MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
After scripting the Cruise WWII thriller Valkyrie, Christopher Mcquarrie became the actor/ producer’s creative partner on the Mission: Impossible franchise with 2015’s Rogue Nation, 2018’s Fallout, the recently completed Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and the eighth installment that is currently in production. Cruise had stepped up his commitment to outrageously ambitious stunts right before Mcquarrie got there, when Brad Bird directed Ghost Protocol, and Cruise scaled the glassy exterior of the world’s largest skyscraper in Dubai, 123 oors up. But it was on Mcquarrie’s watch that Cruise hung from the exterior of a ying Airbus A400M in midair for Rogue Nation, and when Cruise broke his ankle after a leap during a chase in which he crashed into a wall. It was a rare mishap, and Mcquarrie feels that Cruise is so meticulous in his stunt prep and so con dent in his ability to walk away unscathed, that the director swallows hard and says yes.
“I was asked once by a lm student: ‘How do you know when you’ve made it?’” Mcquarrie says, “I said, ‘You don’t make it. You’re making it. Actively. All the time. May you never make it. May you always be making it. May you look back one day on all you’ve made and go right on making more.’ Tom embodies that. There is no nish line, no pinnacle, no summit. He applies all he’s learned to something new, then studies it with brutal honesty: Where did we go wrong? Where did we go right? How do we apply it to the next thing? How do we push the limits of what is possible? How do we create the most immersive, engaging experience for the widest possible audience? How do we do all that with an emphasis on character and story rst? Tom’s not still here by accident.”
Mcquarrie could not recall a stunt Cruise insisted on doing that the lmmaker tried to talk him out of. “I get asked that a lot,” he says. “Honestly, no. Is there anything I wish I hadn’t suggested? Absolutely. When I’m sitting in an A400M with the engines running and my friend is strapped to the fuselage, I’m thinking, Maybe I should have kept this one to myself. The truth is, that stunt seems tame now. What we’ve done since, I still can’t believe. If my hair could get any whiter, it would... Tom understands how all of the individual parts function. His level of preparation is exceedingly present and aware. The bigger the stakes, the higher the awareness. That awareness is contagious and enormously clarifying.”
J.J. Abrams made his feature directorial debut on Mission: Impossible III, the one in which Phillip Seymour Hoffman went mano a mano with Cruise after kidnapping the agent’s wife (Michelle Monaghan). Abrams says the stunts weren’t as eye popping as the ones in the lms directed by Mcquarrie and Bird (Abrams is a producer of all of those lms). While Abrams was a hotshot TV director and showrunner with Alias, Cruise pushed for him to direct, despite his being untested on the big screen.
“I blame Tom Cruise entirely on my having a career,” Abrams says. “He did all the impossible heavy lifting I don’t think anyone could have done to give me a shot. I will be forever grateful for everything he did.”
They met when Cruise and Steven Spielberg wanted Abrams to script War of the Worlds (scheduling didn’t work) and they cooked up a Mission: Impossible movie di erent from the one Paramount thought it was going to make. “While I was shooting the Lost pilot, Tom watched Alias and asked if I would be interested in Mission: Impossible. They were meant to shoot that other version of Mission. Steven was meant to shoot Munich and then War of the Worlds, and somehow Tom convinced both Steven and the studio, and it seemed like a herculean task only Tom could do, but he managed to reorder the lms. Steven agreed to do War of the Worlds rst, and Mission: Impossible got moved to after. What I remember is that I had a meeting with Tom and Sherry Lansing, who was high on this other version of the movie. I remember Tom basically saying, that he and I were going to do Mission: Impossible together. I remember Sherry saying she liked the other script and Tom saying, ‘This is the one we’re going to do.’ And she said, ‘OK.’ I’m sitting there, watching him take a wild chance on someone who had never directed a feature before, and I couldn’t believe it was me. I came to learn that kind of thing is a normal Tuesday for Tom.”
Any fear Abrams had that the lm’s star and producer would impose himself on a young director was quickly allayed. Abrams says Cruise had a clear understanding of the lanes each occupied, and that he relied on good directors to push him to do his best work.
“Any rst lm is a surreal experience,” Abrams says. “To have it be something where the rst day you are lming in Rome with Tom Cruise on a Mission: Impossible set, now that is incredibly surreal. On the second lm I directed, which was Star Trek in 2009, I remember getting to the set the rst day and feeling the palpable sense of the absence of Tom Cruise. Which is to say, I had only known shooting a movie with Tom, which was a kind of gift you can’t nd anywhere else. You have someone who you always know is working as hard—if not harder—trying to make something work, and he is number one on the call sheet. It’s an incredible rarity.”
“I blame Tom Cruise entirely on my having a career. He did all the impossible heavy lifting I don’t think anyone could have done to give me a shot. —J.J. ABRAMS