Tom Cruise Waged War on Harvey Weinstein to Save His Friend's Movie

Director’s vision for the movie is typically what creates iconic cult classics. If a director is brilliant, their approach to movie-making is sure to reveal their ideas to the world, and that’s how legends are shaped: Kubrick, Tarantino, Nolan, Cameron, and many others. Essentially, the director has complete control over his film, and that does the trick.

However, in order to make a movie, a director needs a budget, and that’s where producers come in. Attracting someone with enough money to sponsor the production and marketing is an essential step in making a film, and in most cases, finding a producer is a dream come true for a director, especially an aspiring one.

This is not always the case, though.

Some producers don’t allow their directors many creative liberties and want to be directly involved in the final product. Rarely does this end up doing wonders for the movie, but the bigger a producer’s ego, the bigger impact they want to have on the movie — and Harvey Weinstein, as you might imagine, was unrivaled at that.

Now convicted for numerous cases of sexual crimes, Harvey Weinstein used to be one of the most influential producers in Hollywood — and he was notorious for turning movies upside down, leaving nothing but shallow shells of their original form behind. So naturally, when he was the one to buy a director’s movie, it was pretty much doomed from that point forward.

When Weinstein bought the rights to Todd Field’s film, In the Bedroom, the aspiring director was devastated. He realized that his movie was never going to succeed, and it was the toughest blow ever… Luckily, he was good friends with Tom Cruise, so he called him out of desperation and asked for advice. Cruise reacted immediately.

"I was weeping in the bathroom… I called up Tom Cruise and said, 'Something terrible has happened.' He basically said, 'This is how you’re going to play it. It’s going to take you six months, and you’ll beat him, but you have to do exactly what I’m going to tell you to do, step by step,'" Field told The New Yorker.

Todd Field decided to trust his friend, and he ended up beating Harvey Weinstein in his own game: In the Bedroom was released exactly the way he envisioned it and became a huge success, earning more than twenty-five times its budget and being nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. That’s one story of success here.

However, it wouldn’t have been possible without Tom Cruise’s intervention. Since the actor was already quite an influential person in Hollywood himself, he knew Weinstein’s ways, and he knew exactly how to take care of him. Back then, going against Weinstein was pure madness — but Cruise did it anyway to help his friend.

Source: The New Yorker