Voices From Krypton: Making The Mission Possible

Christopher McQuarrie took the impossible challenge of both writing and directing the newest entry in the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE franchise, ROGUE NATION. In our exclusive interview, VOICES FROM KRYPTON talks to him about how he landed the job and all the challenges he faced to make it work.

Transcript

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The voices from Krypton. I'm Ed Gross, this is Voices from Krypton, and we are going behind the scenes on Mission Impossible Rogue Nation as we sit down for a conversation with director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie. No stranger to working with Tom Cruise, McQuarrie directed him in Jack Reacher which he co-wrote

as he did the Cruise films Valkyrie and Edge of Tomorrow. And for good measure he penned the script for Bryan Singer from Usual Suspects which has nothing in the world to do with Cruise, but is a hell of a credit. Each Mission Impossible film has been directed by a different filmmaker, and like Bryan De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird before him, Christopher McQuarrie brings an approach

to the adventure that is strictly his own. In the following conversation we go behind the scenes on the making of Mission Impossible Rogue Nation. Looking over your credits, and I wonder to myself, I noticed your screenplays were getting bigger and bigger.

Was that preparing you for taking on a project of this scope as a director? Probably unintentionally. It was never anything that I was directly pursuing. I think it's the nature of the business, it's what it's turned into, and how the business has sort of been split down in the middle, and small movies are getting smaller and big

movies are getting bigger and you go in one direction or the other. How did this opportunity come then for you to direct this? Because like I said, this seems to be bigger than anything you've directed before. Yeah, I've had kind of a long standing relationship with Tom. We worked on Valkyrie together and I came in and did a little work on Ghost Protocol,

I worked on Jack Reacher, I worked on Edge of Tomorrow, and when we were working on Edge of Tomorrow he sort of suggested very offhandedly, you should direct the next Mission Impossible. And I didn't really think of it at the time, I didn't think that this was a really present conversation. I thought it was more or less something, you know, for every ten things that we talk about

doing one of them materialized. Right. So I didn't really expect anything to come of that, and then a little while later he came up to me and said, okay, you're directing Mission Impossible. What's your reaction when Tom Cruise comes to you and says you're directing Mission Impossible?

Inwardly, panic, outwardly, you know, totally positive, and it's like, great, we're going to do this, we're going to kill it. And you know, I had seen firsthand I was on the set of Ghost Protocol and I saw what Brad Burton was managing on that movie, which is pretty huge and pretty intense, and you know, didn't know if I was ready to deal with that, didn't know if I wanted to deal with

that, but just decided, okay, this is an opportunity that's been presented to you, what are you going to do with it? Right. This is your moment, what are you going to do with your moment? So what did you do with your moment?

You know, I just, I crossed my fingers and I shut my eyes and I jumped in. And that's sort of been, you know, look, I've been through it enough times with Tom on previous movies so I understood some sense of what this kind of movie was, how big this movie was and how uncertain the process looks when you're inside of it. And yet, it's a simple matter of the movie wouldn't get made if you didn't decide to

make the movie. And it's never as simple as saying, here's a great screenplay, here's a great schedule, this is a really sound plan, and you know, we're going to go ahead with it, and you know, 60 days from now we'll have a finished movie. It doesn't work that way on movies this size.

Once movies hit a certain size in a certain budget, you're more or less beholden to the whole other mode of movie making. And it's one that's based largely on a sense of feel. And that's really what happened on this movie. We started with the best of intentions and we started with the best of plans, but you

find a better idea and you move away from the established plan in pursuit of that idea and then pretty soon, you know, everything you thought you would set out to do doesn't really apply anymore. Right, because it's a living breathing thing in a sense. Yeah, absolutely, with an absolute mind of its own.

