Filmmaker Ed Zwick — whose new memoir Hits, Flops and Other Illusions has just come out — joined The Hollywood Reporter‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast for the show’s season five premiere.
Zwick has directed some of Hollywood’s biggest stars in films like 1989’s Glory (starring Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick), 1994’s Legends of the Fall (with Brad Pitt) and 2006’s Blood Diamond (with Leonardo DiCaprio).
But it was in teaming up with Tom Cruise that Zwick felt the full force of what it meant to be making a movie with arguably the most powerful movie star on the planet. No expense was spared for the period epic set in Japan — and as Zwick reveals, Cruise was heavily courted by other A-list directors while he made his film.
“We’d been in Japan for a couple of weeks — we shot at a beautiful monastery for about two weeks,” Zwick recalls. “Then, we came back to Warner Brothers, and we built this whole stage. And you know, word gets around when the interesting things are happening. People were going to look at this old Hollywood recreation of the [19th century Tokyo] street.
“And at one point, I happen to turn around. And it’s almost like a joke — you know, there’s Cameron Crowe. There is Steven Spielberg. There’s David Fincher. And I’m sitting in my [director] chair, and they’re like, all behind me. It’s like, ‘Oh — hey. I didn’t want to feel too self-conscious about this. But whoa,” he continues.
The men “had all come to see Tom, for various reasons, because Cameron had made a couple of movies with him. I think Fincher was going to and then didn’t, and Spielberg later did — he made War of the Worlds with him [in 2005],” says Zwick.
“The great part of the story is that the unit photographer saw us all together and said, ‘Hey, can I just take your picture?’ So there’s a picture of all of us — except Tom had been called away to do something. And then he heard about the picture later, and he saw it. And he said, ‘I want to be in that picture!’ So we shot Tom, and then photoshopped him into the picture.”
Courtesy of Ed Zwick
Listen to that anecdote and many others on the latest episode of It Happened in Hollywood below — and subscribe today for weekly tales from the Hollywood trenches.