MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT
CHRISTOPHER M C QUARRIE ON HOW HIS ENDURING FRIENDSHIP WITH TOM CRUISE LED TO MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT, AND A SHIFT IN GEARS FOR THE FRANCHISE
Director Christopher Mcquarrie on the latest mission for the IMF. No Tom Cruises were harmed during this feature.
“Holy shit, whose car is this? Is this your car, Mcquarrie? Come out here!”
Those were the first words Christopher Mcquarrie ever heard Tom Cruise say. In real life, that is. He’d heard him utter plenty before, on the big screen. But as far as in the flesh was concerned, this was it.
It was 2007 and Mcquarrie had made a breakthrough with his World War II script, Valkyrie: Tom Cruise was interested in producing it. So, Mcquarrie found himself summoned to Cruise’s house to meet the man himself. Only there was a dilemma. “My car broke down,” recalls Mcquarrie. “I had a choice of either driving the family mini-van, with a dent in the side and baby seats in the back, or this old ’64 Cadillac I’ve hung onto since I was a bachelor.” He chose the Caddy, for extra coolness, and was waiting inside when he heard those words. “I walk outside and there’s Tom Cruise standing next to my Cadillac. And he says, ‘Can I see the motor?’ I say, ‘Sure, open the hood,’ and we both stick our heads in the engine.”
An enthused Cruise then took him to a nearby garage, filled with motorcycles, one of which belonged to Steve Mcqueen. “So we start talking about Steve Mcqueen, which leads us to The Great Escape, and our love of war movies. The conversation just started and has gone on uninterrupted since. We just hit it off.”
Understatement much? In the 11 years since, the pair have worked on nine movies together, from Valkyrie to this summer’s Mission: Impossible Fallout, the latest in the ongoing saga of superspy Ethan Hunt. Imagine what might have happened if Mcquarrie had chosen Vehicle A. “Holy shit, whose minivan is this?” doesn’t have the same ring.
HARD TO BELIEVE
, but Mcquarrie, who won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with The Usual Suspects when he was in his twenties, was struggling when he met Cruise. He’d been in that nebulous concept, Director Jail, since his directorial debut, 2000’s The Way Of The Gun, stiffed, and life as a screenwriter wasn’t much better. “I was not in the business of making movies, I was in the business of trying to get movies made,” he says. He had written Valkyrie, a true story about an attempt by German high-ranking officers to assassinate Hitler, as a directing vehicle for himself, and had gotten nowhere. Then his old friend, Bryan Singer, decided he fancied directing and the wheels started turning. Most writers would have been cock-ahoop. Mcquarrie, a tall, unflappable figure with an anecdote for every occasion, is not most writers.
“My intention was to quit the film business,” he says. “Bryan wanted to make it, and suddenly everyone was willing to make it without even reading it. And that I took as my sign. I knew in that moment that my career was over.” The Mcquarrie masterplan: see the movie through, take a double fee for producing
and writing, “pay off my debts and find a new career”. And then his life changed.
It didn’t change under the hood of that Cadillac, though that helped. It changed when he met Cruise’s long-time producing partner Paula Wagner for lunch early in pre-production. “Paula said to me, ‘I understand you are producing this movie,’” says Mcquarrie. “And a voice in my head said, ‘How you answer this question will determine the rest of your life.’ And the words that came out of my mouth were, ‘I am now.’”
Which is how Mcquarrie found himself actually producing Valkyrie rather than simply just taking a producer credit. Even though, just like that Cadillac engine, he didn’t know what all the parts were called, or how they fit together. But he was a quick study. “I wanted to do the job as well as I could,” he says. “I became a producer under the tutelage of Tom Cruise. All I really wanted to do was deliver for that guy.”
Meeting Tom Cruise can be an ‘oh fuck’ moment. Largely because it’s Tom frickin’ Cruise. The Tom Cruise. The man who played Maverick. Ethan Hunt. Whatshisface from Jerry Maguire. There’s not a person on the planet who hasn’t made their mind up about what, or who, Tom Cruise is. Mcquarrie was no different. But close contact with Cruise quickly disabused him of those notions. “After a month I thought, this person does not jibe with my impressions of who I’ve come to believe he is,” he laughs. “After ten years I’m like, ‘Boy, if that’s a cover, he never breaks character.’ We’re at a point when Tom is an uncle to my kids now. So the ‘oh fuck’ of meeting Tom Cruise is not, ‘Oh fuck, it’s Tom Cruise.’ It’s, ‘Oh fuck, Tom Cruise is just a real person.’”
