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Q&A with Christopher McQuarrie

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

You mentioned the first act was the hardest to edit. Can you expand on that?
Christopher McQuarrie: Every time we finish one of these movies, we’re at the premiere and in that moment where the film ends but right before the credits start, Tom will lean over and say, “we could do better.” We came away from Dead Reckoning knowing not only that we could do it, but we had to do it. Our first instinct was to make a shorter, tighter movie. The simplest way to cut a lot of time out of the movie is to cut the team out of the movie. The reason these movies have expanded from Rogue Nation to Fallout and Dead Reckoning is that we keep adding characters and we don’t sell those characters short. We’re adding more and more emotional arcs to the story. And the setup to emotional payoffs is what’s adding length to the movies because of the number of characters involved. I was determined after Fallout to give every character an emotional arc at least as good as Ethan’s was in Fallout. We had ways to short-circuit this narrative by telling a nonlinear story and to get you more quickly into the story. Within ten minutes of the movie, you were at Mount Weather with Angela Bassett, he was on the plane, and you were catching up to elements of act one as the story went on. It didn’t work. We then put the story in completely linear order. It didn’t work. One of the problems was that in all of those scenes, someone was referring to the Entity and you didn’t yet know what the Entity was—unless you had seen the previous movie, which we don’t ask you to do.

Over the course of making these movies, we’ve become clearer about the things you must have in the movie. For example, you need the team to be together as a group for a minute. You need to feel them as a team. You don’t need a big scene where they’re all sitting around the table making fun of each other. But you need to feel them as a team before the movie blows apart. Things like that we knew we could do very efficiently. Hayley Atwell’s introduction in the movie was shot two months ago. Because of the nonlinear structure, we had an idea for a short-circuited entrance for Hayley into the movie. You would primarily meet her in the torture chamber where she and Ethan get chained up. It created a series of problems. The writing was there, and the performance was there. But visually, you were first meeting this character shackled to a poll. She had no power. She had no agency. As soon as we saw the movie with an audience, we realized what we needed to do, and we shot that intro pickpocket scene in one day. After having made four of these movies, I knew the scene could not exceed two and a half minutes. We hit all the buttons we needed to tick in that scene. It’s setting up what will make Grace absolutely invaluable to the team later.

The essence of action is suspense

Can we talk a bit about the set pieces? Everyone looks forward to the incredible action scenes in these films. I particularly loved the submarine sequence and the off-screen torture room escape.
The off-screen fight in the scene we call the torture chamber—both literally and figuratively—was a very hard scene to shoot. We were aware of time constraints, so we came up with this clever idea of playing the fight off camera and making it more about character. We were patting ourselves on the back and Tom rehearsed it with Hayley, and Tom’s fight was much shorter than what you see on camera. I was recently asked a very good question, which was, how much time do I allow for Tom to recover from his stunts? And the answer is none. There’s no time to recover from anything that he’s doing in this movie, simply because with a pandemic and two strikes, we were never not in a state of catching up with the crisis of Dead Reckoning playing all the way through to The Final Reckoning. This is the picture I want put in your head before you can really understand the granular answer to your question.

[Writer] Erik Jendresen and I always knew Tom would return to the Sevastopol and that was going to be my signature scene, and the aerial was going to be Tom’s. We also knew that James Cameron and other filmmakers had done scenes—very effective and iconic scenes—in submarines and realized that once you flood this thing with water, you’re just swimming through it. It’s kind of ghostly and the hazards are specific and it’s kind of one note. However, if portions of this had been sealed and Ethan was having to move water through the submarine, you’d now have opportunities for him to go through the submarine in two states, one fully flooded when he’s imagining what the submarine will be, and then partially flooded when he’s moving through it. And then somebody got the idea of, wow, what if it started rolling? Now you just say something like that without ever thinking of the material costs or the two-and-a-half years that it would take to build a 1,000-ton fully submersible, 360-degree rotating, 45-degree pitching in both directions gimbal attached to two giant derrick cranes over an 8.5 million liter tank, and to which it could be submerged that they’re building behind my trailer while I’m going to work every day! And knowing that the physics are such, that you can’t actually plan the sequence until you build this gimbal and turn it on and see what it does. That’s how the submarine sequence started.

