Director Ed Zwick Talks About Tom Cruise and The Action of JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK

This Friday, Tom Cruise returns to theaters in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, a sequel to his 2012 action thriller. This time, he works to clear the name of a government colleague (How I Met Your Mother star Cobie Smulders), gets embroiled in a conspiracy, and discovers that he may have a teenage daughter he never knew about.

I had the opportunity to speak with co-writer/director Ed Zwick by phone about the new film, including bringing his more humanist touch to the franchise, how he went about topping the action scenes from the first movie, what he thinks Cruise responds to about working with him (this is their second collaboration, following 2003's The Last Samuari), and more.

GeekTyrant: Thanks for speaking with me. Let me start with this: I heard reports that Chris McQuarrie (who directed the first film) was initially going to direct this movie before he slid into a producer role and you came on board to direct, so what that was like working with him in that capacity? I imagine it’d sort of feel like playing in someone else’s sandbox, but what was your experience like?

Ed Zwick: I don't think that's entirely correct. I know that Chris and Tom had a really good experience on the first one, but Chris is somebody I've known for many years — in fact, he worked for me once as a writer — and when they called, they called together asking if I'd be interested in doing it. They may have talked about Chris doing it, but I think that nothing had been done to that effect. I began with the book and started to chart my own course and was very happy to have Chris available to me, along with [author] Lee Child and everybody else, talking about the process. They were very respectful of wanting to have a director direct his own movie and not really be influenced, and that was part of the terms I think they knew I would want, and what they wanted as well.

I think Tom knows what a director is and does. He's worked with great ones. I think they both realized that me doing this franchise would give it some different spin than Chris doing it. And that might actually help broaden it in some way.

You mentioned Tom, and I've noticed he tends to like to work with filmmakers he’s worked with before. This is your second collaboration — what is it about your working relationship that you think he responds to in particular?

I know that he's an incredibly disciplined, hard worker, and I'd like to think that I am too. I know that I take great joy and gratitude in the process and so does he. It's important that it's a good time as well as a tough time. He has incredible movie sense. He's made a lot of movies, and that's one reason why his career is where it is. He has great internal understanding of what makes a movie tick, and we also come from the same place, were influenced by some of the same people. Sydney Pollack was an important mentor to me and he was to Tom, too. Other people we knew growing up were people we knew and worked with at the same time, and there's a tradition of movies that goes back to some of the movies that really meant a lot to us in the '70s and '80s, in which action movies were not just about explosions and CG, but they were about people. I think he knew that was my bias, and maybe that might be right for this movie.

You’ve been working with co-writer Marshall Herskovitz for something like 35 years now. What kind of process do you guys have at this point for writing a screenplay?

I can't stand to be in the same room with him. (Laughs) No, just kidding. We've been best friends for even longer than that, and I've always felt that working together was license to keep hanging out. I know early on, we might have had different strengths, but over time, it's a little bit like people and their pets — you come to resemble each other. I know that we do it every different way. We do it with one person holding the keyboard and the other person telling them they're doing it wrong. We sometimes write things separately and then trade them. We've done it where we literally will be ridiculously acting out the scenes. We fight and fuss and give high fives when we feel like we've accomplished something. It's every kind of dynamic you can imagine, but there's great respect and trust for the other's ability. There's one other thing which is kind of unexpected: sometimes, it's not just having an idea, or the other person having an idea, it's you having an idea that you're a little bit ashamed of or embarrassed of that you just happen to tentatively say, "This is stupid, but it's sort of this," and the other person hears it and goes, "No, that's the one." It gives you license in this way to get past your own inhibition at times, and that's a good part of it, too.

I’m interested in the approach to a project like this. Coming into a sequel to a successful movie, what were the key things you both wanted to achieve with this movie on a script level, and what was the key aspect you wanted to achieve as a director?

Every movie tends to have at least some reflection of the director's, or the writer/director's, sensibility. It was important for me to try to expand some internal understanding of the character. To really feature some of the relationships as much as the action. Not that I didn't love the action, I knew I wanted to have a good amount of it because it's certainly obligatory, but I really felt there was an opportunity here to expand what the franchise can be, almost as an anthology. Which is to say, in the next one, they could encounter other people and other kinds of circumstances.

We know this is an enigmatic figure, this hero, but just because you're enigmatic doesn't mean you can't try to penetrate some of those layers, and I was very interested in a story where a man who has cut himself off from society, really, is forced to deal in a way that he might not be entirely comfortable. Along with the title, this guy who can handle anything except a fifteen-year-old girl, or a woman who is his peer and his equal and having to reckon with what that means. So those are a little bit more humanist dilemmas instead of just genre dilemmas.

I went back and looked, and I believe the first announcement about your involvement with this movie came out on May 19, 2015, which is just over 17 months from when the movie ultimately comes out. Compared to some of the insane production schedules I’ve heard about with a couple of blockbuster movies recently, 17 months strikes me as an almost luxurious amount of time. I’m sure it didn’t quite feel that way to you being in the middle of it, but now that you’re on the other side of it, what did you think about the timetable of how everything came together?

