Christopher McQuarrie’s latest mission.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the first of a pair of films directed and co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, will be released this summer, with the second part to follow next year. For McQuarrie, it is a continuation of his work on two preceding Mission: Impossible films – Rogue Nation and Fallout – and further consolidates a long-term working relationship with the lead actor, Tom Cruise.

Having made his name as the Oscar- and BAFTA-winning writer of The Usual Suspects in 1995, McQuarrie moved into directing five years later with crime thriller The Way of the Gun. In retrospect, he sees that he still had everything to learn. “I went right from being a writer to being a director with no real study of the nature of that job. As a result, I did what most writers do when they make that transition: I didn’t really shoot the movie, I shot the screenplay. Now I’m a completely different filmmaker: my reliance on dialogue is a lot less emphasized. I never once discussed lenses with the cinematographer; I just assumed that was the cinematographer’s realm. Whereas on Fallout there were three thousand setups, and there was not a single one that didn’t start with a discussion about the lens. I would say that encapsulates my evolution from writing to directing. My emphasis tends to be more on the lens first and the word last.”

Although McQuarrie says that it was not necessarily the film he wanted to make at the time – “I’m really into historical epics, biopics and things like that. That’s really where my taste goes” – The Way of the Gun was instrumental in securing his future partnership with Cruise. “When Tom saw that movie, long before I met him, he recognized my ability to adhere to clarity and geography, my staging, and my innate sense of action. I would say I shoot action pretty much in the same way I write: it’s about presenting you with everything you need, so that you don’t have to put it together in your head. Tom was always very confident in my ability to direct action.”

McQuarrie and Cruise have collaborated on a number of films outside the Mission: Impossible franchise, including Valkyrie, Jack Reacher and Top Gun: Maverick. “The secret to it all is there’s no ego, there’s no pride of authorship. We’re not precious about ideas. There will be times when one of us will definitely be chasing something – there’s a point at which you’re trying to make it happen rather than it naturally occurring – and one of us will invariably nudge the other one and flag that it’s not working.” He recalls how, when shooting Rogue Nation on the roof of the Vienna State Opera, he was reluctant to pause the action so Ilsa could instruct Ethan to remove her impractical shoes before resuming the chase. “Tom will suggest things that I just don’t get – it’s not my brand of humour or I’m just desperate to get this action done. I really didn’t understand the shoe gag but when you watch it in the editing room, you realize that’s far more important than getting off the roof: it’s the characters and it’s their interaction. At the same time, if it wasn’t working, Tom would be the first person to go, ‘Yeah, sorry. Thanks for trying that, it didn’t work.’” Roles were reversed on the set of Fallout when McQuarrie wanted to introduce Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow performing a big musical number. “Tom, who was very sceptical of it, completely supported me doing it. It was wonderful, Vanessa’s singing was great, it was quite beautiful.” But, recognizing that it killed the momentum, they took the difficult decision to cut the scene. “And that’s kind of how we make these movies: we’re constantly finding ways to create affinity and create attachments to the characters. It’s never about indulging some creative whim.”

“I’ve been dying to do a submarine sequence, and a sequence in the Arctic, forever. I grew up watching ‘Ice Station Zebra’ and ‘The Thing’ – those were fascinating environments to me.”

— Christopher

While Cruise’s stunts have long been a trademark of the Mission: Impossible films, the trailer for Dead Reckoning – showing a motorbike jump off a cliff that is thought to be the most dangerous he’s ever executed – has generated both enormous pre-release buzz and calls for better recognition of stunt artistry when awards season comes around. Over the years, McQuarrie and Cruise have assembled a list of ideas that they are working through with every film. “The basejump off a cliff was an arrow in our quiver for a long time, in just the same way the HALO jump in Fallout was and the motorcycle chase in Rogue Nation was.” He is often right beside Cruise when shooting those big scenes. “I probably much prefer being there than being on the sidelines. There’s a feeling of paralysis in that you call ‘action’, and then you just have to wait until it’s over.” Rather than becoming inured to the stress of watching the film’s star putting himself in peril on set, McQuarrie says experience has made him even more conscious of the risks. “You learn to live in a state of constant heightened awareness. It’s all about the reduction of variables, that’s the big thing.”

The action sequences have also led him to embrace more physically demanding environments than he is usually comfortable with – “My wife calls me the Great Indoorsman. I’m not a physically adventurous person by nature,” he admits. “I’ve been dying to do a submarine sequence, and a sequence in the Arctic, forever. I grew up watching Ice Station Zebra and The Thing – those were fascinating environments to me – and this movie and Fallout got me addicted to extreme environments, heights, adverse weather conditions, to the point where I’m now actually more comfortable directing in high winds and freezing temperatures than just being on a stage.”

While the COVID-related difficulties of filming Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning have been well-documented, McQuarrie says that an equal logistical challenge was presented by working on a two-part film. Scheduling restrictions, whether due to actors’ availability or environmental conditions, meant that filming for Part One was frequently paused to shoot scenes for Part Two, running the risk that any footage of Part Two might become obsolete as the storyline evolved during production. “You couldn’t be sure that the ending you thought you had for Part One would still be the ending when you got there. There was a fair bit of brinkmanship in that. And you had to be very, very, very particular because there’s no going back to the Arctic to shoot pickups!”

Although plot development began over five years ago, thematically the film feels very much of the moment in its framing of artificial intelligence as the story’s central threat. “There are only so many in a spy movie – there’s a nuclear threat, there’s a biological threat, there’s a chemical threat. Terrorism is a murky threat – it’s disturbing more than frightening, and it’s ongoing as opposed to looming – so we’ve never really gone in that direction. I felt in 2018 a sense that people were becoming more and more aware that their lives were being influenced by information and information technology. We were trying to find a way to make it emotional and make it a character in the story.” And while his work from The Usual Suspects onwards has explored the nature of truth and ambiguity, it’s a preoccupation that seems ever more pertinent in today’s hazy moral landscape, as signalled in Dead Reckoning Part One by the line “Truth is vanishing”. But in casting AI and post-truth as villains, McQuarrie is more interested in asking questions than giving definitive answers. “As a filmmaker, I’m not here to tell you what I think – I’m only here to give you things to think about. That is something I think about a lot.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is out July 10th.

Watch an exclusive clip below courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Author: Rachel Goodyear