Why did 'BLAH, BLAH, BLAH' nearly become 'Digger's title? Alejandro G. Iñárritu answers
Alejandro G. Iñárritu walks you through how Digger got its name — and why a totally different one almost won out.
Before it landed on Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu was seriously toying with a very different title: BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. Speaking ahead of the film ’s Los Angeles premiere, the director said the phrase wasn’t a joke — it was his blunt nod to the power of language and how it can warp what we think we’re seeing.
“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,” he said.
The idea plugs directly into the movie ’s setup: Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a swaggering oil magnate trying to control the story around a catastrophe he helped unleash. Iñárritu has talked about watching “reality catch up” with his film — that absurdity can turn strangely ordinary when powerful people repeat their version of events often enough.
Inside Cruise’s transformation
To play Rockwell, Tom Cruise disappears under a full makeover: thinning hair, a potbelly and a pronounced Southern drawl, with a silhouette designed to wipe away the polished movie-star image audiences know. Iñárritu has said Cruise embraced the disguise because it freed him from decades of on-screen slickness.
The physical change didn’t come easy. The look initially took about six hours in the makeup chair, but Cruise pushed the team to streamline it to roughly one hour, working through repeated timing drills with the department until they nailed the routine (as reported by Variety).