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TORONTO - Tom Cruise wants to please audiences. And he says his new movie, Valkyrie, fits the "adrenaline, palm-sweating, edge-of-your-seat" bill because, as he put it yesterday, "Who doesn't want to kill Hitler?"
The quip is instantly followed by that raucous laugh that every comic actor worth his salt has worked into his Tom Cruise impression.
"I mean, I'm sorry, but who doesn't want that shot, man? Even just to feel that?"
Cruise has an interesting sense of humour, this billion-dollar box-office man. Yesterday, the 46-year-old was on the second leg of a two-day promotional stay in Toronto -- a city with which he's quite familiar, having filmed Cocktail here and amassed plenty of night-flight hours for his pilot's licence at Toronto Island Airport while then-wife Nicole Kidman was shooting To Die For.
He was still in an ebullient mood yesterday promoting Valkyrie, Bryan Singer's film about German Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who came closest to assassinating Adolf Hitler before the fall of the Third Reich during the Second World War. It was Stauffenberg who led a complex coup for the aftermath, whose intention was to frame the SS and Gestapo and set up a provisional German army.
"I first read this as a movie, okay?" Cruise said. "I first read the script by Chris McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, and it was a page-turner suspense thriller. And then you realize it's really true. This happened, and these men were real.
"It wasn't just, 'Let's kill Hitler.' You realize the journey Stauffenberg took ... and how long these men opposed him. It's documented as early as 1938, Stauffenberg saying, 'Somebody's got to shoot that bastard!'
"Stauffenberg was a poet, he edited literature, he was a philosopher, a man who deeply loved his country, but diametrically opposed Hitler and National Socialism."
In a way, Cruise had to conquer Germany all over again to get the film made, partly because of the country's seeming fixation with Cruise's personal religious belief system of choice, Scientology. Before shooting, opposition politicians railed against the film's use of Berlin government buildings, and Stauffenberg's son Berthold called it "unpleasant for me that an avowed Scientologist will be playing my father."
But the sentiment of seeing a film that suggests not all Germans were Nazis overwhelmed all that opposition.
"It was a small group of people that felt that extreme, and it makes good copy," Cruise said. "I just had to say, 'Okay, listen, I'm an actor and we're making a movie, and I think it's a compelling and interesting film.
"And there was a tremendous outpouring of support for the film. I received a Bambi Award (the German Oscar) for courage in having made the film. It was a movie and not a documentary, but we showed it to historians who are kind of amazed by how accurate the film is. Much of the dialogue is taken from letters that exist, and the events happened.
"We're about to do a premiere in Germany. The grandchildren are definitely supportive, and I'm told even Berthold has backed down a bit."
Scientology will follow him everywhere, it seems. "If I don't talk about it," Cruise said, "it's, 'What is he hiding?' If I do, it's, 'He's proselytising.' "
But it was Stauffenberg's concern about his legacy to his children to which Cruise related.
"The journey of this guy is he didn't do it blindly. Look, my daughter's going to be 16, my son's going to be 14, I have a 21/2 year old. Imagine not being able to sit down with your own children and say, 'I hate this, we're not going to participate in this, this is a crime against humanity, this is not my country.' Because if (Stauffenberg's) son went to school and had the same conversation, then the whole family is at risk.
"He was the one that had the courage to go in that room (in Hitler's so-called Eagle's Nest) with that bomb. We wanted to give the audience that subjective, visceral reality. They are on the ride with him."