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The Last Samurai:
An Exclusive Interview With Tom Cruise

By Cole Smithey
Review East Coast Correspondent

After his last film, Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report," Tom
Cruise spent a year preparing for his most physically challenging role yet,
that of American Civil War Officer Captain Nathan Algren in Ed Zwick's "The
Last Samurai."

After being hired to train a regiment of Japanese Army for the Emperor of
Japan, Algren is captured by Samurai and tutored to live as they do. Algren
eventually learns to value "life in every breath" and finds that his inner
nature is more in harmony with the way of the Samurai than his previous
self-destructive path.

Part fantasy and part historical touchstone, "The Last Samurai" is an

impressive romanticized journey through the ideological struggles of 1877
Japan that benefits from Tom Cruise's flawless influence as a white man who
adopts the Samurai code of honor Bushido.

It is a powerful weapon and it is aesthetically superb. They didn't have
thermodynamics then, so when they were forging the sword they'd hold the
heat out to the rising or setting sun for temperature, and they knew at
that point that it was ready to pound.

It is an amazing culture, and one of the great things about being an actor
and what I do is that I get to travel to these places. I get to learn about
the people, and that is the most enjoyable thing for me, to learn the
history of other people and how they live in their daily lives.

Also, you find a common ground even though the language is different and
their culture is different, you find that common ground of joy, happiness,
pain, and it's the humanity that gives you a sense of woah, we're all in
this thing together here. That's why we've gotta help each other out, and I
really enjoy that.

Review:  How do you view the Samurai code of Bushido as the film's moral
thematic underpinning? (Bushido values include: truth, courage, honor,
sincerity, politeness, courtesy and compassion)

Tom Cruise: Those values are very important to me, very important to me,
and I think it's important to have in life.

I look at the Samurai, because they were the artists of their time, they
were educated. They were educated to be leaders and to lead, to actually
help people, and one of the things that struck me when I read Bushido was
compassion.

Bushido teaches if there's no one for you to help, you go out and find
someone to help. That hit me because I try to lead my life like that.

I think it's important, and helping someone and seeing them do better in
life is the most gratifying thing in the world. Having a film where that's
the value that the movie's about--I connected very deeply with the code of
the Samurai.

Review:  You committed a lot of time to preparing for "The Last Samurai" as
you have many of your roles. How was your preparation different this time?

Tom Cruise: I put a lot of time into everything that I do. With "Rain Man"
and with "Born On The 4th of July," it was years for us prepping those
films.

This film is different in that it took me almost a year to physically be
able to make this picture. I love what I do. I take great pride in what I

do, and I can't do something halfway, three-quarter, nine-tenths.

If I'm going to do something I go all the way and I didn't know if I could
do it, honestly, if I could find that kind of physical elegance and
movement that the Samurai have. It was a year preparing, not only
physically, but it was developing the character.

I kept copious amounts of notes so I could remember, for the training
sequences, where Algren starts and where we end up. It's one of these films
that, as I said when I saw "Lawrence of Arabia," here I am and I haven't
really found or made an epic film.

I knew what Ed was going for with this picture and it was very ambitious on
many levels because here we both love adventure films, and yet you're
looking at this time period and his meticulous dedication to that history.
In the spirit of adventure and epic films, we're embellishing it with this
wonderful story.

But it took that amount of time to prepare. I don't make a film unless I
feel that I have that kind of time. Even with "Jerry Maguire," with every
film I do, there's a lot of preparation.

But this movie in particular because I had to study the American Indian
War, and I'm an American, I thought I knew a lot about the American Indian
Wars, and that time period in our history, and I was blown away at how
little I knew.

Also, I studied the Japanese history during that time period, and a little
earlier, and how the country came to that particular moment. I went and
revisited the Civil War again for myself, because Algren had lived through
that period, and I collected a small library. So I needed that kind of time
to absorb the film, and to work with Ed and Marshall (Herskovitz -
Producer/Screenwriter).

I loved working with Ed Zwick. He's a bright and sensitive artist, so it
was pleasurable for me. When I work on something I'm in that fortunate
position and, I remember as a young actor I thought "I'm used to hard work
and I can bus tables, I can wait on tables, and I've never made a film that
I didn't believe in. However the picture turns out, I've always given
everything to it. That's kind of how I approach life. I can't help
it--there's no part way with me on anything or in any area of my life
really.

Review: Why should audiences see "The Last Samurai?"

Tom Cruise: Each audience walks away with an experience from a movie,
whether it's a thrill ride, or an epic, romance or thriller. I'd like them
to have that feeling that they're going to go see different world in the
same way that I did as a kid.

When I go to a picture, I'm a great audience because I love movies. This
movie is going to take you to a different place and a different time, and
yet, you'll realize what I realized when I was reading, not history books,
but diaries from people.

Because history books sometimes are just nice fiction, it's just good
fiction. But when you start reading diaries of the Civil War during the
American Indian Wars, and people who had been to Japan, and their personal
diaries that weren't altered for social benefit, you can see yourself in

those people and what it's like seeing through their eyes.

I want audiences to know that that is available and they're going to go to
a time period that is authentic, even though the story is fiction. The time
frame in which it takes place and the humanity in the picture is real.