Putting action in motion
ple are just going to think I stole from that,’ ” he said a few minutes later as he discussed an extended “Mission” assassination scene set against a performance in a European opera house.
Told that it was unlikely the Friday date-night crowd would be so keyed in — and couldn’t he just say he didn’t see it? — he flashed an unconvinced look. “I can say that. But I don’t know if they’ll believe me.”
Shortly after, McQuarrie — imposing frame, teased-up hair, glasses with lenses that darkened in the sun — was moving confidently down the street, a man who’d taken one of the most winding paths in contemporary Hollywood now at an unlikely career destination. He swung open a door to a high-end restaurant, where several staffers converged, a regal greeting in a city far from where his odyssey began.
Heading downward
In 1995 life was good for Chris McQuarrie. At 26 and just a few years after moving to L.A. he had written “The Usual Suspects,” the whodunit that became a cultural sensation and would net McQuarrie an Oscar. Bryan Singer, the film’s director and McQuarrie’s boyhood friend from New Jersey, would in a few years direct “X-Men” and become hugely bankable. McQuarrie appeared to be on the same upward trajectory.
As offers came in, though, he felt uncomfortable. Studios wanted another crime drama, preferably with a Keyser Soze twist. “Every time I tried to write a villain for my protagonist, he’d be living in the shadow of that guy who works because he’s not there. And now I had to write a guy who is there.”
McQuarrie met with Singer. The “Suspects” director was willing to make superhero movies — it was about career positioning, Singer believed. “But we’re not comic-book guys,” he said to Singer, slightly baff led. He decided to work instead on an epic Alexander the Great story.
McQuarrie spent years trying to make the Alexander movie, flying to Seattle to meet with then-unknown playwright Peter Buchman. “Chris was figuring out what he wanted to do rather than let Hollywood dictate to him what he should be doing,” said Dana Goldberg, a longtime friend who would later produce “Rogue Nation.” McQuarrie financed it and an expanding lifestyle with studio screenwriting gigs, including an illfated “X-Men” draft that caused the first of two fallouts with Singer.
McQuarrie and Buchman would spend late nights working on Alexander, then take meetings all over Hollywood. McQuarrie would drive to those meetings blasting the music he envisioned as its score. But Alexander was an expensive risk, and it was unclear whether anyone would make the movie.
A WWII turn
The answer was no. First Warner Bros. and others didn’t want to hand over a big budget to a firsttime director. Then a studio wouldn’t greenlight it even with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. When Oliver Stone leapfrogged it with a competing project, McQuarrie’s Alexander was dead. (The Stone film turned out to be a flop, but that’s another story.)
The news hit McQuarrie hard. “When you win a screenwriting Oscar at that age you think you can do whatever you want,” Buchman said. “And then you realize you can’t, and it’s a huge blow.”
McQuarrie finally made his directorial debut in 2000 with “The Way of the Gun,” a violent drama that centered on a plot to kidnap a surrogate mother. The movie was a dud. The late Time critic Richard Corliss quipped, “McQuarrie … devises a two-hour gunfight interrupted by questions of paternity.”
If McQuarrie was unable to have his way in Hollywood before, he was really shut out now. It didn’t help that he had a reputation for being headstrong with executives. But he wrote his hands to the bone, hoping the story would conquer all, as young screenwriters are told, as people read about in profiles like this. He wrote scripts about history, including a Nazi officer’s plot to kill Hitler — the kind of movie that today’s conglomerate-owned studios don’t touch even by telekinesis.
Matters came to a head in 2006, when he traveled with his family to Europe on summer vacation. For the first time in years, he didn’t bring his laptop or take work calls.
“My wife said, ‘You’re happier than you’ve ever been. You’re better with the kids than you’ve ever been. Our marriage is better than it’s ever been,’ ” he recalled. “And I thought, ‘This is the first time in 10 years when I haven’t thought about anyone in Los Angeles.’ And I realized that I’d been sick and hadn’t even known it. I’d been working for so long under the myth that a good script would deliver you. And it was a lie.”
He asked Heather: “‘Would you mind if I never wrote another movie again and found some other way to make a living?’ She said she wouldn’t, so I quit.” Then Tom Cruise happened. Cruise was at a low point in his career in 2006. Several tabloid incidents and a public firing by Paramount boss Sumner Redstone meant Cruise was widely considered over in Hollywood.
