Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman are said to be making a ‘scary’ supernatural film next. But what is Deeper, and why do they want to make it?
Across his lengthy career to date, Tom Cruise has climbed the tallest building in the world, clung to the side of a plane during take-off, and fought an Egyptian mummy. What’s left for a Hollywood star who’s done everything? According to director Doug Liman, head off on a mission to the bottom of the ocean.
Liman himself broke the news about what could be his next collaboration with Cruise earlier this week when he told Showbiz411 that he and the star are planning to make a “scary” supernatural thriller together. That thriller is said to be Deeper, a script originally written in 2015 and which prompted one of those studio bidding frenzies we hear about from time to time; at one stage, it had been purchased by MGM and would have starred Idris Elba.
Deeper is now in the clutches of Warner Bros, where, if the reports are correct, it’ll finally go into production with Liman and Cruise at the helm. One major thing going against the project is its origins: Deeper was written by Max Landis, son of director John Landis, who established himself as an outgoing and prolific screenwriter in the 2010s. Chronicle, directed by Josh Trank in 2012, was a sleeper hit, and Landis went on to write such films as Victor Frankenstein, Mr Right, American Ultra and Bright.
Landis was then dropped by his manager in 2019 following multiple allegations of emotional and sexual abuse. A film based on one of his screenplays, gremlin-on-a-plane thriller Shadow In The Cloud, emerged the following year, but its director Roseanne Liang and its star, Chloë Grace Moretz, quickly distanced themselves from the writer.
“Max was not the producer or writer of this project, and I was allowed to take on the script and make changes with the producers as I saw fit,” Liang told IndieWire in 2020. “The structure of the project has remained quite similar to Max’s draft, but there are things that have changed quite a lot.”
Given its screenwriter’s history, it’s surprising to hear that a Landis script from all those years ago might still make it to the big screen. It’s possible that, in the intervening period, the script has been reworked by subsequent writers, and that the ‘go draft’, assuming the film actually happens, will be quite different from what Landis came up with almost a decade ago.
All the same, it’s interesting to revisit Deeper’s original draft just to see what it was that interested those Hollywood studios – and Liman and Cruise in particular. We won’t go into spoiler territory here; the script is out there on the internet if readers want to find it and read it for themselves. What’s clear, though, is that Deeper has a claustrophobic premise that could easily appeal to a star and filmmaker with a certain daredevil attitude.
Deeper introduces Edward Breen, a former NASA astronaut whose career was cut short for reasons the story doesn’t immediately describe. Instead, he’s parlayed his skills into deep sea diving, and on page one of the script, he’s about to take a submersible craft on a mission to the deepest point on Earth. Only discovered decades earlier, the fictional Ni’hil Crevasse has its own myths and legends attached to it, including the story of a Frenchwoman who vanished in mysterious circumstances when she piloted her own submersible into the trench in the 1960s.
We quickly realise that Deeper is one of those stories with a single-location premise: pretty much the entire story is shot from Breen’s perspective in the tiny submersible, with his only company being the voices from the ship floating above him and the view out of his porthole as he descends into the briny depths.
For a star like Tom Cruise, it’s the kind of conceit that holds a unique appeal; like the terrific Ryan Reynolds thriller Buried from 2010, it places the entire film on the shoulders of its lead. Breen’s also the kind of character who might appeal to Cruise: outwardly confident, capable, even arrogant, but with hidden reservoirs of regret and a self-destructive streak that would make him want to embark on such a dangerous mission in the first place. Cruise’s more recent roles have tended to highlight his talent as a stunt performer; a deep sea ghost story like Deeper would be a chance for him to do a more low-key character piece, albeit in the midst of a plot that requires lots of flashing warning lights, hurried repairs and eerie sights looming up in portholes.
That Liman and Cruise are reportedly interested in Deeper also leaves this writer wondering whether they have something potentially risky in mind should they get to make it. The pair most famously collaborated on the time-loop sci-fi action thriller Edge Of Tomorrow (also known as Live Die Repeat), which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. But less famously, they also made the 2017 crime drama American Made, in which Cruise played real-life pilot Barry Seal, who ran secret flying missions for the CIA while also feathering his own nest by smuggling drugs into the USA. Cruise did most if not all of the flying sequences in that film, some of them quite dangerous-looking.
Given Cruise’s noted appetite for doing his own stunts, and Liman’s own renegade approach to filmmaking, it isn’t hard to imagine the pair shooting at least some of Deeper with a real submersible, possibly out in the actual ocean. Behind-the-scenes footage has shown Cruise preparing for some underwater stunts in his latest film, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in recent weeks. Some readers may also remember the marketing campaign for 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, in which Cruise was said to have held his breath for six and a half minutes during an underwater heist setpiece. Those are skills that would make for a logical fit in Deeper, which contains plenty of tense, watery sequences of its own.
Landis was known for writing his scripts at speed, and Deeper feels like an early draft that needs fleshing out. All the same, there’s the seed of a good idea here: the concept of an explorer sinking into the unknown and facing their own unravelling sanity places it in the realm of such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft. Leaning more on suspense and atmosphere rather than gore, Deeper could make for a lean, effective tale of the supernatural – a refreshing contrast from the bombast of Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise and the madcap tone of Liman’s recent thrillers, Road House and The Instigators.
This is, again, assuming Deeper actually happens. Hollywood is littered with projects that are worked and then abandoned, and Liman and Cruise have themselves talked about certain projects that haven’t, to date, emerged. A sequel to Edge Of Tomorrow has been talked about for years but hasn’t cohered into anything more tangible than a soundbite or two.
And then there’s Luna Park – a long-discussed action thriller that could take Liman and Cruise into space… though that project, and its script, are best left for another story entirely.
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