffee shop with him. And he said Cruise told him, " 'Yeah, well I can hide. I can lay down in the back of your car. We'll get out the driveway, maybe the people outside the house won't follow.' "
"It's what I call the tail of the comet," says McQuarrie, recalling a time they went out for pizza with their kids [he has little girls too] in Germany and were peacefully taking a walk when Cruise stopped to help a shopkeeper carry a heavy metal clothing rack from outside her shop in for the night. "As soon as we stopped, the tail catches up to you and you realize that you are being followed by like two dozen people at a distance."
"You just have to accept it," says Cruise, who tries to stay calm, particularly around his kids. "You know you can spend your life living in your single room, but that is not for me. That's not who I am, my family is or how I want to raise my kids. I don't want to live that."
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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com