Then we designed Tom’s suit, which is cinematically great, in that it’s lit from inside and you can see his entire face. But it’s horrible in terms of the efficiency of getting oxygen to the person wearing the mask! Tom’s accumulating CO2 in his mask and he becomes hypoxic after about twelve minutes in the mask. That’s complicated further by the fact that the rim light around his mask is causing glare on the face shield from inside. So, you can see Tom but he can’t see you, nor can he see anything in the submarine that he’s swimming through while he’s doing that sequence. He goes through, he rehearses by sense of feel without it rotating. He doesn’t know where the torpedoes are going to be on the day. He gets a sense of where he can safely go by feel and by spatial awareness. He puts on the mask and my first AD says, “mask is going on” into my little Bluetooth headset, at which point I look at my watch and I take this bezel and I set the minute hand to whatever minute it’s on, knowing that in twelve minutes, I have to cut. The AD is there every two minutes, “two minutes in the mask.” We’re still moving Tom into position. “Four minutes in the mask.” I know at ten minutes, if we’re not calling action, I have to stop and pull Tom out and we’ll have to start the whole thing all over again.

And I also know that Tom being Tom, he’s going to push himself. From my experience of Tom being on the airplane wing where he also could only be for twelve minutes because the air is hitting him so hard from the propeller that while he’s breathing, he’s not actually getting oxygen. The molecules are dispersed. I got on the wing myself and experienced this firsthand. It’s horrific. You are breathing, but you’re not really getting oxygen and you’re being pounded by winds at 140 miles an hour. And Tom knew that if he didn’t get the shot in those twelve minutes, we would just have to go back to base, land, re-brief, come back, and do it all over again. I’ve got Mary Boulding, my AD, in the helicopter with me saying “four minutes on the wing.” She’s keeping track of all that. The plane, in order to be maneuverable, can’t fly with a full load of fuel. The pilot John Romain is constantly telling you “three minutes of fuel,” “eight minutes on the wing,” and John Romain can’t land when Tom is on the wing. Tom has to get back into the cockpit and because Tom hasn’t gotten the stunt, I will fly up next to him, open the door of the helicopter, stand out on the skid, and call cut. Tom looks at me and goes “twelve minutes on the way,” so then he goes twenty-four minutes on the wing and is so physically exhausted that he’s laying on the wing with his head and his arms hanging off the leading edge of the wing. And unless Tom signals us, we don’t know that he needs help. But we can’t tell if Tom is conscious or not. We can’t tell if he isn’t signaling us because he doesn’t need help or if he isn’t signaling us because he’s unconscious! We’re waiting for him to lift his hand, but he’s so exhausted he can’t even do that, and the pilot is saying, “I have two minutes of fuel” and we’re flying back to the FOB and waiting for Tom to get back into the cockpit so that we can land the plane. That’s a snapshot of what shooting those two sequences were like.

Then there’s fight where he’s in the missile compartment with the Marine who’s trying to kill him, and the Marine slashes that hose and the air comes hissing out of the hose and he shoots it in Tom’s face and that’s what kicks the fight off. Well, I made the mistake of asking the question, What’s the hose doing for the rest of the fight? We left it on, and everybody cleared the room and immediately you saw that it filled the room with this violent vapor and everything looked really cool. We knew we were intercutting it with a house on fire and it suddenly created a greater sense of the connection between the two environments. One small problem though, the air coming out of the hose is compressed carbon dioxide. It’s CO2! I went to Tom with an iPad after I had done a camera test and I said, I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t show you this, I know this was supposed to be a break but look at this. And Tom looked at it and he went, Fuck, that looks really good, we’ve got to do it. Tom and the stuntman Thomas, with whom he is fighting, are holding their breath throughout that entire fight. All that physical exertion, everything that they’re doing. We set everything up, we turn the air on, Tom holds his breath and he starts fighting and the CO2 as it accumulates starts to freeze on the floor and it’s spitting bullets of crystallized CO2, and they’re getting splinters of CO2 in their skin and in their eyes. This day that was supposed to be his break from the torpedo room! That’ll give you a sense of what he was going through physically.

