Tom Cruise Director Reveals He Got Actor to 'Nail' a Scene by Talking About His Son Connor: 'A Window Seemed to Open'

Director Ed Zwick recalled talking to Tom Cruise about his relationship with his son, Connor, to help prompt genuine emotion from him while filming a scene in The Last Samurai in an excerpt of his new memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.

Zwick wrote about a day on set where he specifically noticed how "sweet and attentive" Cruise was being to a young actor. This gave the 71-year-old the idea to have him use that paternal energy for an upcoming scene.

"'Tell me about your son,' I said. He looked at me, surprised," he remembered telling the Top Gun actor, referring to his now 29-year-old child he adopted with ex-wife Nicole Kidman. "I knew Connor had just returned to L.A. and Tom wouldn’t be seeing him for a while."

"For a moment Tom was quiet. And then he began to talk," Zwick shared. "It doesn’t matter what he said in those few short moments in the fading light. I watched as he looked inward, and a window seemed to open and his eyes softened."

Zwick added that Cruise "nailed the scene" after their chat.

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Cruise isn't the only A-lister the director dished about in his tell-all book. As OK! previously reported, he also detailed his sometimes tense relationship with Brad Pitt while making Legends of the Fall.

"Brad had grown up with men who held their emotions in check," he clarified. "I believed the point of the novel was that a man’s life was the sum of his griefs. […] Yet the more I pushed Brad to reveal himself, the more he resisted. So, I kept pushing and Brad pushed back."

"Brad wasn’t about to give in without a fight," he said. "In his defense, I was pushing him to do something he felt was either wrong for the character, or more ’emo’ than he wanted to appear onscreen."

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"I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair. Me, maybe?" he continued. "But when we looked up, the crew had disappeared. And this wasn’t the last time it happened. Eventually the crew grew accustomed to our dustups and would walk away and let us have it out."