IT WOULD BE
easier to list the Tom Cruise projects Mcquarrie hasn’t worked on, in some capacity, since Valkyrie. Knight & Day, for one. Oblivion
is another (though he did offer Joseph Kosinski some notes on the edit). And he only visited the set of Rock Of Ages, so avoids any blame there.
Otherwise, in an inversion of that first meeting, it’s Mcquarrie to whom Cruise turns when he need someone to stick their head under the hood of his movies and tell him what’s wrong. “Not on every movie, but there will be a moment when Tom goes, ‘I’m stuck. Can you read the script? Can you come to the editing room?’” Sometimes he’ll be a consultant. Sometimes he’ll do an uncredited pass on the script, as on Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.
Sometimes, he’ll be the credited writer, as on The Mummy or Edge Of Tomorrow.
And, increasingly, he’ll be the director.
Mcquarrie cast Cruise, somewhat controversially, as Lee Child’s homeless hero Jack Reacher in the 2012 adaptation of the same name. But it got the film made, and Mcquarrie busted out of Director Jail. From there, their mutual trust moved Mcquarrie into the director’s chair on Cruise’s most lucrative franchise, Mission: Impossible, with 2015’s stylish and slick Rogue Nation.
In just over a decade, Mcquarrie has become the Tom Hagen to Cruise’s Don Corleone. “Absolutely,” laughs the 50-year -old. “Although even then Tom Hagen was trying to talk his way into the job. Me, I don’t feel like Tom owes me his next movie. He’s not responsible for me. We can just talk about movies, and it’s not a commitment. It’s not a marriage proposal. We’re just talking about movies.”
The grand tradition of the Mission: Impossible franchise is that each film sees a new director take the reins. Brian De Palma is succeeded by John Woo, who cedes control to J.J. Abrams, who steps aside for Brad Bird, who hands over to Mcquarrie. From there, custom dictated that Mcquarrie would leave the seat warm for a new director. Cruise had other ideas. “Tom was absolutely a driving force in that,” admits Mcquarrie. “When he first suggested it , I said, ‘I can’t do that, there’s a precedent here.’ And Tom said, ‘Precedents are made to be broken, man.’”
And yet, Fallout almost didn’t happen. Last August, Mcquarrie had just finished a call with one of his storyboard artists and was proceeding, full steam ahead, in pre-production. “Then, an hour later they called back and said, ‘I just got laid off. What’s going on?’”
The answer was Paramount had suddenly pulled the plug on the project following disputes over certain deals.
“There was a moment when I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow,’” he admits. “It’s the first time since I started working with Tom that I’ve been in that situation.”
With the school year about to start, Mcquarrie and his producer wife Heather decided to bite the bullet and move back to Los Angeles, and he started considering other projects. Then, two weeks after that, the disputes were resolved as quickly as they had begun, and Fallout was back on again. Should Mcquarrie choose to accept it, of course. “I was very much on the fence about returning,” he says. “My kids were enrolled in school and there was no way to re-transplant my life back to London.”
He caught a plane to London, where he and Cruise popped open that metaphorical hood one more time. On a long walk through the city, they hashed it out. Mcquarrie started telling Cruise a new version of the storyline he’d been working on. “I pitched it and kinda threw it away,” he remembers. “I got to the end of it, and he said, ‘Jesus, man, you buried the fucking lede!’ Why didn’t you say that earlier?” It was at that moment Mcquarrie realised he had accepted the mission. “He’s a pretty persuasive motherfucker,” he laughs.
UNTIL YOU EITHER
see the film or bump into Mcquarrie and have him pitch it to you, Mission: Impossible Fallout is, as you might expect, largely under wraps. The official synopsis is a bunch of generic guff about how Ethan Hunt and his IMF allies race against time to save the world after a mission goes wrong. Mcquarrie laughs when Empire reads it to him verbatim. “That was Mission II, right?”