I love the idea of the film being an organic process and allowing the movie to speak to you. When you are shooting these sequences, what are you watching for and how does that affect the design of the set pieces?
We’re not watching those things while we’re making the movie. We’ve watched them so many times and absorbed them and dissected them. We’re not really watching for the logistics. We’re watching it for the situations that Ethan gets into, and what creates humor, what creates empathy, what creates tension? The essence of action is suspense, and the essence of suspense is not creating a scenario where the audience thinks that’s impossible. The truth of the matter is you know how the movie is going to turn out. You know that if Ethan is getting in the submarine and we’re an hour into the movie, you know where this sequence is going. You can presuppose the outcome of that sequence. In the first five minutes of any movie, you’re signing a contract with the audience and you’re telling them the kind of movie that it’s going to be. In the case of a Mission: Impossible, there are a lot of sequences that might seem scary, but you know it’s going to end well. Just because of where we are in the timeline. But I have to create a situation where you cannot imagine how it will possibly end. That’s the suspense. The other element of suspense that’s free that nobody really talks about is if the movie is working, if movie has got you and it’s affecting you, some part of you is thinking, God, I’m really having a good time, please don’t mess this up. Just don’t blow it. I just want to enjoy the whole movie. That is a layer of suspense that you are feeling that you only get the first time you watch the movie. That is something of which we are acutely aware. We don’t rely on spectacle. All of this action would be spectacle if you didn’t care about those characters, and you only care about these characters because of the onerous amount of setup that the movie requires.

Q&A with Christopher McQuarrie

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

It’s not your first time directing a Mission: Impossible film, and you’re the first director to come back. I hear you were kind of hesitant about that. Why?
Christopher McQuarrie: I had worked on Ghost Protocol. I came in midway through and was working on that movie. I saw Brad Bird going through what could only be described as a meat grinder. So, when Tom Cruise asked me to do Rogue Nation, I was very reluctant to do it. We were working on Edge of Tomorrow, and in the midst of a script session he said, “You know you should direct the next Mission Impossible!” A chill went down my spine. He picked up the phone, walked out of the room and called Brad Grey of Paramount Pictures. About ten minutes later he came back in and said, “You’re directing Mission Impossible.” So, I never formally accepted the job. It just happened. When I finished shooting Rogue Nation, I turned to Robert Elswit, the cinematographer, and I said, “I really feel sorry for the next son of a bitch who directs one of these movies cause I don’t know what’s left.” Then of course the joke was on me, because I was the next son of a bitch. The fans of the franchise have come to expect a different director every time. That’s a precedent. Tom said that precedents are made to be broken. So, I said if I was going to do it I have to come back as a different director. I want to achieve a new aesthetic. Tom asked how I was going to do that, and first and foremost I replaced my entire crew no matter how comfortable of a relationship I had with somebody. I think with the exception of our stunt coordinator and our editor, we replaced everyone. And, in many cases replaced them with people who had never done a movie of this scale before. The other thing was that I was going to go against the grain of Rogue Nation, which had obeyed the template of Ghost Protocol. Ghost Protocol really felt like the series had finally figured out what it was. So, just as we had decided what Mission: Impossible was, I was going to break what didn’t need fixing.

