NEW YORK – There are usually limited places to go as an action movie after leaving Tom Cruise clinging to the side of an Airbus A400M and threw him getting off a cargo plane at 25,000 feet.
But in the kinetic, fast-paced world of Mission: Impossible, the pressure to keep upping the ante – like the films perennial star – never ends.
“Every time we finish a movie, the first thing Tom says to me is, ‘We can do better,'” says Christopher McQuarrie.
McQuarrie, the writer and director of 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and 2018’s franchise highlight, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, collaborated with Cruise “Top Gun: Maverick ‘ (which McQuarrie wrote) when they started talking about their ambitions for the next iteration of Mission: Impossible.
Their plan was to do not one, but two sequels: back-to-back blockbusters with even bigger stunts—Cruise envisioned a motorcycle jump-slash skydive—and a massive train sequence that McQuarrie was keen to make. The exhilarating experience on “Maverick,” a pop culture juggernaut that has grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, only heightened her ambitions.
“Top Gun: Maverick really taught us a lot about the character dynamics and the overall emotional impact of the film,” McQuarrie said in a recent interview. “To make films of this magnitude, one of the most important things to think about is the feeling that the audience is just not there anymore.”
A year after “Maverick” box-office dominance, McQuarrie and Cruise are back with another daredevil extravaganza in a class of its own. Similar to Maverick, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is a cutting-edge action extravaganza with old-school engineering, crafted with star power, hands-on effects and stunt work to elicit shouts of “Hey!” made what?”
It was also their near-impossible mission to date — and not just because, according to Paramount Pictures the 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps this was what Cruise did in preparation for his climactic stunt. “Dead Reckoning” was just days away from starting production in Venice when COVID-19 cases skyrocketed in Italy, an early epicenter.
“Mission: Impossible” was one of the first major productions to be shut down by the pandemic. Months later, Cruise and Dead Reckoning came out — a $290 million world-spanning film that was logistically so complicated it was easy sparked controversy for the original plans to blow up a centuries-old bridge in Poland – led an industry-wide effort to get the film business back on track during the pandemic. An already stressful production became even more tense. In December 2020, An audio recording of Cruise was leaked yelled at two crew members for not following COVID-19 protocols.
“We’re the gold standard,” Cruise said in the recording. “Because of us, they’re making movies in Hollywood again. Because they believe in us and what we do.”
There were numerous delays and turning points along the way. But McQuarrie says he never thought Dead Reckoning wouldn’t be finished.
“We just kept walking, because if you stopped and tried to find the end of the tunnel, you would just go to a place of desperation,” says McQuarrie.
McQuarrie and Cruise first worked together on the 2008 Hitler assassination drama Valkyrie. McQuarrie, the famous screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, was in proverbial prison for his poorly received directorial debut The Way of the Gun.
“When I met Tom in 2006, I hadn’t done a film in seven years,” says McQuarrie. “I wouldn’t do another film for five years. I really had banished from my mind all the ambitions I had to realize. I certainly never imagined being considered an action director, let alone directing four action movies.”
“In ‘Dead Reckoning’ you see the ghosts of all the films I never got to do,” he adds.
Unlikely as it may seem, McQuarrie (who is also directing the already filmed second part of Dead Reckoning) has become the architect of one of the most haunting action franchises.
In Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt confronts a renegade artificial intelligence, a prescient and well-suited antagonist to a cinematic universe based less on CGI and more on practical effects. McQuarrie told Cruise he wanted to take “Mission: Impossible” beyond the threat of a terrorist getting his hands on a deadly weapon.
“Another lesson we learned from ‘Top Gun’ was: What does the audience bring to the film? Top Gun was born out of Cold War fears. I said to Tom in 2019, “Now what kind of fear is this?” says McQuarrie. “What we didn’t anticipate was the extent to which it would accelerate.”
In Mission: Impossible, what you see is rarely what you get. Hunt and his spy team are masters of deception. At the same time, McQuarrie and his team, including cinematographer Fraser Taggart, put considerable effort into ensuring that what the audience sees feels authentic and immersive.
“The challenge is usually hiding the fact that it’s not the actor doing it,” says McQuarrie. “And here the opposite is the case. They’re actually going to go to great lengths to show that Tom actually does it.”
Taggart, who directed the helicopter sequence in Fallout, says he’s never worked with an actor who’s as resilient to stunt doubles as Cruise is, even on the most benign of shots.
“Tom won’t do it. He just refuses, even if you make a hand call,” says Taggart. “There can be no one else doing it like you would do on other projects. Tom will insist it is him.”
Just as Top Gun: Maverick sought to get as many cameras as possible into the cockpits of fighter jets, Mission: Impossible’s production sets are choreographed to get the cameras as close as possible to Cruise and the cast – here’s Haley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby – as possible.
For Taggart, that meant taking on often dizzying challenges, such as shooting a scene in which a train travels at 60 miles per hour through a Scandinavian mountain landscape and the weather is uncontrollable. He didn’t just want fixed cameras.
“So now we have to bring in a whole camera crew and some lighting, and by the end we’ll probably have 10 people strapped to the roof of a train car, including an old-fashioned physical camera up there,” says Taggart. “They think: can we actually put 10 people on the roof of the train that’s going 60 miles an hour? That’s the challenge because you really want your entire crew and cast to survive the shoot.”
In another sequence featuring characters in a falling train car, they hung a cameraman, Chunky Richmond, from stunt wires so that he was hanging alongside the actors. For a nighttime chase through the Byzantine corridors of Venice – for Taggart one of Dead Reckoning’s most complex assignments due to the city’s inherent darkness – they knocked on doors everywhere along the route to reveal cameras on patios and windows.
For an elaborate chase in Rome, Taggart used robotic arms on vehicles that were mounted but could also move.
“We’re always trying out new technologies, but we usually break everything,” he says.
McQuarrie has said he enjoys writing Mission: Impossible movies as they’re shooting; Fallout began without even a sketch. Production on Part Two was paused during the promotion of Part One, and it’s unclear if the ongoing writers’ strike would endanger production of the sequel. But for McQuarrie and company, there is the only way to make Mission: Impossible. The film is in full swing.
“Everything we do is our own responsibility,” says McQuarrie. “We want you to come to the film and experience it the way the characters did, which is, I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
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