Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (7 page)

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Days of Thunder
had a convoluted genesis. Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, the producers of the box-office smash
Top Gun
, had been pressuring Tom Cruise for quite some time to do a sequel. His response, finally, was to suggest that instead of simply re-doing the previous hit, they give the
Top Gun
treatment to his latest high-speed passion—car racing, with the goal of making the best race-car movie ever made.

The subject had been on Tom’s mind for three years, ever since he drove Rick Hendrick’s Winston Cup cars around the track at Daytona. He explained to Bruckheimer and Simpson that he wanted to make a behind-the-scenes movie that focused on the personalities of the drivers, the owners and the pit crew. He wrote out a brief outline and took it to Paramount so that executives there could approve the project.

Tom hired Warran Skaaren, who had written the screenplay for
Top Gun
, to flesh out his ideas for a script. Skaaren did his best to bring Tom’s ideas to life, but the two men had a difficult time seeing eye-to-eye on the storyline. Finally, after several drafts, Skaaren withdrew from the project. Frustrated by the slow progress, Tom approached one of the best-known screenwriters in the business—Robert Towne, who had penned the scripts for classics such as
Bonnie and Clyde
, and
The Godfather.
After attending a race with Tom, Towne voiced enthusiasm for working on the project.

Once they had a completed script, Tom and the producers selected a director—Tony Scott, who had directed
Top Gun
—and then put together a cast that included veterans Robert Duvall and Randy Quaid, chosen for their uncanny ability to appeal to working class moviegoers. Nicole Kidman was the last piece of that puzzle.

Days of Thunder
begins with a Daytona 500 race and an announcement that a favored driver has dropped out. Car lot owner Tim Daland, played by Randy Quaid, sees an opportunity to enter the race-car business and pleads with retired pit boss Harry Hogge, played by Robert Duvall, to build him a car. Hogge tells him he first needs to find himself a driver—no driver, no car.

Daland arranges for his driver Cole Trickle, played by Tom Cruise, to test drive another driver’s car. Trickle burns up the track, impressing Hogge and the car’s regular driver, Rowdy Burns (played by Michael Rooker) with his driving skills. Against his better judgment, Hogge agrees to come out of retirement to work with Trickle.

After several unsuccessful races, Hogge and Trickle have a fight and Trickle storms out of the office. Hogge finds him in a bar and utters the words all drivers (and lovers) dread hearing: “We’ve got to talk.” Hogge asks him why he thinks things are not working out. Trickle expresses frustration that he can’t do the “car talk” thing. He admits he knows next to nothing about cars. The paternal Hogge, seeing him in a sympathetic light for the first time, tells him not to worry—they’ll figure it out.

After their talk, Trickle enjoys a winning streak and then crashes while dueling on the track with Rowdy. Both drivers are taken to the hospital, where Trickle meets Dr. Claire Lewicki, played by Nicole Kidman. When she enters his hospital room for her first face-to-face meeting with him, he thinks she is a ringer. A few days earlier Hogge and the boys had played a trick on him with a paid escort dressed up like a cop. He assumes the beautiful neurosurgeon is just another good-ole-boy gag. To the horror of his team members, he takes Claire’s hand and places it between his legs.

“Isn’t this what you’re really looking for?” he asks.

“Well, that’s interesting enough Mr. Trickle, but it’s just not my speciality,” she says and then leaves the room. Trickle is horrified at his mistake. When he is discharged from the hospital, he sends Claire a roomful of flowers and asks her for a date. She says she doesn’t have time, then changes her mind and agrees to fly to Charlotte with him. Later, while they are in bed, she asks, “Tell me what you love so much about racing?”

“The speed—to be able to control it. To know that I can control something that’s out of control. I’d really have to show you.”

“Show me,” she says, and they kiss.

In another scene, after he has scared the hell out of her by racing with an irate cab driver, she yells at him: “Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what is going to happen next . . . nobody knows and nobody controls anything. You’ve gotten a glimpse of that and you’re scared.”

As the story progresses, Trickle learns that Rowdy has more serious injuries than they first realized. He needs surgery and will be unable to race his car in the Daytona 500. Since Trickle has lost his sponsor, Rowdy asks him to race his car. Trickle reluctantly agrees, but everyone, himself included, wonders if he has lost his nerve as a result of the previous accident.

On the day of the big race, Claire shows up at the racetrack but tells Trickle that she does not plan to stick around to watch the race. Says Trickle, “Claire, I’m more afraid of being nothing than I am of being hurt.”

Of course, when Trickle drives out onto the track, Claire changes her mind and joins Hogge in the pit to watch the race and cheer him on to victory.

For Nicole, making the film was an adventure unto itself, for she had never seen a NASCAR race. Not until Tom took her for a 180-mile-per-hour spin around the track did she understand what all the excitement was about. “It was fantastic,” she said in ESPN’s
The Making of Days of Thunder.
“I really like things that get my adrenaline pumping. I’d never watched a race before .  .  . now I can understand why people get hooked on it.” 

To make
Days of Thunder,
the film company built sixty cars, but by the time production wrapped, they only had two cars left, having wrecked the other fifty-eight. One of those wrecked cars was used for the scene in which Tom experiences a devastating crash. To capture it on film, Tom’s car was equipped with a camera and a sawed-off telephone pole that was rigged to dig into the pavement at the appropriate time to send the vehicle tumbling end over end at 120-miles-per-hour. Taped inside the car was a note for the driver: “Turn wheel to left, push button—good luck”

Parts of the movie were filmed during a live television broadcast, so it was always a challenge to keep the movie cameramen out of the way of the television cameramen. Before each scene, director Tony Scott used storyboards and an assortment of toy cars to show the camera crews and stunt drivers exactly what he wanted captured on film. They placed cameras beneath the cars and inside the cars, the goal being to find vantage points that had not yet been exploited by other filmmakers. In all, Scott used an astonishing twenty-eight movie cameras to make the film.