“They asked me what I would do to grow the audience. I said, ‘I’d make a more grown up film.’ “

Do you think that Mission: Impossible plays differently in the modern world?
CM: What the process teaches you is that you’re making these movies for four separate demographics that want four separate things from movies. And, at a certain budget you’re always trying to make a “four quadrant” movie. On Rogue Nation I went to marketing and said that I had really clashed with marketing on Jack Reacher. I had the luck or curse depending on how you look at it of making three movies with the same studio. So, I was able to learn the personality of that studio over time. So, with Rogue Nation I went to marketing and said, “Tell me how to make a Mission: Impossible movie. What do you guys need so that I’m not fighting with you a year from now on how to sell this?” They were so stunned. No director had ever come to them before. They brought out all these trailers and showed me how they sold movies. They’d point to shots and say, “this is the only moment we have with a woman in the movie. This is the only line of a dialogue we have that tells this part of the story.” We had the same conversation again and again at the beginning of this film. And this time they showed me this demographic breakdown of Mission: Impossible from the first movie all the way to the fifth movie. The thing that I noticed was that the under 25 audience peaked at Mission: Impossible II, and they have been steadily dropping film over film. The movie was growing with the audience, and younger audiences were coming less and less. Until Rogue Nation when the audience was less than 20% for under 25. So, I said why am I making a movie for these people? If you take the under 25 and separate everybody who is under 13 and can’t come to this movie, it’s even less than 20%. Screw those guys. Let’s read the feedback cards. They’re the ones who, when it’s emotional, say it’s corny. And, when it’s funny, they say it’s cheesy. They’re coming with this cynical attitude, and they’re not really reaching for what you’re offering. They asked me what I would do to grow the audience. I said, “I’d make a more grown up film.”

Can you speak about the handmade and “real” stunt nature of Mission: Impossible in the modern day, when people are so hard to impress in terms of visuals?
CM: I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it in terms of impressing. I think about it in terms of engaging. I remember on Rogue Nation he kept saying to me that he wasn’t hooked in. All we’re really trying to do is tell stories in the most elegant way imaginable and the most analog way imaginable. That’s why it’s the book and the tape recorder. We’ve gone back to the original TV show, and we nod towards that through the majority of the technology of this movie. We’re shooting as much of this we can on film. There’s two sequences shot digitally: the HALO jump and the helicopter sequence. Both of which are only shot digitally because there is no practical way that a film camera could be there to do those things. There were a lot of technical reasons why we did it. So, that’s why I think you feel that texture. Rob Hardy, the cinematographer, is someone that understands that and goes for a very gritty, realistic look. I hear people saying I’ve got this kind of ’70’s vibe to my movies. That’s not a conscious thing. I’m not sitting there sort of picking through and trying to make it more ’70’s. That’s what I grew up watching, and I hate technology in movies. I hate the internet in movies. I hate cellphones in movies. They get between characters and their struggle, and that’s what I’m always looking for. That’s why I like pay phones and not cell phones. All of that feels very “throwback,” but it’s not me trying to be ’70’s. It’s trying to create something that feels more connected and more textured and analog. So, I think that’s what you’re feeling.

How do you get Tom Cruise to stay so good looking, year after year?
CM: The quote that has come up out of this press tour is that I am the portrait and he is Dorian Gray. I had dark hair when I met Tom Cruise, and I have turned into his grandfather. He’s aged two years in the twelve that I’ve known him. He’s just a genetically pure specimen, but he also takes incredible care of himself. I wish there was a pill that he took. The truth of the matter is you’re looking at somebody that has only become more and more disciplined in terms of his training and his diet. For everything that he does to take care of himself, it is his instrument. And, he loves making movies. Everything that goes into that guy’s body and into developing himself is about preserving this for as long as he can, because he loves making movies. It’s just the thing he likes to do. He’s already onto the next movie. I just want to go on vacation. I want to lie on the couch with my dogs and read for three months. When we were at the Paris premiere, it was the first time we had watched the movie together. The movie ends, and the title comes on the screen. The audience is applauding, and Tom nudges me and goes, “Eh… We can do better.” That’s Tom.