HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — At breakneck speed, secret agent Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) sends the ordinary-seeming June Havens' (Cameron Diaz) life on a screeching detour ... and vice versa. June boarded a plane in Wichita, Kansas and began chatting up her charming, mysterious seatmate - Roy. Soon after, everything changed. Suddenly, the plane was hurtling into a cornfield without any living crew or passengers.
Without even time to catch her breath, June finds herself being pursued around the globe – dodging bullets in Boston, leaping rooftops in Austria, and running from bulls in Seville – all in the company of a potentially duplicitous, possibly unstable yet decidedly alluring secret agent at the center of a life-or-death adventure that will push these two people from opposite worlds to do the one thing they've long avoided: trust. Now, nothing will be the same again for them, as this exceptional secret operative finds himself undone by ordinary love and this everyday woman finds herself capable of the most extraordinary things she could imagine.
"Knight and Day has everything I love in movies," says Cruise. "It's a perfect mix of action, comedy and fresh, identifiable characters with a love story that feels very organic. What interested me so much about the story of Roy and June is that everything that happens to them happens through the prism of action. The challenge and joy for Cameron and me was finding ways to reveal our characters in the middle of these manic moments of danger – showing how Roy and June start to bring out the best in each other, which is the ultimate romantic idea."
Diaz, who was already attached to the project when Cruise came aboard, appreciated the characters' interplay, their romance - and the chance to take the journey with her leading man. "I was drawn to Knight and Day not only for its high-level action, but because I saw it as an impassioned love story between two people who find each other from opposite worlds," Diaz says. "Roy and June have that thing where they each bring out something interesting and unexpected in the other, and I thought that would be so much fun to explore on this thrilling ride with Tom."
Watch: Knight and Day Cast Interviews
Director James Mangold has a history of taking creative, edgy approaches to classic genres - he most recently helmed the Oscar-winning biopic of Johnny Cash, Walk the Line; and brought wit and speed to the Western in the critically acclaimed 3:10 to Yuma. Now he makes another departure, mixing global espionage action with witty romance, and wrapping an intricate web of high-speed chases, battles and escapes inside a love story full of glamour and fun.
Unlike most action films of this scope, Knight and Day did not begin as a comic book, TV series or franchise property – but as a spec script by Patrick O'Neill. For Mangold, it was a chance to make something classic new again. "We saw Knight and Day as an update of those wonderful, Hollywood cinematic confections – a movie full of travel, glamour, humor, love and adventure - but with modern characters and dynamic, intense action," he says. "One of the things important to me, as a director who has done both dramatic and comedic films, was not to let Knight and Day become a James Bond movie. We wanted to do something more fanciful, more like Charade or North by Northwest; a modern action picture with a light heart. We wanted to take audiences on a fun journey around the world, a journey filled with comedy, yet with characters who feel completely real and actors who would commit to that."
He continues: "To do all that, you need the right people. With Tom and Cameron, I knew it could happen. One of the things I've really missed about Tom's movies in the last several years, and what I really wanted to see again in Knight and Day, was Tom in a role that is both human and funny. I was really excited by the opportunity to take that step with him playing Roy Miller, a character who is suddenly second-guessing everything that he wants in life. And then into Roy's world walks Cameron Diaz, as June Havens, who puts him in a position to do things and feel things he's never done or felt before. A major interest for me was the humor of mixing together their romantic squabbles and confusion with high-scale action."
Another person key to the project was Mangold's long-time filmmaking partner and behind-the-scenes marriage partner, producer Cathy Konrad, with whom he has developed a tight-knit creative shorthand that it verges on telepathy. Konrad was drawn to Knight and Day by the story's originality. "It's hard to find fresh material that isn't superhero based or something like that," she observes. "What spoke to us is that Knight and Day is about two great characters, even more so than the action. It reflects something that I think is found in all of our work: the idea that behind every good story there are always great people."
Mangold relished the challenge of bending a beloved genre. "We were very aware of the legacy and iconography of spy movies - the Bond pictures, the Bourne pictures, the Mission: Impossible pictures - and we were always looking at how we could upend that and find new ways to approach it," he explains. "Knight and Day is not a send-up. We set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic."
Mangold upped the clash of high-end spycraft with comedy and romance, while taking the characters into slippery territory, which is just where he likes to dwell. He says: "One of the fun questions the movie asks is: even if you are a spy capable of bringing down a plane or saving the world...can you handle a relationship? You have these two wonderfully opposite characters - a woman who has always had a fantasy of going somewhere but has never let go enough to do it and a man who has been absolutely everywhere, but has never let himself know love. It's a collision of opposite desires from the moment they meet."
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