“I was very successful since I was a kid,” Tom Cruise told a full house at the Academy Museum’s 945-seat David Geffen Theater following a screening of Digger. That stardom has led him in search of ever bigger challenges, learning new skills and finding opportunities to apply them.

As he put it: “OK, the door’s open. Now I want to push it again.”

He has certainly done that with Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s wildly ambitious, deeply weird and extravagantly mounted comedy, in which Cruise plays a Texas oil tycoon forced to face the music after an environmental disaster puts the world at risk.

The Warner Bros. release, arriving just as Paramount nears its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, carries a reported $125 million production budget.

At 64 and 63, respectively, Cruise and Iñárritu are near-exact contemporaries taking this leap together. Cruise has ventured into similarly offbeat territory before, memorably in an Oscar-nominated turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and beneath the prosthetics of Ben Stiller’s comedy Tropic Thunder.

But he has spent much of his recent career delivering increasingly elaborate Mission: Impossible spectacles, taking extraordinary physical risks within a franchise whose appeal he understands intimately. Digger requires a different leap of faith, both from Cruise and from the audience he hopes will follow him.

Among critics, the film has proved wildly divisive, with some reviews positively savage, The Hollywood Reporter’s among them. I understand the objections to Digger; I was also quite happy to have seen it. There is something invigorating about watching this much talent and money committed to a movie this peculiar, even when its considerable parts refuse to cooperate.

Iñárritu offered a remarkably candid account of the challenges during the discussion. Making this trompe-l’œil of a film required a constant negotiation between theatricality and the camera. What felt inspired on set could look very different the following morning.

“We were laughing all day,” the four-time Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker said. Then he would watch the dailies: “Oh my God,” he recalled thinking. “This is not working. This is shit.” Adjusting the performance could send it too far in the other direction: “It’s too naturalistic. It’s not so funny.”

In sharing that, Iñárritu was describing the search for the film’s highly unusual tone, not conceding that the finished movie had failed. But the anecdote gets at the precariousness of the enterprise. The actors had to find that tone in their bodies and voices, he explained. “Nothing can be written in tone. It doesn’t exist,” he said.

Iñárritu compared the precision of Cruise’s acting to the “micro decisions” he makes during a dangerous stunt, when “one second is the difference between life and death.” On set, the director watched that attention extend to where Cruise placed his hands, when he winked and when he stayed silent. “Every take he’s just present and observing naturally,” he said.

Cruise, meanwhile, seemed delighted by the company he was keeping. He repeatedly jumped in to praise his fellow actors, recalling how difficult it was to stop laughing around John Goodman. Of Sandra Hüller, he said, “What an extraordinary actress,” before settling on a succession of wows.

His enthusiasm was considerably easier to pin down than his acting techniques. After Cruise gave a drawn-out answer about a life spent observing humanity to explain his character work, Iñárritu teased him: “He keeps the secret. He don’t answer.”

By the end of the conversation, Cruise was making a broader argument about what audiences want, and what filmmakers should give them. “This film is handmade,” he said. He described stopping on set with his colleagues to look around and appreciate the skill that had gone into the physical world surrounding them. “People want to see real things,” he said. Then, a little later: “People want real things and they want real experiences.”

Cruise never mentioned artificial intelligence, but the repeated emphasis on “real things” and “handmade” filmmaking could readily be heard as an implicit rejoinder to it. His remarks placed the value in the people doing the work, the skills they had acquired and the pleasure of being together to make something. “It was never handed to any of us,” he said.

For all his confidence, there was also an acknowledgment that the opportunity to keep doing this depends on people buying tickets. “My hope is always that the films would do enough that I’d have that opportunity to do it again,” Cruise said.

Whether audiences follow him into Digger remains to be seen. For now, he seemed grateful to have made the leap. “It’s not like I don’t have challenges, we don’t have challenges,” he said. “But I really choose to be joyful about creating.”

