Happy Tom Cruise Tuesday!!!
This week, with just three days left before we in the USA can finally enjoy “American Made”, we thought we’d present a little trivia from the movie. There have been several interviews and articles floating around in the wake of the movie’s UK release, and we’d like to share a few choice tidbits from from all the info we’ve been obsessively devouring looking over in the last few weeks.
Dig in to some fun facts below!
Tom Cruise and Doug Liman are masters at “enjoying the process” according to Brendan Gleeson:
First of all, are we late? Maybe we’re late, but we had no idea that the red-headed guy from that “Black Mirror” episode was the son of the military guy that arrested Bill Cage in “Edge of Tomorrow“! But there you have it. Brendan Gleeson and Domhnall Gleeson are father and son!
Enjoy your way through it!
Domhnall was asked in an interview with JOE.IE if his father had any advice for working with Doug Liman and Tom Cruise. According to Domhnall, his father was “great”, and said:
“First of all, they’re basically mad, the two of them. If you come in with this serious head on you and what you’re trying to do – that’s not gonna work. What you need to do is enjoy the process in the same way they enjoy the process, and go along with that. And not be scared of it. Cuz it gets really scary when you… when you’re tearing stuff up and you don’t know what you’re doing next, you can… and the secret is not to freeze, the secret is to enjoy it. Like, enjoy your way through it. And that’s what I did, I had a brilliant time working on this.”
Tom Cruise does all the flying in American Made. ALL of it.”
Tom Cruise loves to risk it all to bring us “practical stunts” – aka HIS FACE in the shot doing the stunts. Almost never a green screen, and as much in-camera work as possible. “American Made” is no exception! Tom is doing ALL his own flying. Every time you see his face on the plane, it’s Tom Cruise flying. Including when he crashes through the trees, and into a residential neighborhood!
I’m flying alongside him in a helicopter filming, and that made a big impression on me – there’s nobody in the cockpit of the plane!
And, according to Doug Liman, one of Tom’s airplane stunts was QUITE hair-raising:
“Flying extremely fast, small airplanes, low to the ground, is a dangerous environment to be in just on its own. Then, in the story, he’s throwing bales of cocaine out of the airplane, loading them up with guns, so every once in a while in this scene he’s got to climb out of the cockpit and go to the back of the airplane to dump the cocaine out. I’m flying alongside him in a helicopter filming, and that made a big impression on me – there’s nobody in the cockpit of the plane! Tom has gone to the back of the aircraft, and he’s alone in that airplane. It’s one thing to have Tom Cruise alone in the airplane flying it – that’s already outrageous – now he’s alone and he’s not even in the cockpit so he’s gone beyond. It was already a stunt before he left the cockpit, it was already a serious stunt.”
Wow. Just… wow. There’s a reason we love Tom Cruise, that’s all we have to say.
Here’s another picture of this beautiful, courageous, amazing actor:
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“American Made” hits US theaters this Friday, September 29th, and we CAN’T WAIT!!! The lucky people in the UK and some other countries who have already seen the movie are saying it’s WONDERFUL (of course, we knew it would be – it’s Tom!), and we are so excited to finally see it for ourselves!