In the taciturn, wandering hero of his film Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, Edward Zwick sees an echo of the last film he and Tom Cruise made together, 2003's The Last Samurai.
Former military policeman Reacher is, he says, a little like Yojimbo, the hero of Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai films of the 1960s.
"The ronin were those masterless men who roamed around, and yet they found themselves getting involved in circumstances they hadn't expected," Zwick says. "I guess it's kind of funny that Tom and I would find a sort of analogue of that in this story."
Reacher is the hero of 20 novels by Englishman Lee Child; Never Go Back is adapted from the 18th of them, though it is only the second film in what star and producer Cruise presumably hopes will become a fruitful franchise.
Zwick thinks Christopher McQuarrie did a good job with the first movie, "but I thought there was more to be revealed, to be explored, about this man and how cut off he is from the world. I thought how interesting to take somebody who has chosen to remain apart and force him to go deep into a relationship with these two women."
Tom Cruise as modern-day ronin Jack Reacher. Photo: Paramount
Those women are army major Susan Turner, played by How I Met Your Mother's Cobie Smulders, and teenage runaway Samantha Dayton (Danika Yarosh), who may or may not be the daughter Reacher never even knew he had.
The three are thrown together when they become embroiled in a conspiracy in which a military contractor appears to be selling US arms on the black market, though nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems.
At first glance, it's an odd choice for Zwick. In 1987, he created the magnificent yuppie soap Thirtysomething for TV with long-time writing partner Marshall Herskovitz (also one of the writers of this film). In 1989, he directed the Civil War pic Glory, which won three Academy Awards, including Denzel Washington's first. He is, too, an executive producer of Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation, which is widely tipped to feature in the forthcoming Oscar race.
But there's never been a straight line connecting his work on film and TV, he says. "I'm very promiscuous in my tastes."
He's always loved crime thrillers, but if he was ever going to make one, he wanted it to do more than "tick the boxes of the genre".
Edward Zwick, centre, with Cobie Smulders and Tom Cruise on set. Photo: Chiabella James
Crafting a more complex Reacher was part of that, but just as important was the character of Turner. She's a career officer, as tough as she is attractive. Her relationship with Reacher starts as flirtation over the phone, but not for the first time in a Cruise movie, the sexual tension remains distinctly unresolved.
"I just felt, we all felt, that the more interesting part of this relationship is that they are professionals and peers," Zwick explains. "If it suddenly became about the two of them jumping into bed it would give it too much of that predictable 'movie' thing, and in some sense it would have belied some of the things we were going for."
Among them was the desire to make something of a feminist action movie.
Cobie Smulders did all her own stunts in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Photo: Emmanuel Wong
"It's not just that Cobie is kick-ass or Danika is strong. It's that they make their own decisions, they are his equals, they're not furniture. They're central – and that's the real politics of it."
Cruise and Smulders do get physical in one respect, though: they both did all their own stunts. And with Cruise in particular, there's a real sense that you're watching a man in his 50s – admittedly a very fit one – running, jumping, being hit, and suffering for it.
"I don't know about you, but I have a bit of superhero fatigue," says Zwick. "When you're in a fight and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that."
Oh, but it hurts.
That physical realism meshed with a broader intention to make a film that harked back to an earlier kind of thriller – the likes of Bullitt (1968) or Three Days of the Condor (1975) – "that tried to be human of scale" while also delivering on the action front.
"Tom and I really wanted to try to pull that off," says Zwick, "and still have it appeal to a worldwide audience that's had a steady diet of buildings falling on people."
And now you've made one, could you imagine going back and doing another?
"Oh, I don't know," says Zwick with something between a laugh and a groan. "Let me get through this one first, please God."
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is now showing
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