Emotion is the key to Fallout. The title — a one-word subtitle being the first for the series — has multiple meanings. On a macro level, it refers to nuclear fallout. On a micro: Ethan Hunt’s past coming back to haunt him in a major way. “He cannot choose between one life and millions,” says Mcquarrie, who studied all five previous Missions in an attempt to isolate Ethan’s fatal flaw. “I realised that when Ethan Hunt is clinging to the Burj Khalifa [as seen in Ghost Protocol] or the A400M [in Rogue Nation] or hanging from a thread in the CIA computer room [in the first Mission: Impossible back in 1996], he’s hanging onto his soul. The job would be so much easier if he were able to simply dispose of certain obstacles in his way.”
Early on in Fallout, Ethan makes a fateful decision that catapults him into the middle of a tug-of-war between several different factions. There’s his own IMF team of Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell, whose ranks have been involuntarily bolstered by CIA liaison August Walker (Henry Cavill And His Magnificent Moustache), sent to keep an eye, and his gun sights, on Hunt. There’s Rogue Nation’s Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the first Mission villain to return for a second slice of impossible pie. There’s a brother-and-sister team of arms dealers (Vanessa Kirby and Frederick Schmidt). And, to complicate matters, both Ethan’s wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the British agent with whom Hunt had such a strong connection last time around. That last combo, in particular, points to the major difference between this movie and
past escapades. “I said to Tom that I wanted to make a more emotional film, more about character and less about stringing together action set-pieces,” says Mcquarrie. “He embraced that.”
NOT THAT FALLOUT
skimps on the derring-do. “People don’t come to Mission Impossible for the plot,” says Mcquarrie. “They identify Mission: Impossible as the one where Tom did X; where he hung from the plane, or fell off a thing, or climbed the other thing, or smashed into that thing.”
Where previous Mission: Impossibles had one standout stunt, Mcquarrie wanted Fallout to have several. Cruise smashes into cars on motorbikes. He jumps out of a plane at 25,000 feet. He pilots his own helicopter during an aerial chase sequence (see right). Yet, for all his daredevilry, if this film is destined to be remembered as ‘the one where Tom did X’, it’s also likely to ‘the one where Tom Cruise revealed he was mortal, after all, by breaking his right ankle after smashing it against the side of a building during a stunt gone wrong.’
For that’s exactly what Cruise did in August of last year. Immediately, filming was shut down for a few weeks while Cruise — who, lest we forget, is in his mid-fifties, an age when most men think twice about climbing a building via the stairs, let alone flinging themselves off the roof — began the recovery process. Doom-laden reports suggested the film could be pushed back, and maybe even cancelled. Mcquarrie didn’t see it that way, though. Speaking to Empire a few days after the accident, he was remarkably sanguine. Even upbeat. “Every cloud has a silver lining,” he said.
Which was a chance to use the enforced hiatus to take stock of what they had shot, and chart a course accordingly. Cruise’s clean break was also the movie’s. And even though it affected the schedule to the point where our last chat with Mcquarrie comes at the end of the final day of pick-ups, more than a year after the start of principal photography, “in the end it allowed us to make a very, very different movie”.
Literal footnote: when Cruise came back on set after the accident, shattered ankle encased in plaster, he asked if they’d got the shot. Yes, smiled Mcquarrie. “And it looked awesome.” And yes, the shot is in the movie.
WHEN A PAIR
have made nine films in ten years, the tenth seems inevitable. Yet there’s nothing in the immediate future for Cruise and Mcquarrie. “Tom and I have a whole host of ongoing abstract conversations, one of which could turn into a movie,” says the director.
It seems likely that a seventh Mission would form one of those confabs, especially now there’s nothing stopping Mcquarrie from returning to complete his hat-trick. Well, there might be something. “What new ground can you cover?” he asks, mock-serious. “There isn’t a building taller than the Burj. And by the way, they better start building one, because we’ve run out of shit. I don’t know what’s left for Tom to fall off of, crash into, or what vehicle there is left for him to destroy.”
His immediate agenda, though, does not involve a camera. “I’m thinking, more than anything, about a long, long vacation,” he laughs.
And if Cruise should happen to show up while Mcquarrie is on the beach, no biggie. They’ll just pop open the hood of the nearest Jetski, stick their heads under it, and carry on talking about movies.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 26 JULY