After riding a motorbike off a cliff, climbing the Burj Khalifa with nothing but his arms, piloting planes at full speed and running like nobody else, did anyone doubt that Tom Cruise was going to drive a NASCAR car? After all, he’s a driver, he knows perfectly well how to handle one, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d made Days of Thunder 2 for the sole reason that “This is actually cool as hell”.
It was a Sunday afternoon and I went to the bumper cars
Even though they still haven’t started shooting, the actor knows exactly: “Oh, Cole Trickle [his character] will be driving. That’s the key, if I’m making a movie about planes, I’ll be flying“. And at this point nobody doubts it, Tom. Luckily, there’ll be something more besides awesome cars: “We’re going all in, and I think we have something real”.
What’s more: in this movie Trickle will still be a NASCAR driver (in his 60s) and Anne Hathaway’s character will be the owner and engineer of his car. I mean, more than a covert Top Gun remake, like the original, it looks like it’s going to be one… of F1.
But for Cruise, the movie is about far more than a simple story: “When we tell these stories, I spend years training in helicopters, jets, airplanes and studying and creating aerial photography. We’re creating stories around what I can convey through movement. Those are the things I’m looking for with NASCAR, with these cars. I love the culture; it’s a cultural and immersive story that’s going to have races and we’ll build that understanding as the story unfolds”. We’ll be sitting down, who are we kidding.
