How could it be otherwise, Tom Cruise has revolutionized the Cannes festival this Wednesday, with hundreds of admirers waiting to see him up close upon his arrival at the Palais des Festivals, where Top Gun is screened tonight for the world premiere and out of competition: Maverick, his long-awaited sequel to the mythical Top Gun, a Tony Scott film that gave him enormous fame to this day. Dressed strictly in black, the Hollywood star offered a master class to the nearly one thousand journalists gathered in the Debussy room, where he received a warm ovation and a tribute was paid to him for his successful career as a whole, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of his only appearance in the contest, when he came to present the film A very distant horizon, by Ron Howard.
The general delegate of the festival, Thierry Fremaux, has been the first to take the stage to ensure that all the films of the American interpreter "are good", and that it is "something not easy to achieve". And he has also pointed out that "he works only for the cinema", a statement that Cruise has made his own when he has been asked why he did not choose to release Top Gun Maverick or Mission: Impossible 7 on some platform during the pandemic and the continuous delays suffered by both. films to reach theaters.
"Cinema is my passion and I make films to be seen on the big screen, there is no option for the platforms", he has sentenced before a devoted audience that has celebrated the showing of a 15-minute compilation video with his most outstanding performances in titles like Rain man, Some good men, The color of money, Legend, Risky Business, Cocktail, Born on the 4th of July, Magnolia, Interview with the vampire, the Mission Impossible saga, Eyes wide shut, or Jerry Maguire. As a curiosity, in none of them did he appear with his ex-wife Nicole Kidman.
The power of attraction that Cruise raises has been evident throughout a 45-minute conversation with the journalist Didier Allouoch in which he reviewed his long career that began more than four decades ago, when at the age of 19 he decided to go to Los Angeles to try his luck in an industry that had appealed to him since he was four. "It is a true honor and privilege to be here, in a movie theater after these two years that we have spent. As a child I wanted to be an actor. I grew up watching films by Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. I had the need to live adventures and I wrote my own characters" said this actor and producer who "never went to film school, but I trained learning a lot on the sets".
In 1981, after a brief role in the film Endless Love, he was cast in Taps, Beyond Honor, opposite Sean Penn, Timothy Hutton and veteran George C. Scott. "I told myself that if I could work in film forever after that film, I would try to do my best every day. I learned a lot from that film. We had five weeks of rehearsals and I was able to appreciate how important the work of each department is." : makeup, costumes, photography... I was interested in knowing how they worked in order to learn". After so many years, Cruise maintains that "I'm still exploring and learning."
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