Overhearing people in an L.A. restaurant writing Cruise’s obituary, McQuarrie was intrigued. Here was someone else who had found early success and was now being spit out by the Hollywood meat grinder. Through a contact he asked to get in touch with Cruise. Soon, mostly out of curiosity, he had a meeting with Cruise’s producing partner, Paula Wagner, and then with Cruise. The two hit it off, geeking out over the Paul Newman film “The Verdict” — a shared favorite — and other film classics. “When McQ came that day I saw a guy who was so talented and so understood movie story and structure, and what a waste if he never got to fulfill that talent,” Cruise said by phone.
Meanwhile, Singer, unaware of McQuarrie’s resolution, had called his old friend about the Nazi script, titled “Valkyrie.” Singer had just directed “Superman Returns” and needed a palate cleanser. McQuarrie was going to sell the script and cash out. But one meeting with Cruise turned to two, then four. Wagner, who was reviving United Artists with Cruise, asked if McQuarrie would produce.
“I was about to say no, but what came out of my mouth was yes,” said McQuarrie.
The struggles were to come, as a schadenfreude-minded press jumped on the Cruise production. But it gave McQuarrie a crash course in producing. “If this was chess you’d say he was finally seeing the whole board,” recalled his longtime manager, Ken Kamins.
“Valkyrie” grossed $200 million worldwide, solid for a period drama. More important, a relationship with Cruise was forged and McQuarrie was back.
The star would bring McQuarrie in for script polishes on his films. McQuarrie still had ideas about directing a historical epic. Once, after Cruise overheard him talking about such a film, the actor put his arm around McQuarrie and said, good-naturedly but pointedly, “We have to concentrate on a movie that will actually get made.”
That film proved to be the 2012 Cruise thriller “Jack Reacher.” It would lead to a much larger McQuarrie-Cruise collaboration.
‘On the outside’
McQuarrie is finishing lunch. The man who is a complicated hybrid, both comeback story and cautionary tale, has much work to do on “Rogue Nation.” Famously fastidious, he was working on postproduction as recently as a few days ago.
The film’s story has enough twists, the dialogue enough eloquence and a British agent (Rebecca Ferguson) enough dubious intentions to be recognizably from the writer of “The Usual Suspects,” which fittingly came out 20 years ago next month.
McQuarrie and Cruise mainly designed the action scenes first — they include a Moroccan motorcycle chase and a wordless underwater sequence — then connected them with plot. Cruise had to work on McQuarrie to make the movie. “McQ was like, ‘Yeah, maybe, I don’t know,’ ” Cruise recalled with a laugh by phone from the “Mission” editing suite last week. “And I said, ‘Come on, dude, let’s quit talking about it and do it.’ ”
That McQuarrie is in charge of this all might seem strange. It does to Singer. “We’re the two kids who were always on the outside,” said the director by phone from the Montreal set of his latest “X-Men.” “We never would have imagined any of this when we were using fireworks to make World War II movies in our backyards.”
But Singer has been down the studio road many times. For McQuarrie, this is all new and an even bigger canvas than the one he previously disliked. Not for nothing does McQuarrie live in London, having not been to Los Angeles in nearly two years: “I don’t miss the culture. I don’t miss the business atmosphere there.”
But he says that, as he has worked through the modern studio thicket (he also served as a kind of high-end script doctor on “World War Z” and the previous “Mission”), he has softened his lonecrusader attitude. “Yes, you are surrendering some control with a movie like this. But the other way to look at that is collaboration,” he said. “The only difficulty for me would be if I bought into the auteur myth. Which is frankly bull…”
If McQuarrie’s approach is different, his soul is unchanged, said Goldberg.
“I like to say he’s a soft gummy bear underneath this big, scary, incredibly intense exterior,” noted the “Mission” producer. “One of the things I love about Chris is that he comes across as a super-confident guy, but he’s really an insecure guy at heart.
“He didn’t grow up inside Hollywood, and I think as a result he’s a little like Sally Field — you know, ‘You like me, you really really like me.’ I see it every time he hands someone a script. I see it every time we preview a movie. He has a great deal of film knowledge and intelligence and even a little arrogance, but at the end of the day all he really wants is to make a film that entertains audiences.”