TOM LIKES IT TIDY – CONFIDENTIAL:
IF THE WHOLE global action star thing doesn’t pan out for Tom Cruise ,he could fall back on housekeeping. Director Doug Liman — who helmed Cruise’s latest flick, “American Made” — says he shared a house in Atlanta with the “Top Gun” star along with the film’s screenwriter Gary Spinelli. “The worst I can say about Tom is that he was a stickler for all of us doing our chores,” Liman, 52, recounted to the Daily News. “We had a chore chart. Tom would often come through after I’d put dishes in the dishwasher and make me wash them again. They weren’t rinsed well enough. I grew up kind of spoiled on the Upper East Side of New York, so I hadn’t experienced that.” There was also a communal bathroom that Cruise (photo) controlled, which means there were no pee stains on the floor. “He was for sure a stickler about that,” the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” director says. “Everything had to be spotless. He believed that a pot, after you cooked with it, should be cleaned to the point where it looks brand-new again.” The movie tells the real-life story of Barry Seal, a TWA pilot recruited by the CIA to provide reconnaissance on the Communist threat in South America. Eventually, Seal acted as a courier between the CIA and Panama’s strongman Manuel Noriega, and became a cocaine smuggler with the Medellin cartel.
It’s an improbable story that has special meaning for Liman. His father was Arthur Liman, who served as chief counsel for the Senate’s investigation of the Iran-Contra affair — a scandal that involved secret U.S. assistance to anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua. Two years ago, two pilots who were working on the film were killed when their plane crashed in the mountains of Colombia. Their families are suing for wrongful death. Although Liman is not personally named in the suit, he declined to discuss the litigation.
But he did reveal that Cruise spent his birthday having an epic eight-hour meeting about the aviation scenes in the film “because the flying scenes are so complicated, they took incredible coordination.”
The “Mission: Impossible” star is also a generous guy. Liman, an admitted junk food junkie, was sent boxes and boxes of candy by Cruise for his birthday. So much candy that Liman was forced to share it with pigs that live at his vacation property.