The Strange Celebrity Campaign to Save Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’

Well, celebrities congratulating and promoting each other is, of course, an eternal part of awards season. Still, this outpouring is genuinely remarkable — both for how public it is and how seemingly uncoordinated. The last time we saw anything like this was the To Leslie Oscar campaign, when a bunch of celebrities posted suspiciously similar praise for the little-seen indie, and helped land Andrea Riseborough a shocking best actress nomination. (It was later revealed that Mary McCormack, married to To Leslie director Michael Morris, was instrumental in rallying her famous friends behind the scenes along with Riseborough’s manager, Jason Weinberg.)

No mastermind has come forward to take credit for the Digger surge (I don’t think Frances Fisher is working the phones). But that also feels right. The praise is about what Digger means to the industry as much as it is for the movie itself. Affleck summed it up best, a point journalists have made as well: If you want to see more expensive, risky masterpieces like One Battle After Another and Sinners, you’ve got to make room for misfires like Digger, too.

The Digger debacle coinciding with Warner Bros.’ demise as a standalone studio — and the ouster of auteur-friendly executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy — is a tragic coincidence, but it still hammers home the point: There are vanishingly few places for even A-list talent like Cruise and Iñárritu to take risks — and fewer execs willing to go out on a limb; we should celebrate something bold when we have it.

None of this helps Digger get any closer to turning a profit; the movie’s box office dropped 60 percent in its second weekend, and it remains about $200 million in the red, depending on budget figures. The real target, of course, is Oscar voters, who have been primed for a year to celebrate Cruise’s career achievements — and are now being encouraged to stand by him as a visionary storyteller, no matter what critics and audiences say. It’s a pretty huge pivot for an actor who has made almost exclusively action movies for the past decade, but who ever said Hollywood doesn’t love a transformation? 

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing some of this energy devoted to awards season contenders that haven’t been talked to death and are much better than Digger. (When will Lakshmi make a front-facing video encouraging people to see Neon’s dazzling documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem?) I also remain skeptical about Cruise’s chances of landing a best actor nomination, both because it’s a jam-packed field and this surge of support is happening awfully early to stick with voters come January. Still, if you start seeing more celebrities on video saying Digger is a little movie with a giant heart, you’ll know the game is truly afoot.

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The Year’s Biggest Ugly Cry

Rachel Morrison’s new film Love of Your Life is not entirely what it seems on the surface. I’m not talking about a Digger-style complete switcheroo; if you watch the film’s trailer above, you see star Margaret Qualley falling head over heels for a guy played by Gabriel Basso. But Qualley’s character also travels the world alone and builds a connection with a polished Brit played by Aaron Pierre. 

Don’t worry, I won’t reveal any more than that, and neither will Morrison, whom I caught up with from home on Zoom earlier this week. She tells me the main thing she wants you to know about her movie is that you should be prepared to “feel all the feels.” Or, as a friend’s wife recently put it to her, “drink wine and ugly cry.”

Love of Your Life, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month and is now on Prime Video after a short theatrical run, is a romantic drama — a genre we rarely see these days. But like Morrison’s debut feature, The Fire Inside, a sports drama about boxing champion Claressa Shields, Love of Your Life constantly pushes back against rigid genre definitions. 

“In my last film I was hiding the drama in a sports movie, and now I’m hiding it in a romantic movie,” says Morrison, who began her career as a cinematographer — she became the first-ever female Oscar nominee for best cinematography in 2017 for Mudbound. After getting her start with boundary-defying directors like Dee Rees, Ryan Coogler and Rick Famuyiwa, she has carried that willingness to challenge audiences into her own films. 

“Audiences for a while now, maybe since the pandemic and some other things, are looking for escapism more than being asked to feel things or think things,” Morrison continues. “That’s the marketing challenge — getting audiences to a theater, or even in front of their television, where they’re gonna have to engage in some way. Yet if you do it well, it’s also something people are looking for. Maybe they don’t realize they’re looking for it until they find it.”

As you might imagine for a film directed by an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, Love of Your Life looks exceptional, both in scenes that might look standard in anyone else’s hands — Qualley and Basso eating cake in their apartment — and in sequences filmed on location in London, Lisbon and New Orleans. In an era when Budapest soundstages constantly stand in for real locations, it’s thrilling, almost shocking, to see an intimate drama given the resources to shoot around the world. 

“Nobody ever tried to make me shoot it on a stage or in an LED volume,” says Morrison, who has worked with Amazon MGM on both of her films. “I know the difference it makes being in real places where you can pivot; you can shoot 360 degrees. If we had cheated in another city or on a green screen, it wouldn’t have the expansive and really human quality that we needed.”

Qualley, carrying the film across years and continents, brings much of that human quality Morrison describes: a performance built in partnership with a director who says she always aimed to “mirror my main character’s emotional world.” As a cinematographer, Morrison knows how to make anyone look great on camera, but that wasn’t the goal of Love of Your Life.

“I was very clear about wanting to keep a foot on the ground and wanting it to feel relatable to anybody watching it, and not the glossy version of itself, which this genre is known for,” Morrison tells me. “In this story, I think you really need to attend to the character and meet her where she’s at.”

Take the streets of Lisbon, for example, which look as enviably gorgeous as ever even when Qualley’s character, Maya, arrives in a fog of depression. Morrison worked with her cinematographer, Todd Banhazl, to capture Lisbon’s famously beautiful light while keeping Maya out of it. “It’s not dreary just because she’s in a dreary space,” Morrison explains. “If anything, it’s the opposite. But it’s like the sun is hitting everything but her.”

That attention to detail is a huge part of what makes Love of Your Life feel so special, a film that makes relationships and romance feel as epic as anything else you can see onscreen. For me, it lived up to Morrison’s goal: “You do want to walk away feeling like you have lived a life and traveled the world.”