Steven Spielberg is a big Tom Cruise fan, praising the actor for his incredible work ethic on set.
While speaking at the recent SXSW Film Festival, Spielberg, who directed Cruise in Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005), shared what it’s really like working with the actor.
The director explained the collaborative process in filmmaking. “I wake up in the morning and I know the page count that I need to cover, but I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to cover it yet,” he shared.
“That’s what’s exciting — getting on set with no real plan except to tell the story the best way I can possibly tell it,” Spielberg continued. “And I love doing that in collaboration with crew, but also especially with actors. Because the thing that I love about actors, if you cast the film right, you’re not just getting someone who is going to give you a great performance, you’re getting someone who has a deep meaningful understanding of the film that all of us are making together.”
“Tom Cruise showed up every morning when I showed up,” Spielberg said. “I show up before the crew. So I get to the set sometimes at 6:30 in the morning.”
“On Minority Report and on War of the Worlds, Tom would insist on getting there when I got there so we would map out the whole day … which was really helpful for me.”
During the keynote conversation, Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture, asked Spielberg, “How do you know you’re getting it? How do you know that what you’re capturing on film is actually going to work on a big screen?”
Spielberg explained, “It’s only when I hear from the audience, you know, and when I hear from the general feeling of how the film is landing, do I know that the things that I thought were going to work are working, or the things that I was certain would work, aren’t working.”
He also recalled the audience screening for Jaws in 1975.
“I didn’t know what I had until we previewed the picture in the Medallion Theatre in Dallas, Texas,” the director shared. “And that was my lucky theater for like my first four films.”
Spielberg added, “And I took all my films to Texas, including E.T. We previewed in Houston, we previewed all my films in Texas, and I didn’t know what we had until the audience told us what we had.”
This story was originally published by Parade on Mar 25, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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