IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters/James Lang
Tom Cruise has made a 6-hour film he shows to potential movie stars
Tom Cruise has been quietly screening a six-hour private video on filmmaking fundamentals for emerging Hollywood talent, including his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Glen Powell. Cruise says the video is to help actors better understand their craft.
According to Cruise, the six-hour-long video covers lenses, framing, and the different layers of storytelling—tools that the Hollywood star believes actors need to understand to elevate their craft.
Tom Cruise explained the six-hour-long film he made about being a movie star that he shows to actors he mentors
In a new GQ interview, Cruise described the material as foundational rather than advanced.
“It’s very basic,” Cruise told GQ in a recent interview.
“It was something to have people understand, just to have a different concept of lenses and what the lens is and what the frame is. Just the same way as an actor onstage, or in the development of cinema, where it started, and what that frame means and how to understand that frame. There’s just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also: to understand certain things so that you can forget about it.”
Powell first shared details of the screening back in 2024 when he revealed he watched it alone in a private Los Angeles theater.
Cruise’s rare interview with GQ comes just a couple of weeks ahead of the release of his new film Digger, his first purely non-action film since 2012.
Alongside Cruise, Digger, hitting theaters on October 2, also stars Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman, Robert John Burke, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman.