‘Digger’ Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Riz Ahmed on How the Year’s Riskiest Movie Captures Our Demented Reality: ‘We Are Living in a Satire’

The "Digger" team on Tom Cruise's dramatic transformation and the need to keep its big twist a secret.

Riz Ahmed was getting ready for his big confrontation with Tom Cruise. The two actors were playing a scientist and a hell-catting oilman in “Digger,” who face off in a swanky private jet over an ecological disaster triggered by humanity’s relentless pursuit of black gold. It was January 2025, and just as cameras were about to roll, news broke that a raging forest fire was threatening large swaths of Los Angeles.

“I remember looking out at the crew who were watching the fire move in real time through satellite imagery, and they were thinking, ‘I’m about 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 on Friday, has been in the works for nearly a decade. The absurdist look at greed and climate change, reality and the distorting power of media, feckless world leaders and rapacious billionaires, struggled to get off the ground. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, its co-writer and director, said the production collapsed three times during a period that saw Hollywood battered by COVID and labor strikes before Warner Bros. and Legendary took a leap of faith and backed the movie to the tune of $125 million.

“In the world of fear we are living in, everybody wants certainty,” Iñárritu said over Zoom a few hours before “Digger’s” Los Angeles premiere. “This film is not any of that. For it to be made and to nail the tone was a big bet. But to their credit, Warner Bros. and Legendary were really bold. They never hesitated. They believed in this film — the urgency, the absurdity, the humanity, the nowness that it has.”

As he labored to get “Digger” made, Iñárritu began to feel like events were overtaking his story. As shooting happened, Donald Trump returned to office, reintroducing his reality TV show approach to government, and Elon Musk took a literal chainsaw to the federal workforce. In the lead-up to “Digger’s” release, various AI executives and tech moguls have warned about the technology’s destructive power. The lines between Iñárritu’s fiction and our demented present are clearly blurring.

“We are living in a satire,” Iñárritu said. “The more we stretched our imagination, reality was chasing and catching us. It was crazy. Now I think the tone of the film feels almost realistic because if you turn on the TV, this is what is going on. The people in power are trying to convince all of us that everything is fine, and people want to buy that, and that’s the power of someone like Digger.”

Initially, the film wasn’t named for Cruise’s character, Digger Rockwell. It was intended to be entitled “Blah, Blah, Blah.”

“It was a reference to this incredible, terrible, terrifying weapon that we as humans have, which is the tongue,” Iñárritu said. “It can change your perception of the reality that your body is experiencing. It can make you believe in something that you don’t see.”

One thing you don’t see often is Cruise abandoning vanity to play a potbellied mogul with a thick Texas drawl and thinning hair. The physical transformation originally took six hours (Cruise challenged the makeup team to get it down to one), but it was a change that the movie star embraced with abandon.

“He’s so handsome,” Iñárritu said. “He looks like he’s 40 years old. There’s no white man with that look. Nobody will believe it. He’s not someone off of Wall Street. He’s from the South of the United States … But I think he loved it because it liberated him to be playful, to suddenly get into the skin of another person that is not Tom Cruise, and he nailed it.”

Ahmed shares several pivotal moments with Cruise, including a drunken clash just as Digger is about to address a collection of world leaders about the environmental disaster he unleashed. The “Sound of Metal” Oscar nominee praised his co-star as a scene partner.

“Tom is meticulous — he has the precision of a stuntman,” Ahmed said. “His spatial awareness, his sense of movement, his physicality is something he’s so in command of. And his awareness of the camera and of the frame informs his behavior in this way that is very intuitive. It’s wondrous to watch.”

And Cruise often served as a cheerleader for the rest of the cast.

“Once in rehearsal, I did something, and it clearly didn’t work, and we were about to move on,” Ahmed remembered. “But before we did, Tom stopped the rehearsal and gave me a round of applause to say, ‘Well done for trying something.’ He wanted us to take big swings because this film is such a big swing.”

In addition to being one of the year’s biggest commercial risks — a savage and surreal social satire produced on the scale of a studio blockbuster — “Digger” is nearly impossible to discuss without spoiling it. About a third of the way through, a moment completely reorients the story and sends it in a direction that is, well, Brechtian (bet you can’t say that about “Days of Thunder 2”). Both Iñárritu and Ahmed confess they’re having a tough time dancing around the big reveal.

“I want to make sure people are surprised when they see the film,” Iñárritu said. “It’s difficult. That’s why our trailers were like, ‘What is this about?’ Well, we cannot say anything more.”

It was a twist that Iñárritu said he came up with years into “Digger’s” development.

“I was on a hiking holiday with my young daughter, and I was just thinking, ‘How are we going to tell this story?'” Iñárritu said. “And as I was strolling, I realized that the only way to tell this story is by being separated from it in some way. That separation will allow us to recognize ourselves without killing each other.”

“Digger” offers a warning about the perilous course humanity is taking, but Iñárritu wasn’t interested in offering up a screed. He paid particular attention to a 10-minute speech Digger Rockwell delivers to a room full of presidents, prime ministers, and ambassadors, in which he acknowledges both the terrible consequences of our relentless pursuit of oil and the creature comforts it provides. Are we really prepared to make a sacrifice for the greater good?

“I’m not interested in pointing fingers or reducing the film to a political commentary or a right or left thing,” Iñárritu said. “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 trapped all of us, and we have to find a way out together.”

“Digger” opens in theaters on October 2 from Warner Bros. Pictures.