Tom Cruise Quotations | Page 2

As an actor - like an artist - you have to ask, "Why do I choose a certain moment to play something a certain way?" It's organic to who we are.

For me as a man, philosophically, when you talk about honor and integrity, that’s the way I want to live my life. It moved me.

I enjoy working with writers and their scripts. It's very exciting to me. Eventually I would like to produce, direct and act onstage, but it's not a heavy pressure. When I do it, I want to do it well. I'm just educating myself with writers and scripts, because I didn't read a lot of books when I was growing up.

When I work, I'm the actor. I'm going to do my job. I'm not going to direct the movie. If I wanted to direct it, I would direct it. I wanted J.J. Abrams to direct Mission: Impossible. I work with people that I respect. I expect them to do their jobs, and I will do mine. And I am there as a producer to help in any way, but no one makes a movie by themselves. It's a collaboration.

For me, to take a movie and travel the world and go and work with these cultures and an international cast and have this spy thriller that's not just about character but also action and suspense, they're very challenging films as a producer to make, creating stories, creating set pieces that serve this character [Ethan Hunt].

I've had such extremes in my life. From being this kind of wild kid, to one year studying to be a Franciscan priest at the seminary....I was very frustrated.

I love adventure movies, I just love action adventure films. It's pure cinema and you go in and you're lost to it. To me, it's that challenge - I want to give an audience that ride, that entertainment.

I structure the scripts and work on them on films and work on scenes with writers and but I haven't written a script myself, I really respect what they do and I'm fortunate I get to work with people that I really enjoy working with and we all kind of spitball and work together on these things, but I haven't written a script yet.

We live in a world in which we are able to communicate very quickly in many different ways, and yet we find communicating more difficult than ever. When in fact we need communication more urgently than ever, because the enemies that threaten us are universal: drugs, illiteracy and crime. We have to fight against them together.

Stanley Kubrick was very selective when he went into a close-up. Every director has his taste in a performance, but Stanley would explore a scene to find what was most interesting for him.