After posing for a cast and crew photo, Cruise, ever the audience pleaser, spent 15 minutes mingling with fans who rushed the stage for selfies and a few words with a movie legend. Four decades into his career, he’s still finding new ways to make it in this risky business.

He clearly loves the job.

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Chinese director Niu Niu’s Final Payment scooped the Best Film Award in the Fei Mu Awards of this year’s Pingyao International Film Festival (PYIFF), while Rafiki Fariala’s Congo Boy won Best Film in the festival’s Roberto Rossellini Awards.

Final Payment, which also won Best Actor for Niu Jianrong’s performance, revolves around a homeowner clashing with a contractor over the final payment following a set of renovations on his home. PYIFF’s competition jury stated: “Tearing through a very small rip, the film leads us into a reality and emotional landscape so expansive, where we sigh, lament, and reflect. The director’s approach is concise, unpretentious, and masterful, earning the wholehearted recognition of the entire jury.”

The Best Film award came with a cash prize of $150,000 (RMB1m) with half given to the director for the development of their next film, and half given to the distributor in China. Niu Niu previously directed Mr Junjun, which was awarded with the Jury Award and Youth Jury Award at PYIFF in 2023.

Also in the Fei Mu Awards, Xu Zao won Best Director for Light Pillar, while Best Actress went to Sun Yi for Wang Xiaozhen’s A Joke. The Jury Award was presented to Dong Jie’s Zoom In, Zoom Out, which had its world premiere in Venice Critics Week, while a special mention went to Cai Chengjie’s Suzhou Quartet.

The Fei Mu awards are focused on the festival’s Hidden Dragons section, which selects first, second and third films from emerging directors making Chinese-language films, while the Roberto Rossellini Awards focus on the Crouching Tigers section for emerging international directors.

Congo Boy, which took Best Film in the Roberto Rossellini Awards, also won Best Actor when it premiered in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes film festival. The PYIFF award came with a cash prize of $20,000, with half given to the director for the development of their next film, and half given to the distributor in China.

The PYIFF jury stated: “The Jury unanimously has been moved by this autobiographical story, told in a simple style that echoes the great tradition of neorealism. For a film focusing on a character that confronts his world with optimism despite dark times and takes on his shoulders the destiny of his entire family.”

Also in this section, the Philippines’ Rafael Manuel won Best Director for Filipiñana, while the Jury Award went to Ben’imana, directed by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, which won the Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes. The jury also awarded Rakan Mayasi’s Yesterday The Eye Didn’t Sleep a Special Mention.

Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui received the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon East-West Award, shortly before she receives the Camellia Award at Busan International Film Festival next week.

Pingyao’s International Contribution To Chinese Cinema Award went to Marco Müller, who founded the festival with Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke and currently serves as Artistic Director of the Film Art Research Centre at Shanghai University, and veteran producer, director and former chairman of China Film Group Han Sanping. Hello Group chairman Tang Yan was presented with a 10th Anniversary Award.

This year’s PYIFF opened on September 24 with a screening of the 4K restoration of Fei Mu’s Spring In A Small Town; closed with Good Trip, co-directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Norris Wong and Hoi Wong, and also screened Jia’s short film Torino Shadow, which premiered at this year’s Cannes.

PINGYAO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 AWARDS:

FEI MU AWARDS:

Best Film: Final Payment, dir: Niu Niu

Best Director: Xu Zao, Light Pillar

Best Actress: Sun Yi, A Joke, dir: Wang Xiaozhen

Best Actor: Niu Jianrong, Final Payment, dir: Niu Niu

Jury Award: Zoom In, Zoom Out, dir: Dong Jie

Special Mention: Suzhou Quartet, dir: Cai Chengjie

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI AWARDS:

Best Film: Congo Boy, dir: Rafiki Fariala

Best Director: Filipiñana, dir: Rafael Manuel

Jury Award: Ben’imana, dir: Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo

Special Mention: Yesterday The Eye Didn’t Sleep, dir: Rakan Mayasi