Yeah, it was, I wouldn't say gracious, but it was appropriate. We finished a draft sometime after the Fourth of July, we worked on that draft even as we prepped here in New Orleans for several months. And you know, you never finish anything, and we kept writing all the way through, but we were really able to have a script that we were pretty confident with for that first read-through in September so we were able to prep it properly and continue at a pace that seemed almost a little like the old days. Believe it or not, when you have time, you're able to spend smart money rather than stupid money, we were able to make the movie more economically because we were able to plan properly.

I know for smaller, more independent films you try to stick as close to the final cut as possible along the way. But for something like this where you have a bigger budget to play with, were there scenes or set pieces you shot that you ultimately cut out?

Oh yeah, that always happens. Never anything Draconian. But even when you've done this as long as I have, and something seems so essential on the page, and you devote an incredibly arduous couple of days and you get it right, and you fight for the money to do it and the time to do it and you sweat it...and then you see it in the cutting room, and it's so easy to say, "You know, we don't need it." Somehow, you don't always know. I try to know more than most people, because it is a way of being more economical, but yeah, there were a couple of things in this. Nothing of great consequence, but some things as they're being chased. Or there could be a scene between two people that seems to be important to reveal character, and yet you suddenly realize that character has been revealed in action. It always surprises you. You always do some line cutting, some rewriting...the way an actor says to me sometimes on the set, "Oh, I can act that," well I often find that in the cutting room. The truth is I wrote that line, but sometimes I can see that line in the actor's reaction and I don't need that line. You're inevitably trimming the words as well.

Have you had conversations about coming back to direct a sequel to Never Go Back?

I think we first have to see how this one does.

Do you have any ideas in mind if you were to direct another one? Or maybe one of the specific books you think would make for the best adaptation?

I'm so bad at trying to think that far ahead. I'm afraid that's a "no," but I don't think any of us have gone there yet.

Was there one particular sequence or moment in this movie that rose above the rest for you on a personal level, where you were standing on the set, things just clicked, and you said, "Yes, this is exactly the way this is supposed to be."?

There are a couple of them. Obviously, Cobie [Smulders] did extraordinarily good work, and I thought she revealed aspects of herself that people hadn't seen in the TV stuff she'd done, but there's a scene that Tom does where they've just arrived in New Orleans, and they're sitting there, and Danika [Yarosh] says to him, "I did this, and I should go," and the way that he looks at her, and there's extraordinary stillness and internal stuff going on, and I'm reminded of what an actor he has been in his career and in moments like that and at the end — it just feels at a very high level. I was reminded of some of those movies that he's done where he's been obliged to do that kind of work, and I was very pleased by that.

Obviously the first movie has a ton of action, and this one does as well. Talk about the early days of coming up with set pieces and action sequences. How did you try to rise up and take the action one step beyond what we've already seen?

We didn't want to make it bigger. We wanted to make it its own. We didn't want to defy the laws of physics, but I wanted it to be brutal in a way where you could actually see the choreography and feel what those punches and what that fighting style looked like. We worked very hard with Tom and with [stunt coordinators] Wade Eastwood and Rob Alonzo on a very particular fighting style that they had started in the first one, and we found an opportunity to do more of. It was really just so the fights could be part of the story and not put in there as an opportunity to go to a set piece. Obviously you choose a setting — to choose a kitchen for a fight was a good idea because it had all these opportunities for use of props and things like that. That was an idea. To get them on the rooftops of New Orleans came about [by] spending time in New Orleans and thinking about what would really seem like a finale, and what was classic moviemaking. Somehow rooftops, I'm not sure where they come from in my mind, but I know that Hitchcock had a few and I'm sure others as well.

What's next for you? Do you have anything on the docket?

I don't. I wish I did, and I hope that somehow, after these conversations, I'll be able to focus on it. That'll start in about a week or so.

Thanks for speaking with me.

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Earlier in the interview, I asked Mr. Zwick about a revelation that comes late in the movie, and it's considered a spoiler, so I cut it and am dropping it in here at the very end. If you haven't seen the movie yet, bookmark this page, turn back now, and come back after you've seen it.

I have a spoilery plot question for you that I’m hoping you can answer, and this may have been in the book, which I have not read. So it’s revealed at the end that the girl is not Reacher’s daughter, but I’m a little confused as to how exactly he came to be involved in her situation. She asked her mom to get a paternity test, but since Reacher and the mom didn’t seem to know each other in the diner, why did the mom suspect Reacher as the father?

I think she says a line in there saying, "He used that name." Whoever the guy was, my guess is had used Reacher's name and that's all the woman knew.

Oh, I see. That's a simple answer to that question. I was wondering about that.

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Thanks to the folks at Paramount for setting up this interview.