From a bit part in 1981's Endless Love when he was a mere scamp of 19, Tom Cruise has risen to become one of (Roger Ebert says "only") America's top movie stars. After Minority Report, Cruise spent a year preparing for his role of Capt. Nathan Algren in The Last Samurai, which included putting on 20 pounds of muscle on his 5-foot, 7-inch frame to handle the armor and swordplay.
Why should audiences see The Last Samurai?
This movie is going to take you to a different place and a different time, and yet you'll realize what I realized when I was reading, not history books, but diaries from people. Because history books sometimes are just nice fiction, it's just good fiction. But when you start reading diaries of the Civil War during the American Indian Wars, and people who had been to Japan, and their personal diaries that weren't altered for social benefit, you can see yourself in those people and what it's like seeing through their eyes.
What about Japan affected you beside the history of the samurai?
You look at that small island of Japan, and when you study the sword, you discover that the samurai sword is the greatest sword ever made in the history of this world. It is a powerful weapon and it is aesthetically superb. They didn't have thermodynamics then, so when they were forging the sword, they'd hold the heat out to the rising or setting sun for temperature, and they knew at that point that it was ready to pound.
How do you view the samurai code of bushido as the film's moral thematic underpinning? (Bushido's values include: truth, courage, honor, sincerity, politeness, courtesy and compassion.)
Those values are very important to me, very important to me, and I think it's important to have in life. I look at the samurai because they were the artists of their time; they were educated. They were educated to be leaders, and to lead, to actually help people, and one of the things that struck me when I read bushido was … compassion. Bushido teaches if there's no one for you to help, you go out and find someone to help. That hit me because I try to lead my life like that. I think it's important, and helping someone and seeing them do better in life is the most gratifying thing in the world.
You committed a lot of time to preparing for The Last Samurai, as you have many of your roles. How was your preparation different this time?
It was a year preparing, not only physically, but it was developing the character. ... But it took that amount of time to prepare. I don't make a film unless I feel that I have that kind of time. Even with Jerry Maguire, with every film I do, there's a lot of preparation. But this movie in particular, because I had to study the American Indian War. I'm an American, I thought I knew a lot about the American Indian Wars, and that time period in our history, and I was blown away at how little I knew. Also, I studied the Japanese history during that time period and a little earlier, and how the country came to that particular moment. Also, I went and revisited the Civil War again for myself, because Algren had lived through that period, and I collected a small library.
So I needed that kind of time to absorb the film, and to work with Ed and Marshall [Herskovitz, producer-screenwriter]. ... When I work on something, I'm in that fortunate position, and I remember as a young actor, I thought,
I'm used to hard work and I can bus tables, I can wait on tables, and I've never made a film that I didn't believe in. However the picture turns out, I've always given everything to it. That's kind of how I approach life. I can't help it; there's no partway with me on anything or in any area of my life, really.