What can Tom Cruize’s hand teach us about life?

Screenshot via ted.com 

A few years ago, the world renowned director J.J. Abrams delivered an engaging TED Talk. During the talk, among many interesting things, he also mentioned this story from the shooting of Mission Impossible III:

 So my favorite visual effect in the movie is the one I’m about to show you. And it’s a scene in which Tom’s character wakes up. He’s drowsy. He’s crazy — out of it. And the guy wakes up, and he shoves this gun in his nose and shoots this little capsule into his brain that he’s going to use later to kill him, as bad guys do.

OK, now. When we shot that scene, we were there doing it, the actor who had the gun, an English actor, Eddie Marsan — sweetheart, great guy — he kept taking the gun and putting it into Tom’s nose, and it was hurting Tom’s nose. And I learned this very early on in my career: Don’t hurt Tom’s nose. There are three things you don’t want to do. Number two is: Don’t hurt Tom’s nose. So Eddie has this gun — and he’s the greatest guy — he’s this really sweet English guy. He’s like, “Sorry, I don’t want to hurt you.” I’m like — you gotta — we have to make this look good. And I realized that we had to do something ’cause it wasn’t working just as it was. And I literally, like, thought back to what I would have done using the Super 8 camera that my grandfather got me sitting in that room, and I realized that hand didn’t have to be Eddie Marsan’s. It could be Tom’s. And Tom would know just how hard to push the gun. He wouldn’t hurt himself.

So we took his hand and we painted it to look a little bit more like Eddie’s. We put it in Eddie’s sleeve, and so the hand that you see… So Tom is playing two roles. And he didn’t ask for any more money.

My 2¢:
Imagination is an engine of difference. Do you need more resources, or to be more resourceful?

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