Yeah. All you could do is run and keep up with it. Pretty much. Or actually you're running like mad just in one step ahead of it. Is there anything significant, as silly as this may sound, of the fact that it is something

that's like Star Trek next year, it's celebrating its 50th anniversary? So is there anything special about the fact that that's the right word, that you're involved in a project with a history like this one has? You know, I tried not to think of it in those terms past a certain point. But we definitely, while we were making the movie, we wanted to subtly acknowledge the

four movies that came before. And you know, that this is sort of a milestone in a series and we wanted to do a little bit of a greatest chance. That's why our cast is the cast that it is and some of the elements of our story are what they are.

We sort of make nods to both the film franchise and also the original series as we were going through it. But beyond that, we just had to make our own movie. Sure. I understand. They've used different directors in each of these movies and each director brings their

own thing into the world of Mission Impossible. Are you able to take a step back and think what sort of your approach was that may have been different than things we've seen before? And I'm not talking about the story, obviously. I'm just talking from a director's point of view.

You know, it's really interesting because I've been sort of looking at, you know, as the movie is coming to a close, I'm looking at this movie compared to my last movie and the movie before that. And I like to think with my own films that there's some sort of a continuity where you can look at all three and say they were all made by the same person but not by the same

filmmaker. And I feel like this series of movies is the same game, that Tom is the producer and the star of all of these movies. Tom really brings to it a sensibility and kind of a certain heartbeat to it. And each director brings a different point of view to it.

I think what this one brings to it is there's a… Each and every one of the movies has a tone all of its own, has a pace all of its own. And I guess in this movie, there are… It's Ethan Hunt having come full circle with who Ethan Hunt is. In every other movie, Ethan Hunt is sort of struggling with his identity and struggling

with whether or not this is something that he wants to do. Some part of his character is always pulling away from this path that life has chosen for him. And in this movie, it's quite the opposite. He has sort of embraced it wholeheartedly and is determined to hang on to it when it's

threatened to be taken away from it. That's the Ethan story and that connection with Ethan, which is obviously the most important thing. But what's sort of overall the dramatic thrust of this movie? You know, what you're saying to an audience, you can see this movie because this is the

power of this movie. You know, the dramatic thrust of this movie is a darn good question. The dramatic thrust of this movie is the… There's definitely a distinctly different sense of what the team is in this movie. It's very much a team divided and Ethan has loyalties to…

He has sort of a faith in a character, in the person of Rebecca Ferguson, that under no circumstances should he trust or does anybody else trust. And the beginning of the movie is about the IMF and the team sort of being scattered to the four winds and struggling to coalesce, struggling to find one another and find their place with one another.

And then even when they get back together again, there's conflicts within that team, which I think is a really new feeling for this franchise. Sounds good. I have to know too, as a director and someone who knows Mr. Cruz quite well, do you have your heart going you throat at all when you watch your leading man hanging on the side

of a plane that's taking off? I think that if anything happens to him, I'm going to have to answer for it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we do everything that we can to be safe and we do everything we can to plan for every

variable, but that was a genuinely scary one and that there were a lot of variables that we simply couldn't control. I mean that building thing he did and the last one was pretty intense. It was… Well, I'll tell you, it's interesting because you look at the stunts that Tom does in the

movies and the most dangerous part of each stunt is not necessarily the part that you perceive as being the most dangerous. For example, when he's on the verge, it's not the fall that is the thing that threatens Tom most. He had a safety harness and the chances of that harness giving out and Tom falling,

were not really the thing. It's when Tom did that, where he runs along the building and then does the… He jumps off the building and arches backwards to fly back towards the window, the open window. When he was doing that with his back towards the building, Tom couldn't see where he was going.

Wow. And if he collided with the building, he'd have been dead. He wouldn't have fallen. He would have smashed his head against the side of the building and crushed his skull and that would have been it.

And so you tend to look, when you look at every single sequence in which Tom is doing something dangerous, the illusion of those things is it's not the perceived threat. It's the very real threat within that. It wasn't really a fear of ours that Tom would fall off the plane. There was never a moment where we thought Tom was going to fall.

What we were terrified of is when the plane was on the runway, any debris, any debris that got sucked into those propellers was headed straight for Tom. Yeah. True. And when we were in the air, if a bird flew by and hit Tom, he was dead.

