Free Chinese Lesson - "Lives of Others" director supports Cruise

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"Lives of Others" director supports Cruise

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-07-04 08:22









Tom Cruise at a football game in Landover, Maryland, September 11, 2006.
Makers of a movie about a failed plot to kill Adolf Hitler will be barred
from filming at a German memorial site, but not because star Cruise is a
Scientologist, the Finance Ministry said on Monday.[Reuters]



COLOGNE, Germany (Hollywood Reporter) - The Oscar-winning director of the
German film "The Lives of Others" has supported Tom Cruise's bid to play
a would-be Hitler assassin in the movie "Valkyrie."

The project, set to begin shooting this month at Germany's Studio
Babelsberg, has been surrounded by controversy. German politicians have
criticized the decision to cast Cruise in the lead role because he is a
Scientologist, a religion seen in Germany as a dangerous sect.

After a long back and forth, the German authorities also banned Cruise
and director Bryan Singer from shooting "Valkyrie" on location at the
Bendlerblock memorial in Berlin. It is the actual location where Claus
von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators hatched the plot to
assassinate Hitler with a bomb hidden in a briefcase. It is also where
Stauffenberg and the other plotters were executed after the attempt
failed.

But in a long op-ed piece for German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung on Tuesday, "Lives" director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
said Cruise was the ideal person to play one of Germany's few Hitler-era
heroes.

"Tom Cruise is the most successful of all the (Hollywood) superstars,"
Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote. "His superstar light will illuminate this
rare shining moment in the darkest chapter of our history. In doing so,
he will do more to improve Germany's international image than 10 soccer
World Cups could."

Henckel von Donnersmarck said the story of Stauffenberg is almost unknown
outside of Germany and that his country should be grateful a star with
Cruise's drawing power has chosen it as his next project.

Henckel von Donnersmarck is well acquainted with the delicate politics of
adapting German history. His Stasi drama "The Lives of Others" was an
international box office hit, but he had to defend every casting and
wardrobe decision made in adapting the reality of communist East Berlin
to the screen. He was rewarded for his efforts with the foreign-language
Oscar earlier this year.

Reuters








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