If Tom Cruise looks kind of bloodshot and disheveled in “The Last Samurai,” don’t blame producer-cowriter Marshall Herskovitz or director Edward Zwick. They were just heeding their star.
“It was all his impulse to mess himself up,” Herskovitz explains. “To wear a beard, to have the long hair, to have Lois Burwell, who was our wonderful makeup artist, add years to his face. …Tom wanted that. He said that’s who the guy is.”
The guy, Nathan Algren, is a Civil War veteran and career military man hired by the Imperial Army of Japan to train its troops in Western-style combat to deal with an uprising of the tradition-bound warriors, the samurai. Turned sour by his involvement in the Indian Campaigns that decimated tribes across the American West, Algren has become a drunken, cynical mercenary.
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His time in 1870s Japan changes Cruise’s Algren–as he finds himself living among the samurai, learning “bushido,” the way of the warrior. “The Last Samurai,” a bloody, $100 million historical epic, opens in theaters Friday.
“Tom was really fascinated by the whole concept and how the samurai lived. It spoke to him, I think, very personally,” Herskovitz says. “I think people have an image of Tom from some of his films, like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ but then there’s the Tom who did ‘Born on the 4th of July’ and ‘Magnolia.’ As Ed likes to say, he’s really a character actor deep inside. He actually really wants to immerse himself completely in a part and transform.”
Herskovitz and Zwick have worked as a producer-director team on the Brad Pitt-Anthony Hopkins opus “Legends of the Fall,” as well as on the recent ABC series “Once and Again.”
Separately, Zwick directed Denzel Washington and Matthew Broderick in “Glory” and Washington and Meg Ryan in “Courage Under Fire.” Herskovitz, who has one feature to his credit as a director–1993’s “Jack the Bear”–has produced the films “Traffic” and “I Am Sam.”
Bringing the changing world of 19th Century Japan to the screen was something both men were keen to do.
“It was really a remarkable time in Japanese history,” says Herskovitz, who, with Zwick and screenwriter John Logan, delved into the history books and archives. “Japan had just opened itself up to the West in 1854, and in the space of 20 years they had completely transformed the society, and a lot of people were having trouble with that. The samurai class was being dispossessed, and a bunch of them were rising up in revolt. It was a very dramatic period.”
It also was a very dramatic shoot. Production crossed three continents–two weeks in Japan, seven weeks in Los Angeles and five months in New Zealand, where a team of 200 carpenters built a 19th Century samurai village outside of New Plymouth, on the country’s North Island. Filming began in 2002 and went well into 2003.
“When Tom turned to us one day and said, ‘Well, this is the biggest movie I’ve ever worked on,’ we all got a little bit scared,” Herskovitz recalls, laughing. The decision to shoot in New Zealand, home of the Hobbits and warriors of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, was based on economics and landscape.
Cruise, who speaks some Japanese in the film, is surrounded by a cast of great Japanese actors: Ken Watanabe, Hiroyuki Sanada and Koyuki, the popular model-turned-actress who portrays a widowed villager at first repelled by the Westerner (“He smells,” she says with a frown) and then compelled to throw a lot of moony glances his way. Brits Billy Connolly and Timothy Spall and American Tony Goldwyn also star.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Victoria Rodriguez ([email protected])