Legendary Producer Jerry Bruckheimer on Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, and 50 Years of Making Movie Magic

It has not been the producer’s only big box-office triumph in the last five years. Nor was it the biggest—that honor goes by far to Top Gun: Maverick, which grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide despite its theatrical release being delayed nearly three years by the pandemic (and also earned Bruckheimer his only Oscar nomination as a producer in his long career). The two were both directed by Joseph Kosinski.

“He’s an amazing talent, and that’s what you look for as a director,” Bruckheimer says of Kosinski. “He’s a great storyteller, he’s brilliant. He was trained as an architect and as an engineer, so structurally, everything has to look good. When you’re trained as an engineer, everything is coordinated. He storyboards the entire movie from beginning to end. We’re out shooting at Silverstone and he’s got little storyboards up on a big board, and we start crossing them off as he gets them. Just to have somebody who’s that organized and talented as the captain of your ship is a blessing.”

For Bruckheimer, embarking on ambitious, high-budget productions is habit, but he argues that while it’s not always easy to find financing these days, thanks to the consolidation of studios, shoots are less technically complicated now than in previous decades.

“In a way, it’s easier because the technology [has improved],” he says, citing his director of photography’s skill as well. “Claudio Miranda, who did Top Gun: Maverick and F1, created a camera that, [while] going 180 miles per hour, can pan from Brad [Pitt]‘s face to the next car remotely. It’s unbelievable what they did. … To have the technology to do that, I don’t think we could have done that years ago. Cameras were so much bigger.”

What hasn’t changed since Bruckheimer’s career started, is the need for big stars to guarantee the success of a production. He’s worked with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the last 40 years, among them Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Eddie Murphy, Nicolas Cage, Will Smith, Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, and Ben Affleck, in addition to deceased legends like Gene Hackman and Sean Connery.

F1 marked the first time he was able to collaborate with Pitt, who was both leading man and producer on the project.

“There’s a reason they’re movie stars: they’re enormously talented, they’re handsome, usually good looking for females, and they have some kind of magic,” Bruckheimer says. “Now, also, what makes a movie star is that they really care about what they do. [Pitt] was involved in writing the screenplay. He was involved in every step of the way, the editing, the advertising, everything, the distribution. So like Tom [Cruise], they put their heart and soul into every project that they do. That’s why they’re movie stars. But the real reason is there’s something magic in these movie stars. There’s something that, when you see them on a big screen, they captivate you.”

F1 also gave Bruckheimer another chance to collaborate with Javier Bardem, whom he’s known for almost a decade, when he played the main villain in 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge.

“Javier is an amazing actor and amazing individual. He’s the nicest, sweetest man. He’s so upbeat. He’s got a phenomenal family, and he’s just a great man and a wonderful actor,” he says. “He really can do anything. He can play the most, meanest, miserable character, and then he can be this wonderful character, and either one you feel his passion and that he cares about his team. It’s wonderful to work with somebody like that, and he’s one of those actors that doesn’t sit in his trailer. He’s hanging out on the set and talks to everybody, talks to the crew, and he’s a joy. He lifts everybody’s spirits.”

Bruckheimer lights up, too, when he talks about Tom Cruise. The success of Top Gun in the mid-1980s changed both their careers forever, and then they repeated their collaboration in 1990’s Days of Thunder, and reunited again for the Top Gun sequel.

“When we were making the first Top Gun, he was like a sponge, he wanted to know everything I was doing and what everyone did,” he says. “And now he’s a better producer than I am. If there’s someone on the crew who’s not doing what they’re supposed to, Tom notices because he knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and they’re gone. You’ve got to be phenomenal at whatever you do, because Tom doesn’t suffer people who don’t know what they’re doing. He wants the best behind the camera and the best in front of the camera.”

As with the case of Pitt, what Bruckheimer values most about Cruise is his degree of commitment to the productions he is involved in: “He’s really focused on everything: the advertising, the distribution. He’ll call theater owners and say please keep our movie running a little longer. Other actors, they finish the movie and they’re gone. They don’t want to do publicity. They don’t want to do anything. But the real movie stars, they really want to promote their movies.”

