John Lahr in the New Yorker (2001.10.15) on African-American acting coachess Susan Batson:
As a coach, Batson also has to be something of a shape-shifter, and she adjusts her approach to the needs of each client. She first worked with [Tom] Cruise on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. “He said to me, ‘You know, I’ve done this King of Hollywood thing. I really wanna act,’ ” Batson recalls. “He wanted to grab something and bite into it. And he did.” For Magnolia, in which Cruise played a woman-hating men’s-empowerment guru, Batson worked to open him up “to the scumbag in him, the hustler in him.” She says, “I wanted him to be more physical. We worked on an animal – the fox. He would start to feel the whole thing, which gave him the clothing, the look. Once he got the sensation of the tail, he was totally present.”