How Tom Cruise Helped Todd Field Defeat Harvey Weinstein

Writer-director Todd Field is in the thick of an Oscar campaign right now, with his latest movie TÁR a strong bet for a slew of awards, including best picture and best actress for Cate Blanchett. (Indeed, in those two categories, TÁR won the hat trick from the three most important critics groups, the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics.) 

As such, The New Yorker just ran a lengthy profile with Field, in which he admitted that he’s a little rusty when it comes to promotion (it’s been a long while since his last project) and that he’s thrilled the conversation about the character Lydia Tár has been so robust. “It’s incredible,” he remarked, about various fan theories about what’s real and what’s imagined in the picture, and just what lessons we’re to draw from Tár’s rise-and-fall. Even he’s eager to get into it, wondering if Lydia Tár truly did apprentice with Leonard Bernstein. (“If you look at the math—Lenny dies in what, 1990? When is she studying with Lenny Bernstein? I don’t think it happened.”)

Field was hesitant, at first, to get into just how Tár won her EGOT, though when pressed by interviewer Michael Schulman he (somewhat) confirmed some solid theories. He did, however, spin a yard from over 20 years ago about how he was able to evade Harvey Weinstein’s notorious penchant for re-cutting movies.

It was 2001 and his first film as a director, In The Bedroom, starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei, just debuted to rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival. But Field was miserable. His picture was bought by Miramax Films, and he knew that meant company head Harvey Weinstein (aka “Harvey Scissorhands”) would end up making substantial changes. Despondent, he called Tom Cruise.

Field and Cruise met during the lengthy production of Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. (The writer-director, who began his career as an actor, played the part of nightclub pianist Nick Nightingale, who offers Cruise’s Dr. Harford his first peek into the weird, masked shadow society of whatever the hell is actually going on in Eyes Wide Shut.) Indeed, it was Cruise, with his power of positive speaking, that emboldened Field to get In The Bedroom up and running. “You’re just making excuses,” he said, as Field recalled the story of them meeting over dinner. “Figure it out.”