Wow. Okay. So we're… Yeah. So we're…

And if the pilot whose hand is on the throttle had moved that throttle just a few millimeters forward, the differential in air speed from just at the slightest adjustment would have been the difference between Tom staying on the plane and Tom being ripped off the side of the plane no matter what sort of safety mechanism was there to hold him on. And so those…

The number of variables for that stunt were far greater and each variable is in order of magnitude. So it just… You're not aware of that when you're watching it. You're watching a scene.

You're saying, oh my God, that guy's hanging out of the side of an airplane. That's crazy. We're looking at it and we're making a thousand different calculations. Each one of them is scarier than the next. Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. See, I would… You're right.

I'd look at the scene. I'd watch the trailer. I'd see him jumping on the plane. To me, that's the most terrifying thing. But you're absolutely right.

All those other things. Jeez. Oh yeah, God, no. If a pigeon came by and hit him in the chest, that was it. Guess my pigeon.

I mean, how could you explain that to anybody? It would be a very embarrassing way to go. Exactly. What sort of do you view looking at the making of this film as its most challenging aspect for you as a filmmaker?

Hands down, it was the screenplay. The hardest part was telling a story that you hadn't seen before in this franchise and living up to the four previous films, but also just constantly reassessing what you were doing and saying, is this or isn't it mission impossible? And so we started with a screenplay that we were very happy with.

But then the minute you change one thing, everything else around it changes. And so the script was constantly evolving. And we attack this thing, saying to ourselves, we don't want it to be like the other movies. We want to know what the script is going in. We want to have a plan.

I've worked on these movies before. I've got this thing licked. And just as soon as the movie starts, it becomes something completely and utterly of itself. It takes on a life and a mind of its own. And you just have to go where it takes you.

So there were days when we would write scenes and come up with a scene we were really excited with that ended on this very distinct line of dialogue or this very distinct cliffhanger. And we would say, that's right. That is absolutely mission impossible. I don't know where it's going.

I don't know what's supposed to happen next. But that's the right scene. And now the next scene that we write has to live up to the scene that we shot yesterday. Yeah, it sounds like another nightmare. Okay.

It was pretty scary. It was especially scary in that normally I'm in the position of being the guy next to the director saying, okay, I'm going to go back to my hotel and I'll figure this out while you're directing. What are you doing?

I didn't always have that person on this movie. I had writers come in. I had friends of mine who were writers as well who were helping me on it. But in the end, it's not the sort of thing where you can just jump into it. You have to really learn the language of each individual mission impossible.

You have to kind of understand what the movie is and what the movie is trying to tell you. And so you were constantly directing by sense of field. I don't know any other way to describe it. Yeah. So at the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned the fact that big Hollywood movies

have gotten bigger, basically. Is there a challenge walking a line on a movie like this? I know the Bond films have dealt with this over the years, where obviously with each movie, people expect more and more and more and more. So is it tough delivering the action and the larger than life sort of stunts and spectacle,

but still holding on to those characters and that story and making it all legitimate? Only if you allow the spectacle to become the tail that wags the dog. For Tom and I, character and story always come first. And we were really struggling with the end of the movie, thinking to ourselves, what is the big spectacular thing need to be?

And we couldn't connect with it. We couldn't find an ending that really got us emotionally excited. And it was only when we said, well, where would the characters go and what would this movie… Pretend you weren't making this big giant summer 10-pawn movie.

What would the movie really be if you just went where the characters wanted to go? And as soon as we did that, we found an ending that worked for us. And the test audiences that we've shown the movie to really responded to it. And it wasn't necessarily the big, gargantuan spectacle that you would expect. And I think movies are going that way.

I'm seeing other movies that have been… Very big movies that have been very successful without… Look at World War Z. The end of that movie was ultimately about Brad Pitt and one zombie in a little room. But because you'd sort of been on that journey, it was the right way to end the story.

It was all about the stakes and all about the character. And that's what Tom and I really believed in. I'm Ed Gross. Thanks for listening to Voices from Krypton. From Voices from Krypton.