OK, OK, it isn’t much news since the news of Tom and Katie 😉 but I’ve found a small telephone interview by The Current:

Recently both Tom Cruise and Billy Bob Thornton participated in telephone conference call interviews for college newspapers. The Current accepted the opportunity to speak with the acclaimed performers.
Both actors are starring in summer film releases, “Bad News Bears” and “War of the Worlds.” “War of the Worlds” is set to open on June 29 and “Bad News Bears” is expected to open on July 22.
(…)

The other big college phone conference interview was with the famously press-elusive Tom Cruise. However, while it seems that Cruise is often cautious and distant in dealing with the mainstream press, he enjoys talking to the college press, and was quite open and friendly throughout. Cruise is promoting his collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on a film inspired by the H.G. Wells classic “War of the Worlds.”

“War of the Worlds” will forever be tied to the Orson Welles radio broadcast that was so realistic that it caused a panic among those who tuned in too late to hear the disclaimers. The story played on people’s fears and had a startling originality in the first half of the twentieth century. But both the familiarity of the story and the passage of time make a faithful adaptation difficult if you want to give the audience chills. Spielberg was faced with a choice of staying faithful to the story or going in a new direction.

“We both enjoyed the book and there are things that we paid tribute to in ‘War of the Worlds,’ said Cruise. “But it is told from a subjective point of view so it is a movie that is going to be terrifying. It is going to be quite frightening. But it is definitely original. It is new but it has essentially the same themes.”

Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” is going to be heavy on computer-generated effects. We asked Cruise if it was difficult working with a lot of CGI scenes. “Yes, it can be,” he said. “But what Steven did was he did a pre-visualization, what we call pre-vis for short, where he designed a lot of the effects on computer – the staging. He would then go to the set and alter it but it gave me an idea of what I was looking at, what we were seeing. We also had a lot of onsite effects and Spielberg is great at knowing what he needs in that particular scene.” Cruise added “I really had to make sure that I gave the full range of intensity, emotion and fear because you are trying to figure out what would I really…I am always going for what it would really be like. As an actor, what you have to do is create it. You just create it and that is what acting is. You are creating it. So it was a challenge to do that. It was actually kind of fun, truly. It was kind of tricky and you just had to make it happen and make it real because the story as I said is told from a subjective point of view. So if you are going to be on the ride of this story you can have all the effects in the world but if you are not invested in that story and you are not invested in the characters, it doesn’t matter. When you look at Spielberg’s stories he is just a great storyteller and I want to go on that ride with him.”

Although Tom Cruise has worked with a variety of directors in a variety of projects, many filmgoers think of him as an action movie star. Cruise was asked if it bothered him that many film fans thought of him as an action star. “I don’t care,” said Cruise, laughing and sounding like he had heard this many times. “I don’t really care.” Then he continued, “Listen, that is not important. What is important to me is I make the movies that I want to make. What people say about me doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I get to make all the movies that I want to make and I am incredibly proud of that.”