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http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/documents/04787290.asp

War of the words
Or, Alienating Tom Cruise

NEW YORK - Well, at least now we know Steven Spielberg likes the Phoenix. But Tom Cruise probably never will, thanks to me.

As you may have divined from the trailers, Spielberg's War of the Worlds departs from all previous versions of the story by having the alien tripods emerge from underground, where they've lain dormant for eons, instead of arriving in spaceships. To me, that sounded like some aspects of Scientology lore. (Google "Xenu" and see for yourself.) So I wondered whether Cruise was behind the plot change. At a media press conference at Manhattan's Essex Hotel last week, I asked him, "What resonance does that have for you as a Scientologist." "In what way?" he replied. "In that some of the tenets of Scientology deal with the past of aliens on this planet." Cruise bristled but never stopped smiling. "That's not true," he said. "Like, huh? W-w-what? What paper are you from?" "The Boston Phoenix." "The Boston What?" He looked at Spielberg. "Is that a good paper?" Spielberg nodded. "I read it. It's a good paper." Cruise then returned to my question. "It has no resonance whatsoever. There's absolutely no relation to that whatsoever."

Spielberg picked up the ball and said that the plot change had been his idea. "I didn't want to do the old 'death from above' cliché that we've seen so often in science-fiction movies. I just thought that was more of an original way of introducing a threat from where we least expect it to come, an extraterrestrial threat coming almost from the inner reaches of earth." Cruise interjected, "If you are interested in Scientology, you should read Evolution of a Science, I don't know if you've ever read that, or Fundamentals of Thought. That will give you a greater understanding of what Scientology is. There's a book called What Is Scientology? Read that." Uh, thanks.

Spielberg's explanation echoed what screenwriter David Koepp had told me earlier in the day. "Part of the reason we couldn't make them [the aliens] from Mars is that we know there's nothing there. Also, when objects are approaching from space, we now have sophisticated telescopes and we'd see them coming." And the Scientology echo? "It certainly wasn't conscious on my part. If I were out to make a Scientology reference, I'd be crazy."

What the film does refer to, and often, is September 11. "We studied a lot of combat footage and 9/11 footage to figure out what makes that stuff so real," said special-effects supervisor Dennis Muren. "It makes the effects much harder but much better."

Yet the filmmakers contend there's no overt political agenda behind these references. "To some people, the movie will be about American fear of terrorism," Koepp said, "and to people elsewhere in the world, it might be about fear of an American invasion." Tim Robbins, who plays a crazed survivalist, said the story could apply to any attempt to invade or coerce a nation. "You can conquer it but you can never really inhabit it. You can apply that all across the world, even in this country."

"I tried to make it as open for interpretation as possible, without having anybody coming out with a huge political polemic," Spielberg said. "There are politics underneath some of the fear." He added, "I think I gave you enough rope to hang me with."

By the way, if you're wondering why the movie's Boston finale doesn't look like Boston, that's because the Hub is portrayed on screen by Brooklyn. "They may have wanted to shoot it in Boston at the end," explained Lord of the Rings alumna Miranda Otto, who plays the mother of Cruise's children, "but we had to condense everything I did because I was pregnant and had to shoot it early. So it was probably my fault. Sorry, Boston." Yeah, too bad the shoot didn't make it to town; Cruise might have acquainted himself with a certain local alternative weekly.

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