At times, observing his star’s commitment, Zwick wondered if he was expecting too much. "I thought, ‘what am I doing,’" he says. "Here I have Tom face down in the mud, getting the crap kicked out of him, or we’re doing take after take in which actual aluminum swords are swinging past his face at extraordinary rates and I think maybe I’m putting him too much at risk. But each time he would say, ‘just give me the time and the preparation and tell me what you want me to do, and I’m going to be there.’"
In truth, Cruise, a naturally gifted athlete and all-around sports enthusiast, looked forward to his character’s physical contests. In an inspired bit of scheduling, before Cruise embarked on his nights of double-sword combat, he split the shooting day by beginning with emotionally charged scenes between Algren and his Japanese captors. This combination of emotion and action echoed Algren’s own bifurcation; at once, a conflicted, conscientious man, struggling to reclaim his honor but also an impassive, strategic, lethally effective soldier. While Algren’s profound and complex emotional nuances intrigued Cruise, upon completing these scenes he happily and literally ran to the next sets, eager to begin his Samurai fight sequences. "I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid," he announced the first night, and he did not disappoint.
The parallels between Algren’s experience in the Samurai camp and Cruise’s training for the role were not lost on the company. "The training Tom did was not just an actor practicing to do stunts for a movie," explains Zwick. "There’s a very significant correspondence between the training in martial arts and philosophic dedication Algren gets as
a Samurai prisoner and the kind of training that Tom was undergoing both mentally and physically. He was preparing for the role itself, not just for the stunts or the fight scenes." Cruise agrees, adding that, "I started feeling like Algren in the village, I got a sense of the kind of emotional and physical transformation he was going through."
For Ken Watanabe also, working on The Last Samurai inspired a fair amount of soul-searching, even though the project placed him on somewhat familiar ground. His Japanese film career includes roles in several historical dramas, including the popular NHK Samurai series Dokuganryu Masamune and the feature Bakumatsu Junjyo Den, set against the waning days of the Tokugawa Shogunate when the Samurai held sway. Even so, Watanabe reveals that working on The Last Samurai encouraged him to examine more closely his own feelings about his country’s renowned warrior class and that it was partly Zwick’s passion for the subject that ultimately helped him understand Katsumoto and help bring the Samurai warrior to life.
"In the beginning, it was difficult for me to grasp the character," he says. "What does he want, what is he thinking? Certainly there is beauty in death, traditionally, but dying, to me, is not necessarily a virtue, so it was hard for me to reconcile at first. As a Samurai and as the leader of his people, Katsumoto has a very specific way of living and dying, but I couldn’t help wondering, what right does he have to lead his people, the villagers and the people surrounding him, towards certain death with him, how could this be justified and allowed? It was a dilemma for me at first, until I realized that for Katsumoto it was not a question of life or death that was important, but a question of honor."
Movie Database
In Theaters
