by Gill Pringle in LA
Digger sees Tom Cruise’s Texan oil tycoon Digger Rockwell as a white cat stroking Dr. Evil-esque figure – the most powerful man in the world we are told – embarking on a frantic mission to prove that he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster that he’s unleashed destroys everything.
The project took nine years to make, during which time much of writer/director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s black comedy stopped being satire and, instead, actually echoed what was really happening in the world.
“I think when you develop something for so long, reality and fiction doesn’t stay still. So, at the beginning, we were stretching our imagination, being informed by certain events at that time, but then the reality started chasing us and passing by us with all the craziness of the things,” says the four-time Oscar winner whose films include Birdman and The Revenant.
“So, these events that were supposed to be dystopian or happening in the future, were now happening as we were developing. We had the California burn, the pandemic…” says the acclaimed Mexican director.
“Also, when we started writing this, there wasn’t an ice shelf being detached in Antarctica. And then we traveled two times to the Arctic with scientists. All that Ganesh says in the script is absolutely true, and what’s projected in a certain future,” he says of Riz Ahmed’s scientist character.
“And then, methane was not in the mainstream language that it is now. And Greenland was not in the conversation when it was written!” he exclaims eluding to US President Trump’s ongoing obsession with the country and its resources.
“This future hadn’t happened when it was written, and suddenly, life is changing so much. And during the shoot, John lost his home in the fires, and all these things were affecting all of us,” he says referring to John Goodman’s Pacific Palisades home which was burned to the ground during the January 2025 California fires.
“And all that informed my co-writers and I to be rewriting this, and how to tell this story. And that’s where suddenly I realised that we cannot be basically ahead of the reality, even when the fiction was stretched, because there was no space to stretch. Because farce is already reality. We are living in fiction.
Tom Cruise, we are surprised to learn, has been a long time fan of the director – right from when Iñárritu’s Amores Perros screened at Cannes in 2000, winning the Critic’s Week prize. “His movies are movies that I see right when they open, and many times over,” says Cruise. “And I’ve had the great privilege of working with Scorsese, Stone, Mann, Spielberg twice, Kubrick, McQuarrie, Kosinski and so many brilliant directors, and he’s, without a doubt, one of the great filmmakers of all time.”
Having agreed to work together some day, Cruise was on Day One of shooting Top Gun: Maverick when Iñárritu called to say he had something to share at his Los Angeles office.
“And Tom said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go tonight’. And he was shooting in San Diego! And then I hear an engine, and I opened the window, and it was Tom on a motorcycle. ‘Holy shit! It’s Tom Cruise in my office’ – and all the office was like pretending to be cool, and Tom was very nice with everybody,” recalls the director who showed him a lot of early images for Digger.
“We spent hours talking about the film, the idea behind it, and he was in – but then the film collapsed, with a pandemic in the middle and the ice shelf started happening,” he says.
The two men would meet again in 2024 and, true to his word, Cruise was still down to play – agreeing to a six hour prosthetics ordeal rendering him nearly unrecognisable with a grey thinning hairpiece, wrinkly jowls, facial lines and a heavy padded body suit created by Japanese makeup effects artist Kazu Hiro.
Like with all of Iñárritu’s films, an A-list cast immediately fit into place including Jesse Plemons as Digger’s nephew; John Goodman as dictatorial US President Compson; Michael Stuhlbarg as a cowering vice president, and Sandra Hüller as Digger’s half sister and business partner, Emma, accompanied by Emma D’Arcy and Australia’s own Sophie Wilde.
As much as Iñárritu was delighted to have the legendary Cruise headline his film, the rest of his cast were equally important. “Let’s start with John Goodman, who is a legend,” says the director. “I knew that John would be the only person that could handle and hold that tone that we were after of the world we are living in, and being still truthful, even when we were going high as hell – I think John is the only one,” he says referring to the Big Lebowski and Argo star who looks unrecognisable today having shed 200lbs.
“Sandra, I met her in 2017. I remember when I saw Toni Erdmann, I said, ‘How does this film exist?’ I was so blown away at her performance. So, I met her in Cannes, and I dreamed of working with her ever since. I was lucky that she accepted.
“And then Michael Stuhlbarg. Obviously, Michael has this ability to be the most lovable guy in films that he has done, as this father of Timothee [in Call Me by Your Name] – or he can be the most very dangerous person in so many roles, so he’s an incredible theatre actor, and he understands this world. So that character he creates of the vice president is this very tricky guy and he just nailed it in every dimension,” he says.
If we’ve seen Hüller so thoroughly inhabit her characters, then with this one, she dug deep. “I have never seen this side of me before,” she says. “I mean, the energy on set was always really high, and the stakes were high, and what we were asked to do was very difficult to play,” says the Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest actress. “But at the same time, we would have to find a tone in between and really go big which was a lot of fun.”
Digger is in cinemas now
