Confessions of a Not-So-Dangerous Mind*
Oct 6, 2026 · 18 min · 8 segments
The much-heralded collaboration between Alejandro Inarrito and Tom Cruise is vastly underperforming at the boxoffice and has met with insanely polarized reactions from critics. Is this the sort of…
And more from the perspective of Tom Cruise has made so few-- forget bad movies.
But Tom Cruise has almost never misjudged the marketplace, and I don't think that he just wanted to do the movie Digger to try to get an Oscar nomination and hopefully an Oscar win.
But I believe that he felt it was an opportunity to work with what he would perceive to be an auteur filmmaker.
And Cruise saw an opportunity to do a daring, bold, distinctive film with a daring, bold, distinctive filmmaker.
It's kind of like, if you wanna draw a parallel, where Cruise pretty much pressed pause on his career and spent basically three years with Stanley Kubrick making Eyes Wide Shut with his then wife, Nicole Kidman.
The thing with Tom Cruise that I have always respected, he takes the movie business seriously.
He's a good interview, but he's a good interview within very specific parameters.
He's cordial, he's friendly, he's funny, but he's not gonna give you that much of himself.
And there are very few people, I can say, in the world that can honestly declare, "I know what makes this man tick." But it's part of the mystery.
He might be the greatest single star in the history of cinema, and I do believe that he is shocked at, number one, the critical reception of the film.
I think that that has absolutely floored him because, um, I believe that he thought they made a masterpiece.
And the reviews are as polarized as, as any I can remember since about five years ago when the movie Don't Look Up came out.
That's a movie that made a lot of ten best lists for twenty twenty-one, and it made a lot of ten worst lists.
And more from the perspective of Tom Cruise has made so few-- forget bad movies.
But Tom Cruise has almost never misjudged the marketplace, and I don't think that he just wanted to do the movie Digger to try to get an Oscar nomination and hopefully an Oscar win.
But I believe that he felt it was an opportunity to work with what he would perceive to be an auteur filmmaker.
And Cruise saw an opportunity to do a daring, bold, distinctive film with a daring, bold, distinctive filmmaker.
It's kind of like, if you wanna draw a parallel, where Cruise pretty much pressed pause on his career and spent basically three years with Stanley Kubrick making Eyes Wide Shut with his then wife, Nicole Kidman.
The thing with Tom Cruise that I have always respected, he takes the movie business seriously.
He's a good interview, but he's a good interview within very specific parameters.
He's cordial, he's friendly, he's funny, but he's not gonna give you that much of himself.
And there are very few people, I can say, in the world that can honestly declare, "I know what makes this man tick." But it's part of the mystery.
He might be the greatest single star in the history of cinema, and I do believe that he is shocked at, number one, the critical reception of the film.
I think that that has absolutely floored him because, um, I believe that he thought they made a masterpiece.
And the reviews are as polarized as, as any I can remember since about five years ago when the movie Don't Look Up came out.
That's a movie that made a lot of ten best lists for twenty twenty-one, and it made a lot of ten worst lists.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
