The Shameless Plug: Digging Deep On Digger

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to the latest episode of The Shameless Plug, the show in which I get together every single month and have a big old sit down with my pal, my friend, my neighbor, the editor of Empire Magazine. Nick Disemlian. Hello, Nick. Hey, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here with you in the studio. And we're going to be talking about the new issue of Vimper Magazine, which has been on sale for a couple of weeks already. It is the October 2026 issue, issue 458. My Lord, Nick, that's incredible. And on the cover, Nick, what is on the cover? Is this really Tom Cruise? Chris, I can confirm.

0:54Nick de Semlyen:It really is Tom Cruise. What? we wouldn't put someone on the cover and say yes this really is tom cruise and then and then it not be if it wasn't tom cruise yeah but so this is tom cruise uh how many times do you think he's been on the cover now it's it's got to be double digits three three times uh it's it's easily double digits well last time we had him on for um find the final reckoning yes the mission impossible film he was hanging off the plane and now he's hanging onto his belt buckle as digger rockwell the man who puts the crude in crude oil. That's a good line. I wish I'd used that line now.

1:28Nick de Semlyen:Yeah, me too.

1:29Chris Hewitt:I could have used it somewhere. But anyway.

1:31Nick de Semlyen:Damn it. Yeah, he's the oil tycoon who is essentially effed up the world in the upcoming movie Digger and has to try and do something about it.

1:40Chris Hewitt:Yes, he is the star. He is the title character of Alejandro G. Inalitu's new movie Digger, which opens in just a few weeks. We're recording this in the middle of September and the movie opens on October 2nd. This is a big deal, Nick. This is a collaboration between the Oscar-winning director of films, of course, like Amorish Peros and Birdman and The Revenant and Tom Cruise. And he does not look like himself. I mean, he kind of does. You can see that is Tom Cruise on the cover, but he is swaddled in prosthetics as Digger in Digger. and you needed someone to dig deep into this movie, Nick. There's all kinds of rumors swirling around this film.

2:26Nick de Semlyen:I mean, this film looks absolutely bonkers. Tom Cruise's character is bonkers in himself, but he has an animatronic cat named Maggie. The cat's real in the film, but the cat is animatronic that they use to play the cat. I guess, yeah, that's one way of putting it. And yeah, we actually have Maggie the cat on our... Who doesn't look well, let's be real, but is still an adorable creation and she's on our subscriber cover which we'll talk about in a minute because our subscriber cover is especially amazing this month but yeah, there's all kinds of rumors swirling around on the internet about Digger the latest one this week a lot of people are saying it's a cruisical have you heard this?

3:07Nick de Semlyen:people are saying it's a musical with Tom Cruise hence cruisical people are saying, oh it clearly in the trailer looks like people are about to burst into song so that is one thing that people are saying I don't believe it is a cruisical but that's certainly interesting it's not Rock of Ages 2 it's not Rock of Ages 2 but yeah your cover story so you get to the bottom of a lot of this stuff I do I do

3:31Chris Hewitt:yes I do get to the bottom of a lot of stuff so this movie is you know like I said the collaboration between Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Inaritu and as such you know it's just tremendously exciting and it was tremendously exciting to talk to him about this as well because whenever I was on set of Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning Inaritu was there and so I was on this festival set the submarine set and they were doing a sequence where they turned the whole thing 360 and Cruz is being covered in water bombardable water and I looked up at one point and there was Inaritu just standing there he had just come to visit the set and check in with crews because they were prepping at that point to shoot Digger in fact Tom told me in the interview I did with him in Los Angeles for this but it didn't make the piece because you know you have to kill your babies a lot of stuff didn't make it he told me that he had actually you know they were he was working on both movies at the same time and sometimes would sleep in his trailer so that he could work on Mission Impossible and Digger morning, noon and night which was pretty cool.

4:42Chris Hewitt:I mean, the guy is dedicated. But yeah, that moment was like, oh, this is interesting. So they're already circling each other. They're already in conversations, already prepping. And so I've kind of been tracking this movie ever since. And so I sat down in LA with Cruise, flew to LA with Cruise Airlines, flew to LA for a big old Digger press event. You didn't hang on to the wing? No, I didn't. I just boarded conventionally, unlike Tom Cruise. But it was a trailer event where Warner Brothers, it was on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. They unveiled the trailer before it hit the internet. Cruise did a Q &A as well.

