Film actors should know about filmmaking. And film directors should know about acting.

Tom Cruise with Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.”

Tom Cruise has a complaint.

You might not, at first, imagine how he could. He is a perpetually youthful millionaire. He has a huge new movie about to open, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.” And the gossip pages are full of relationship rumors about the actor and the lovely Ana de Armas (who also — coincidentally — has an upcoming movie that she is promoting, too).

Still, there is one thing that bugs the pride of Glen Ridge: Film schools aren’t teaching actors enough about moviemaking.

Cruise recently received a British Film Institute award and, Variety reports, used his acceptance speech to attack colleges for “failing to teach production tools and filmmaking technology” to aspiring actors. “It’s not taught in film school,” he lamented. “I always tell actors: spend time in the editing room, produce a movie, study old movies, recognize what the composition is giving you, know what those lenses are, understand the lighting and how to use it for your benefit. Understand the art form.”

Although cocksure authority is a big part of Cruise’s brand, he is actually a bit off base here. As this aging film-school graduate could have told him, film schools do, in fact, teach editing and composition and lenses and lighting; that is literally what they are set up to do. The thing is, actors don’t generally go to film school. They go to drama school, which concentrates on performance (and, even so, the better programs, like Juilliard’s, already offer a variety of cinema-specific courses, such as “Acting on Camera”).

Still, Cruise may have accidentally made a good point. Maybe every aspiring actor should take a filmmaking class or two? Even better, maybe every would-be director should sit in on some drama classes?

Quentin Tarantino (back row, white jacket) in “The Golden Girls.”

Acting has its own language and, sadly, not every filmmaker is fluent. Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and Orson Welles all began as actors in the theater and, not coincidentally, their films were famous for the extraordinary work they drew from their casts. One of Quentin Tarantino’s first Hollywood jobs was playing an Elvis impersonator on “The Golden Girls” — and his fond appreciation and support of actors (particularly those in need of a comeback) is legendary.

Nurturing a performance is a definite skill, and the tools change depending on the performer. Some want long, psychological discussions of the role; others, just a quick, terse, on-the-set adjustment in their pacing, or volume. John Huston was the son of an actor (as well as an occasional, happy thespian himself) and he knew how to give a star just the advice they needed. (When Katharine Hepburn was struggling to figure out how to play Rose in “The African Queen,” all he had to provide was a two-word clue: “Eleanor Roosevelt.”)

Other directors, though, struggle to work with performers – or simply don’t try. Alfred Hitchcock would give meticulous stage directions but leave the details of the actual acting up to his stars (which Montgomery Clift found frustrating, and Janet Leigh found liberating). Stanley Kubrick hated being asked about a character’s motivation in a particular scene, and quickly shut down any actor who tried. “That’s your job,” he snapped at Malcolm McDowell on the set of “A Clockwork Orange.”

Of course, both directors were geniuses at creating visual dramas, but maybe if they had sat in on an acting workshop or two along the way, they could have saved themselves a bit of on-set drama, as well.

Julianne Moore, right, with Marisa Tomei in the soap opera “The Edge of Night” in 1984.

Similarly, knowing how a lens or a light is going to affect your screen performance is essential, but it is hardly something a performer is born knowing. The smart ones pick it up along the way. After a decade laboring on B movies, Lucille Ball knew the tech well enough that she could walk on a stage with dozens of lights and know which one was out. Julianne Moore started out laboring on daytime TV; she told me, as a result, however deep she’d go into a movie’s emotional scene, she always remained aware of precisely how the camera was framing her.

It would have been easier, of course, if both women could have started their careers already well-versed in all that technical knowledge. Just as it’s easier on every performer — and every audience — if the newly minted filmmaker behind the camera knows something about acting, and how to create an environment in which it can flourish.

But learning those things takes time, and money, and what hungry young artist-in-training ever has enough of either? If you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to study filmmaking — a dicey investment to begin with — do you really want to spend even more time and money trying to fit in an acting class? If you’re a recent drama-school grad, barely getting by waiting tables, are you really eager to spend more money on some for-profit school’s “crash course” in filmmaking?

Besides, why should an actor take the time to learn about lenses and lighting when something as fleeting as a viral video can jump-start a career? Why should a filmmaker worry about working with actors when they can fix flubbed lines and fine-tune performances later on their laptop? Why not go a little easier on yourself?

Maybe part of the problem is that things have become too easy. When I went to film school in the 1970s … well, it might as well have been the 1920s. Unload the camera improperly, and you’d ruin a whole reel of film. Put your lights too close to a curtain, and you could start a fire. Editing meant a razor blade, a bottle of cement, and a clamp to splice the new scene together. I won’t claim I was very good at it. But it did give me a real respect for what went into filmmaking — for the myriad of decisions on composition and lighting and performance that had to be made every minute.

And it makes me wonder if we haven’t lost something in the years since — if people have become spoiled by technology. If maybe it does too much for us, and too quickly, and removes some of the painstaking necessity of craft and collaboration.

I think back 25 years, to the premiere of Lars von Trier’s moving “Dancer in the Dark.” It was at the New York Film Festival and, after the screening, Catherine Deneuve did a press conference. The film’s musical sequences had been shot using multiple digital cameras — still a new thing then – and one reporter asked Deneuve if she thought these advances in technology would make it easier for people to make films.

“Yes,” she said with chilly Parisian hauteur. “Unfortunately.”

I see her point, now. Because, you know, life shouldn’t be hard.

But maybe sometimes art needs to be.

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