MEN ON A MISSION MARK DANIELL
Director McQuarrie reteams with Cruise for more impressive and Impossible stunts
Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie hadn’t even finished making the last Mission: Impossible movie and they were already talking about making another.
So McQuarrie, who co-wrote M:I 5 (Rogue Nation) with Drew Pearce, hatched an idea for a new movie that would see Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt come face to face once again with Sean Harris as villainous Solomon Lane. That movie is Mission: Impossible — Fallout.
Q You’re the first director who has come back to do a Mission sequel. When did you get the idea for Fallout and what did you think when Tom Cruise asked you to come back and do another?
A We struggled for a long time in the making of Rogue Nation about how we were going to resolve Sean Harris’s character. We were convinced that Ethan and (his arch-nemesis) Solomon Lane had to have some kind of a fight and that Lane had to die and we realized that wasn’t where that sequel was headed. I had an idea (for Fallout) that we talked about when we were promoting the last one, but I said to Tom, “There’s a precedent here that these films get a different director every time.” And Tom said, “Precedents are meant to be broken. I want you to direct the movie.”
Q So aside from the stunts, how did you want to make this film different for Mission fans?
A I proposed a much darker movie and a more emotional movie, and Tom agreed. I really felt like Brad Bird, in the fourth movie, figured out how to make the franchise big. But if we did that again, it would start to feel like shtick. That meant making a different kind of movie and not resting on our laurels.
Q Cruise strapped himself to a plane in Rogue Nation and in this one he performs a HALO jump and takes the controls on an amazing helicopter sequence. Who came up with all of these crazy stunts?
A The HALO jump and the helicopter chase were two things Tom and I had been talking about for a long time. (Cruise hanging off the side of an Airbus A400 in Rogue Nation) came up quite by accident. Someone showed us a model for this new plane that was coming out and it was suggested that it could be in the background of one of the scenes and I joked that we could have it take off with Tom on the side of it. And of course Tom said, “I could do that.” Then the next thing I knew, people got their rulers out and started figuring out a way to do it.
In this one, the HALO jump was not something we set out to do. It came up because in the Grand Palais sequence we were trying to figure out how Tom was going to get in. One of the things about Mission is you don’t go through the front door or out the back door — anyone can do that. You come up with ways to make those two things complicated. Our production designer showed us a picture of the Grand Palais from above and he just stuck a figure of Tom skydiving in from above ... We never thought of this movie having multiple, big stunts until we were deep into making it.
Q Cruise broke his ankle doing one of the stunts. Was there ever a point where you were worried that he might get seriously injured?
A Without question, we worried about it all the time. When he broke his ankle, it wasn’t even a big stunt. It was a transitional beat. It was the first day of shooting the foot chase. We had been through the helicopter chase, we still had the HALO jump and Pulpit Rock in front of us, and that was the only stunt of its kind in that foot chase sequence. Once we were over that hurdle, the rest of the foot chase was very straight forward. What should have been the simplest sequence in the movie was complicated exponentially by the fact that Tom broke his ankle. Virtually every scene you see him running in London, except for the one where he breaks his ankle, his ankle is broken.
Q Have you and Tom Cruise already started thinking about your next Mission?
A No sooner was this movie in the can and out the door that Tom turned to me and said, “Here’s what I want to do next.” In fact, at the première in Paris that was the first time Tom and I sat down to watch the film together. The response from the audience was amazing and as the credits rolled and the audience was cheering, Tom turned to me and said, “Yeah, we can do better.”