The ending of ‘Digger’ and the plot twists, explained by director Alejandro Inarritu

On paper, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film had all the makings of a success.

The Oscar-winning director assembled a star-studded cast led by the inimitable Tom Cruise. It had a twisty, surprising storyline that used satire to tackle ambitious topics, and a talented crew that built sets impressive enough to live up to it.

But he was still nervous about the execution.

“The tone of the acting was what scared me the most,” Iñárritu told Business Insider shortly before the film’s opening weekend. “You can’t write the tone, you have to feel it and hear it.”

Four days later, the box office verdict came in: “Digger” was a bomb. The climate change satire starring Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and Emma D’Arcy grossed $8 million in its opening weekend on a reported budget of $180 million, making it the lowest opening weekend for Cruise in 19 years. The film is only expected to gross $50 million worldwide by the end of its theatrical run.

To add insult to injury, film critics, who helped make his previous films like “The Revenant” and “Birdman” Oscar darlings, lambasted Iñárritu for even attempting something as grandiose and ambitious as “Digger.”

The Hollywood Reporter called it “so meta that one watches with excruciating weariness as it disappears up one’s own ass.” IndieWire described him as “so detached from human truth that his most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat.”

The film currently holds a 53% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest for Iñárritu and the lowest for Cruise in nearly a decade.

Not everyone hated the movie. Anne Hathaway, Mandy Patinkin, Jane Fonda and Iñárritu’s close friend Guillermo del Toro all shared positive reactions on social media following the film’s release. “I love the arts, I fuck the charts,” del Toro wrote on X.

The film proved controversial in part thanks to its twists and turns, the basics of which we’ll reveal here. (Stop reading now if you don’t want spoilers!)

“Digger” follows oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Cruise), who learns that one of his wells in the Arctic has exploded and a piece of glacier is hurtling toward Europe to wreak havoc. But about half an hour into the film, it’s revealed that the Digger Rockwell saga is actually a play. Rockwell is played by an actor named Curtis Markson in a satirical stage production called “Fossil Fools.”

At the end of the film, there’s another twist: “Fossil Fools” is based on real events that happened years before. There was a Digger Rockwell, and one of his wells exploded, causing an environmental catastrophe that changed humanity. Markson performs the play to a live audience decades after these events happened, and the world is still paying the price.

It’s an ambitious attempt on Iñárritu’s part to comment on climate change while expanding the audience’s ability to tell a non-linear story. Whether this was successful or not depends on who you ask. But if Iñárritu learned anything while making “Digger,” it’s that “satire is a motherfucker.”

For the latest interview in Business Insider’s Director’s Chair series, Iñárritu talked about his trip to the Arctic, choosing the film’s ending, and the unique way he worked with Tom Cruise to develop the storyline.

Reading the script to Tom Cruise “like an 8 year old” and what “Digger” is really about

Business Insider: You said the idea for this film came to you ten years ago. What was this idea and how did it evolve?

Alejandro González Iñárritu: I can tell you it all started when we finished filming “The Revenant.” We had to deal with a lot of weather conditions – dramatic changes to where we were filming in parts of Canada. Things were happening, weather-wise, that had never happened before.

A climate difference of one degree, people don’t understand what that means. You say, “Well, the planet is 1.5 degrees warmer,” and people say, “Who cares? It’s the difference between water and ice, and we experienced it spectacularly. It was surprising. We shot on the ice in the summer.

So Sabina Berman, my writing partner, and I started brainstorming. The Arctic was melting. The powerful were excited because, as the ice receded, there were suddenly more canals to transport more materials. The absurdity of it all was the start of this narrative madness.

I think the next step is: how am I going to tell this story using my own creativity?

I think as a storyteller it is our duty to try to tell or express a story in the most original way possible. The original title of the screenplay was “Blah, Blah, Blah”, and that’s what this story is about. This is the most frightening weapon that all human beings have: the tongue. It’s the weapon. We didn’t want to tell a story about climate change or politics. I hope this story transcends politics. We wanted to talk about the human nature of blah, blah, blah.

The result of blah, blah is that no one listens. The brutal final minutes of the film show the result: a dystopian world.

Language is a tool. It is a bridge to bring a common reality. But it is also a weapon to be destroyed. Once an idea arises – an ideology, a religion, whatever – suddenly the reality experienced by the body, and not our abstract thought, becomes almost a reality. I think that’s one of the traps we find ourselves in right now as a society.

Then you need someone as big and brash as Digger Rockwell’s character to take us on this journey, right? Did you need to cast someone at Tom Cruise’s level to direct this film?

Let’s start even before that. Before the casting, I realized that no one cares about an abstract thought or reflection. Perception has become reality, and for nine years, reality seems to be secondary to the stories people tell us. They want us to believe things for a reason. But no one cares what I think.

So I realized that the only way to explore this phenomenon was to need a character. This can’t be a…