5:24Chris Hewitt:And then the next day I came back to Warner Brothers and went into a room, a nondescript meeting room, on the Warner Brothers lot. And I had about 40 minutes with Cruise. And he's always on great form. It was really, really good to have that time one-on-one with him in person because it just gives you a different color, a different texture that you wouldn't get from a phone call or a Zoom chat. And I was really, really keen that that happened for this movie. And I'm glad it happened because actually my intro to the feature came about as a result of being in the room with him and fighting off each other in a different way.

6:06I've never met Tom Cruise.

6:07Nick de Semlyen:I did have some chats with Inariti during the making of this issue. It's really interesting when you're putting a cover story together or just any kind of story. Sometimes the director is kind of out of far reach and other times they get super involved and they get really into the detail and you're really collaborating with them. And definitely with this cover story for Digger, Inariti was really involved. So we were having phone calls about the cover and what the cover image could be and he was pulling art for us and then talking, Chris Lupton, our creative director, and I threw it on quite lengthy Zoom calls, and it was really interesting, but he is a very, very detail-oriented guy.

6:45Chris Hewitt:Oh my God, yeah, absolutely. He was talking about shooting this movie in Fist Division, so I spoke to him on, so I flew to LA to talk to Cruise, but I spoke to Inaritu on Zoom, even though he was in London. He was like, we were literally 10 minutes away from each other, but he had, I think he had just, he maybe still had a bad cold at that point, so we didn't want to risk anything so we stayed on Zoom but he was talking about shooting this movie in Fist Division and deliberately with his incredible cinematographer the multiple Oscar winning Chivo Lubezki kind of making sure that each frame of this movie is shot in such a way that you can pour over details in the background and you can kind of see it in the images we have accompanying the article here you can see the set design is incredible and there's something going on in each corner of the frame besides obviously Tom Cruise dominating as Digger Rockwell but this is a kind of apocalyptic movie about this guy Digger Rockwell who's as you say an oil baron who whose oversight shall we say triggers something that might well prove apocalyptic and he's tasked with afferting the situation in a very Tom Cruise manner but this is not a typical Tom Cruise character this guy is not doing what Ethan Hunt would do The Iceberg is called Judy right because the original name of the film or at least the working title was Judy that's right yes an iceberg pops off and poses a great threat to a continent in this movie and yeah I spoke to Cruise I spoke to Inaritu for an hour I spoke to a number of his castmates as well Riz Ahmed John Goodman Sandra Huller and they were all really, really fascinating interviews.

8:36Chris Hewitt:The story of this film is this collaboration between Cruise and Inaritu which has been on the cards now for many, many years. Cruise was actually an early advocate of Inaritu. He loved Amoros Peros when it came out. He was championing it. He was holding private screenings of it at his house. He was being evangelical about the movie. But they didn't meet for about a decade after that. Then they met at a Paramount, Paramount did a 100 Paramount Pictures did a 100 year anniversary picture with loads of people together so they met that and then they were just casually talking about maybe we should do something and then one day just after finishing The Revenant I think it was in that we had this idea and it wasn't just the idea for the film it was the idea for the character for Digger Rockwell and the only person he could think of to play it was Tom Cruise and so the story of that is the story that I wrote

9:28Nick de Semlyen:we took the opportunity for a breakout or sidebar of this cover story to ask a whole bunch of Hollywood people for their favorite cruise performance in an article called Respect the Tom. We almost called it the Tom Tom Club but didn't. But yeah, we asked Christopher Nolan. He picked Magnolia. Peter Jackson, to what you said about Mission Impossible, he picked Dead Reckoning. Yes. Which is maybe surprising. Yeah. Sandra Huller picked Top Gun Maverick and then we had Jane Campion and all kinds of people. Yeah. So that's a really, really great read. Yeah. As well. I just wanted to talk quickly about the subscriber cover because I kind of alluded to that being special very special because this came from Alejandro Inarritu to get Dawn Bailey and if you know anything about movie posters you'll know her name, she is an absolute legend, her first poster was Dirty Dancing, the famous Dirty Dancing poster, she did Truman Show Zoolander, the Silence of the Lambs poster she's amazing, incredible, iconic posters and she created the subscriber cover for us this month and it is a big old shovel in a suit.

