Riz Ahmed was preparing for his big confrontation with Tom Cruise. The two actors played a scientist and a hell-bent student in “Digger,” who face a swanky private jet after an ecological disaster fueled by humanity’s relentless pursuit of black gold. It was January 2025, and just as cameras were about to roll, news broke that a wildfire was threatening large areas of Los Angeles.
“I remember looking out at the crew watching the fire move in real time through satellite imagery, and they were thinking, ‘I’m going to lose my home,'” Ahmed said. “It was right there. So much of what is explored, exposed and satirized in this film was staring us right in the face.”
“Digger,” which opens Friday, has been in the works for nearly a decade. The absurdist view of greed and climate change, truth and the power of media distortion, senseless world leaders and rapacious billionaires, were struggling to get off the ground. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, his co-writer and director, said the production dropped three times in a period that saw Hollywood hit by COVID and labor strikes before Warner Bros. took over. and Legendary took a leap of faith and backed the film to the tune of $125 million.
“In the world of fear we live in, everyone wants certainty,” Iñárritu said over Zoom a few hours before the premiere of “Digger’s” in Los Angeles. “This movie is nothing. It was a big gamble to get it made and to pull the tone. But to their credit, Warner Bros. and Legendary were very bold. They didn’t hesitate.
While working to make “Digger”, Iñárritu began to feel that events were passing his story. As the shooting happened, Donald Trump returned to office, bringing his reality TV show approach to government, and Elon Musk gave the federal workforce a literal chainsaw. Ahead of “Digger’s” release, several AI executives and tech moguls have warned about the destructive power of the technology. The lines between Iñárritu’s fiction and our sad present are clearly blurring.
“We live in a satire,” said Iñárritu. “The more we expanded our imaginations, the truth was chasing us and catching us. It was crazy. Now I think the tone of the movie feels almost realistic because if you turn on the TV, this is what’s going on.”
Initially, the film was not named for Cruise’s character, Digger Rockwell. It was meant to be called “Blah, Blah, Blah.”
“It was a reference to this amazing, terrible, terrible weapon that we have as humans, which is the tongue,” Iñárritu said. “It can change your perception of the reality your body is experiencing. It can make you believe in something you don’t see.”
One thing you don’t often see is Cruise abandoning vanity to play a potbellied mogul with a thick Texas drawl and thinning hair. The physical transformation initially took six hours (Cruise challenged the crew to make up to one), but it was a transformation the film’s star accepted with abandon.
“He’s so handsome,” Iñárritu said. “He looks like he’s 40 years old. There’s no white person with that look. No one would believe him. He’s not someone from Wall Street. He’s from the southern part of the United States…
Ahmed shares several important moments with Cruise, including a drunken panic just as Digger is about to address a gathering of world leaders about the environmental disaster he has revealed. The “Sound of Metal” Oscar nominee praised his co-star as a scene partner.
“Tom is very careful – he’s as detailed as a stuntman,” Ahmed said. “His sense of space, his sense of movement, his physicality is something he’s so familiar with. And his sense of the camera and the frame conveys information in this very intuitive way. It’s amazing to watch.”
And Cruise was often a cheerleader for the rest of the team.
“Once in rehearsal, I did something, and obviously it didn’t work, and we were going to move on,” Ahmed recalled. “But before we did that, Tom stopped the rehearsal and complimented me saying, ‘Well done for trying something.’ He wanted us to take big swings because this film is such a big swing.”
Aside from being one of the biggest commercial risks of the year – a savage and surreal social satire produced on a studio scale – it’s almost impossible to discuss “Digger” without spoiling it. About a third of the way through, a moment completely redirects the story and puts it in a direction that is, well, Brechtian (bet you can’t say that about “Days of Thunder 2”). Both Iñárritu and Ahmed admit they are having a hard time dancing around the big reveal.
“I want to make sure that people are surprised when they see the film,” said Iñárritu. “It’s hard. That’s why our trailers were like, ‘What is this about?’ Well, we can’t say anything more. ”
It was a twist that Iñárritu said took “Digger” years to develop.
“I was on a hiking vacation with my young daughter, and I just thought, ‘How are we going to tell this story?'” said Iñárritu. “And as I was walking, I realized that the only way to tell this story is to separate from it in some way. That separation allows us to recognize ourselves without killing each other.”
“Digger” warns of the dangerous course humanity is taking, but Iñárritu wasn’t interested in offering a screed. He paid special attention to a 10-minute speech that Digger Rockwell delivers to a room full of presidents, prime ministers, and ambassadors, in which he acknowledges both the dire consequences of our relentless pursuit of oil and the creature comforts it provides. Are we really willing to sacrifice for the greater good?
“I’m not interested in pointing fingers or reducing the film to a political statement or a right or left thing,” said Iñárritu. “I’m trying, through Digger’s speech, to say that we are all part of this madness. That there are no good people or bad people. The system has caught us all, and we have to find a way together.”
“Digger” opens in theaters on Oct. 2 from Warner Bros. Pictures.