Even with all the technical razzle-dazzle at his disposal, Scott placed a higher premium on making a film that explored the personalities of the men behind-the-scenes of NASCAR. “The characters that I’ve written are based on these people and not just cars going around in circles,” screenwriter Robert Towne said in the ESPN documentary. “I believe that we have gotten a sense of these people on film.”

 When
Days of Thunder
was released in June 1990, it did only moderately well at the box office—it took in nearly $89 million domestically when it needed $100 million to show a substantial profit—and reviews were mixed.

 “
Days of Thunder
serves up little to think about, much less enjoy,” wrote David Sterritt for the
Christian Science Monitor
. “There’s a certain novelty in seeing Mr. Duvall give one of his rare mediocre performances, and there’s a certain hilarity in watching Australian actress Nicole Kidman impersonate a ‘brain doctor,’ as the screenplay calls her, whose own brain reels with romance every time Cruise’s character comes near.”

Desson Howe, writing for the
Washington Post
, found the film to be packed with MTV-like images. “Essentially an encore from the
Top Gun
team, director Tony Scott’s
Thunder
is exactly what it promises to be: Not much—but at dizzying speed, stripped down and free of wind-resistant subtlety,” he wrote. “There’s a certain integrity to that. A certain deafening integrity. Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, two of Hollywood’s more successful antichrists of taste, should be congratulated—and they will be. Watch those box-office receipts pile up.”

Some of Cruise’s racetrack heroes came to his defense. Former Daytona 500 winner Geoff Bodine, who gave Tom his first ride around the famous track, compared the movie to
Top Gun
in an interview with the
Miami Herald
: “I can just see those Air Force/Navy pilots watching
Top Gun
and saying, ‘Ridiculous—that’s not the way it is.’ I’ve heard that from some people in the racing community: ‘This isn’t how it really is.’ Of course, it isn’t. It’s how Hollywood sees it. But it’s still pretty realistic. They just made it juicer and more spectacular.”

Some people thought it was a little too realistic. Remember race-car owner Rick Hendrick, whose friendship with Tom inspired him to make the movie? His crew chief, Harry Hyde, sued Paramount, alleging that he was injured by Tom using his career as a basis for Duvall's’ character, Harry Hogge. According to news reports, he took home forty thousand dollars from a settlement with the movie company.

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Upon meeting Tom Cruise for the first time, the first words out of Nicole Kidman’s mouth were, “You’re funny!” She quickly forgot what he said that made her laugh, but not the fact that he had made her laugh when she least expected it. 

If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was a reasonable facsimile. “He took my breath away,” she told
Rolling Stone
in a 1999 interview. “I don’t know what it was—chemical reaction? Hard to define—hard to resist.”

Tom felt it, too, although he was married at the time to actress Mimi Rogers. Nicole was unlike any woman he had ever known. His first response to the mysterious feelings that she stirred inside him was to panic and move out of the Brentwood mansion that he shared with Mimi. Then, feeling that he had overreacted—he had not so much as kissed his new co-star; his infatuation with her was little more than a fantasy at that point —he moved back into the house with Mimi, without ever explaining why he had left. The only problem with that was  he could not get Nicole out of his mind. Each time he tried to focus on Mimi, images of Nicole crept back into his thoughts.

Nicole underwent a similar experience in her relationship with Marcus, but since he was thousands of miles away in Australia—and she did not have to face him—she handled the situation much differently. She simply stopped taking Marcus’s telephone calls, probably more out of guilt than anything else.

How could she ever justify breaking up with Marcus? Not only was he her lover, he was her best friend. She and Tom had shared no intimate moments—and, besides that, he was married. If she couldn’t understand what was going on between herself and Tom, how would she ever be able to explain it to Marcus?

 By the time they left for Daytona Beach, Florida, to start shooting
Days of Thunder
, Tom and Nicole’s relationship seemed unstoppable. Since Tom was in nearly every scene—and Nicole was not—they were halfway through shooting before they got to spend any time together.

“Our scenes together went very well—we clicked,” Nicole told
Cosmopolitan.
“We made each other laugh.” Then, perhaps realizing that she was speaking in double entendre, she grinned broadly. “I don’t think we would have made it as a couple matched by a computer service. I’m a lousy driver myself. At home, I drove Mum’s old VW and put more than a few dents into it while trying to park. I didn’t know one car from another and couldn’t care less .  .  . [Tom] drove me around the Daytona track at one hundred eighty miles an hour. I ended up with a sore neck because at that speed your head gets pulled back. But it did get my adrenaline pumping.” 

Everyone in the film company knew what was going on between Tom and Nicole. They could see it in the secretive glances Nicole tossed Tom’s way and in the way he grinned at her whenever their eyes met. They were so ga-ga over each other that it would have been embarrassing, if it had not been so entertaining to watch from the sidelines.

Not entertained by the spark-filled romance was wife Mimi, who flew to Daytona Beach in December to talk to Tom about their two-year-old marriage. Six years his senior, she had taken him under her wing in 1987, after Tom had been involved in a high-profile romance with
Risky Business
co-star. Rebecca De Mornay. High-profile romances were nothing new for Mimi who had been linked by the tabloids with Tom Selleck, Christopher Reeves and Kennedy clansman Robert Shriver.