10:29It's amazing. Now, of course, if you don't subscribe to Empire,

10:33Chris Hewitt:hey, we might as well share NBC Plug, right? You can't get that cover now. If you signed up right now, you wouldn't be able to get that cover, but you would get the next one. Right, Nick? You'll get the next one.

10:41Nick de Semlyen:I think if you act fast, so we kind of obviously don't reveal what the issues are going to be until like a week before they go on sale, but they're all bangers. I mean, sometimes we create them ourselves. Sometimes we collaborate with, you know, a concept artist from a film. other times like this, someone will create something. Someone who is actually a movie poster creator will create something. So they're always incredible. And you can only get them by being an Empire subscriber. These are wall-worthy pieces of art. Their money can't buy unless you spend your money to become a subscriber. In which case, they very much are money can't buy.

11:14But you can indeed subscribe to empireonline.com and go from there, really. We've got a good deal on. I don't want to turn this

11:21Nick de Semlyen:into a brazen shilling operation. It's called a shameless plug, Nick. We have got a three, four, Well, I can't remember what it is now, but it's an amazing deal. I think it's like£5 for free, or£3 for free issues or something. It's nuts. Go and check it out. Great Magazines. That's the website.

11:38Chris Hewitt:Greatmagazines.co.uk?

11:40Nick de Semlyen:Yeah, sure. There we go.

11:41Chris Hewitt:That's the one. You mentioned Peter Jackson. I'm going to stop talking in a second about stuff I did for the magazine, but I did two features this month, so I'm going to talk about this one, the second one, real quick. Peter Jackson is the director, of course, of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but before that... But more importantly. Yes, more importantly, 30 years ago, he directed a film called The Frighteners, which is beloved of me and Nick. But Nick, you in particular, right? I love The Frighteners. I freaking love it.

12:08Nick de Semlyen:It is a big, big film for me. I remember seeing it at Blockbuster when it came out. It was 96, right? Because this is the anniversary. That's correct, yes. I remember seeing the frankly terrifying cover of the video, which was the face coming through the wall, you know, the thing. and it put me off renting it for quite a long time actually because I found that image quite upsetting and has nothing to do with the film I mean kind of not really there's really nothing like that a little bit not really but anyway it's a striking image but quite off-putting for me personally but when I finally saw it I fell in love with it and it's got a lot of Lord of the Rings DNA in there you know from the Reaper villain who is a lot like the Ringwraiths to the mad camera angles and just the energy and the comedy and the horror and everything mixed up together.

12:54Nick de Semlyen:I think it's a fantastic, and a great Michael J. Fox performance. Yeah, his last lead role actually in a motion picture. Yeah, he sort of plays a Ghostbuster. So he shot it in Wellington down in New Zealand and it still rips, I got to say. It's amazing. So we asked Peter Jackson to talk to us and he talked and talked, right? You had a very lengthy, extended edition of an interview.

13:16Chris Hewitt:Yeah, I did this. You didn't do this, I think because you were being possessed by a serial killer ghost at the time. So, you know, it's always a joy and an honor to talk to Peter Jackson. I'm a huge fan of his, particularly his horror stuff. And so this movie is like the perfect kind of bridge between his early gnarly films like Brain Dead and Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles and Lord of the Rings and his more commercial stuff. But, of course, it died in this arts at the box office when it came out in 1996. So it's a film that he has a particularly interesting relationship with. He hasn't seen it since 1996.