Cruise also acts as a booster for the movie business as a whole. He walked the red carpet at the London premiere of F1 in June, and was photographed with Pitt, Kosinski, and Bruckheimer, despite having no involvement with the film, and it being in direct competition with his own latest installment of the Mission Impossible franchise.

“He’s a good friend. He’s phenomenal. He worked with Brad, he loves Brad, and he wants movies to be successful. He really loves the theatrical experience, and he makes movies to be released theatrically,” the producer explains. “He wants all movies to be successful because he grew up like I did, going to the cinema, being excited about it like you did when you were younger. We want to give that to the next generation.”

Bruckheimer also speaks fondly of Nicolas Cage, who already had an established career—not to mention an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas—when they began collaborating in the mid-’90s. Bruckheimer helped Cage transform into an action hero and a box-office magnet through productions like The Rock, Con Air, and Gone In 60 Seconds, as well as a sort of Indiana Jones for the new generation in National Treasure.

“Nic, you would never think [of him for action roles], because he did so many comedic parts, but he’s physically, he’s enormously strong and big. He’s tall and he’s handsome, and he’s got a phenomenal physique. So it was easy, really easy,” Bruckheimer says. “I love him. He’s a child at heart. He’s such a sweet person.”

He also had kind words for Johnny Depp, who was already well-established when he embarked on Pirates of the Caribbean, but the franchise, which grossed Disney $4.5 billion worldwide through five Bruckheimer-produced installments, raised his popularity and fortune into the stratosphere.

“He’s such a great guy, fun to work with,” Bruckheimer says. “He knows all the crew members’ names, they love him. Everybody has a smile when he comes on the set, he’s just so much fun.”

He only collaborated with Bruce Willis on one occasion, in Armageddon, but Bruckheimer also has fond memories of the actor, who sadly had to leave the profession due to the frontotemporal dementia he suffers from.

“He was a bartender. So he knows what it is, how hard you have to work to get to where you are, and he’s another guy that crew loved,” Bruckheimer says. “He just took care of everybody. He was such a good guy, and that’s so important. Some actors you work with show up in the morning and say, ‘When can I go? I want to go.’ Not Bruce, he stayed. These guys, that’s why they’re movie stars.”

Even before Top Gun, Bruckheimer found genre success with 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop, which grossed more than $300 million worldwide and made Eddie Murphy a star.

Both Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke were reportedly in contention for the lead role of Axel Foley, but Murphy’s performance as leading man set an important precedent, demonstrating to the industry that African-American actors could successfully lead blockbuster films at a time when they were often relegated to secondary and stereotypical roles in big-budget projects.

“It’s always about talent, and Eddie had proven he had it in spades in Saturday Night Live and Trading Places,” Bruckheimer explains. “We also had a director who captured the brilliance of Eddie and worked tirelessly at getting that humor and give Eddie situations where he could shine. That’s what Martin Brest did.”

For the sequel to Beverly Hills Cop, as well as for Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, and Deja Vu, he relied on Tony Scott (brother of fellow director Ridley Scott), a director with whom Bruckheimer frequently collaborated before his death in 2012.

“He’s an amazing director, an amazing individual,” Bruckheimer said of Tony Scott. “He was tireless, he never slept, he was just passionate beyond belief. He would get up at four in the morning after going to bed at one or two and draw storyboards for the next day. He was just so passionate.”

Bruckheimer also reminisced about Don Simpson, a producer with whom he collaborated from the early 1980s on Flashdance until the mid-1990s, when he passed away while they were in the midst of developing The Rock, which was to be their last film together before dissolving their partnership. Much has been written about Simpson’s difficult character and drug addiction, which cost him his position as Paramount’s lead in the early ’80s (just after he began working with Bruckheimer) and, ultimately, his life. This also undermined his professional relationship with Bruckheimer, but Bruckheimer is the first to admit that without what he learned from him, he wouldn’t have gotten where he is now.