13:55Chris Hewitt:And so it was fascinating kind of sitting down with him on Zoom because he's New Zealand and I'm in London and that's the way it is. And just kind of picking his brains. And it was meant to be a 40-minute chat, maybe 45 minutes. And we did an hour and 20 in the end. Because you could just see it. You could see him unlocking memories and unlocking feelings about the movie as he went along, as he reminisced. And so he started talking more and more and more and more and more. And some great, great things. Oh, he told you he saw a ghost. told me he saw a ghost wasn't Patrick Swayze yeah that was a revelation quite near the end as well so that's one of those things about in terms of unlocking people and this has nothing to do with my skills as an interviewer I think this is just time because we had a lot of time and at the beginning of the interview he was in good form he's always great to talk to but I think he was a little bit like why am I talking about The Frighteners it's not I've got affection for it I enjoyed filming it but it didn't move the needle for me.

14:54Chris Hewitt:And in fact, he got quite candid with the impact it had on his career, the negative impact it had on his career. He would have directed King Kong probably next for Universal, and then Universal pulled the plug.

15:06Nick de Semlyen:I think it's often really nice for filmmakers, though, when they have a massive success, it's not a surprise that people want to talk to them about it decades later, but when they've done something that didn't do well, I think often they get very touched that there is still love. And they don't realize it. Like with the Three Amigos, when we did our big Three Amigos reunion with Steve Martin and Martin Short and Chevy Chase and John Landis, like Steve Martin still mentions in interviews that until we asked to do that, he didn't realize that people loved the Three Amigos. And he kind of thought, oh, it didn't do well.

15:36Nick de Semlyen:People have forgotten it. So that's really nice. And it sounds like that is the same

15:39Chris Hewitt:with this and The Frightness. I think so. And I think as he began to remember things, probably memories came beckoning to the surface. So I think the ghost thing was something he mentioned quite late. It was like, oh yeah, I saw a ghost. Because I mentioned the origin of the project at the beginning, and he did mention it, and then we came back to it again. And he went, oh yeah, I saw a ghost that time. I was living with Fran. He lives with his wife, Fran Walsh. And years before they did The Frighteners, he saw a ghost. And the story of that is in there as well. But he talks about nearly directing a Bond movie.

16:11Chris Hewitt:He talks about working with Michael J. Fox, who was the first bona fide Hollywood star that he had worked with. And just his vision for the movie, and surviving the box office hell of the film and kind of paving the way for Lord of the Rings as well because that was the movie they essentially set up with a digital force. So it was a direct line from there to L.O.T.R.

16:35Nick de Semlyen:I got to speak to Jeffrey Combs for that as the one little bit of this I did get to do. Genuinely one of my favorite movie performances of all time as the deranged FBI agent Milton Dammers, who I learned from this interview, Joe Mantegna was trying for that role and that would have been a very different performance but I love Jeffrey Combs in this role and he was an absolute delight and talked to me about fans who have Milton Dammers tattooed on their thighs and all kinds of stuff. I should clarify, I don't have that. Prove it. No, I refuse.

17:11Chris Hewitt:But anyway, listen, I'm going to stop talking now because I've talked for a lot of time already in this podcast. I'm not going to stop talking because I'm going to keep talking but I'm going to stop talking about the things I've done. And there are other great things in the feature section as well. There is a feature on Whalefall.

17:27Nick de Semlyen:Yeah, can't wait for this film. As we call it on the cover, Moby Dick meets Die Hard. I hope it lives up to that. So do I. I don't think it will be literal. But it'd be amazing if there were detonators and German terrorists involved in that. But yeah, it's literally a guy gets stuck inside a whale and that is one of the best one-line synopses for a horror film I've ever read. Helen thinks this book is pretty much unfilmable.

17:52Chris Hewitt:So this is director Brian Duffield and Austin Abrams is the star of this film. He's the guy stuck inside the well and of course next week in Resident Evil he's going to be desperately trying to stay alive

18:03Nick de Semlyen:in a survival horror situation. That guy is putting himself through the ringer because weapons to whale fall to Resident Evil you're having a bad time as an actor if you're in any of those films let alone all three of them. But yeah, cannot wait to see Whale Fall. we have an excerpt from the new memoir by Ki Hoi Hwan Never Say Die which is an amazing read I've got to say I've been lucky enough to get an advanced copy it's fantastic and it's all about his experience on his first film just happened to be Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

18:33Nick de Semlyen:which isn't too bad

18:34Chris Hewitt:it's not too bad at all