'Mission: Impossible' director Christopher McQuarrie breaks down Tom Cruise's terrifying new stunts

Article content

In the midst of making Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, their ambitious finale to Tom Cruise’s nearly 30-year-old Mission: Impossible franchise, Christopher McQuarrie and his leading man would often turn to one another and say the same thing.

“‘This was your idea,'” McQuarrie, 56, says, recalling their chats between any one of Cruise’s death-defying stunts. “‘Just remember, you wanted this.'”

In The Final Reckoning, out this Friday, Cruise’s go-to creative partner for the better part of the last 17 years thrusts Ethan Hunt into a globe-trotting adventure that finds the Impossible Mission Force agent and his team of superspies — including Ethan’s pals, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), a new love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell), an assassin-turned-ally, Paris (Pom Klementieff), and a government agent, Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) — in a race against time as they hunt for a rogue artificial intelligence known as the Entity that can destroy mankind.

Co-written by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, the film concludes a story that began with 2023’s Dead Reckoning and continues Cruise’s penchant for risking life and limb to entertain moviegoers.

After completing a motorcycle jump off the face of a cliff 1,200-feet above sea level in the last movie, Cruise hangs on for dear life as he hits zero G between the wings of a biplane as it flips and cavorts during a midair chase sequence that was shot in Africa.

Elsewhere in the new movie, Cruise, now 62, pushes himself to the limits as he performs “an underwater sequence unlike any other.”

“Tom wanted to do the wing-walking sequence, and I wanted to do the underwater sequence,” McQuarrie says of the movie’s central action scenes. But after filming on the back-to-back sequels was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then a writers’ and actors’ strike, the filmmaker can’t help but chuckle at the grandiosity of those two ambitions.

“It was very, very challenging. Taking away all of the logistics involved — and you’ve seen those two sequences that centre in the movie — as complicated as they are, we were doing them through a pandemic and parts of two strikes.”

Filming on The Final Reckoning was also happening while the pair was shooting Dead Reckoning simultaneously. “You name a complication, and this movie had it,” McQuarrie adds.

But it’s all in service of entertaining the audience. “Tom’s all about big-screen emotional shared experience,” McQuarrie says.

McQuarrie first met Cruise as a writer, penning the actor’s 2008 historical thriller Valkyrie. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects then did an uncredited rewrite on 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and directed the actor in the first Jack Reacher movie. Cruise then invited him to write and direct 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.

Other collaborations followed, including Mission: Impossible – Fallout and 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, which McQuarrie co-wrote.

The creative partnership works, he says, because “there’s really no ego in the process.”

“This new movie is a gargantuan accomplishment,” Cruise says. “It’s a culmination of everything, and I mean everything, that me and McQ have learned in storytelling over the course of making these movies.”

After dangling off the Burj Khalifa (Ghost Protocol), clinging to the side of an Airbus A400M (Rogue Nation), performing a dangerous HALO jump stunt (Fallout), getting behind the wheel for an elaborate car chase in Rome (Dead Reckoning), performing a cliffside motorbike jump (also Dead Reckoning) and more, neither Cruise nor McQuarrie will say for certain if this is their last Mission: Impossible movie. 

But speaking to Postmedia at the 2023 New York City premiere of Dead Reckoning, Cruise hinted he might not be quite finished, saying “there’s constant adventures that we can take this character (on).”

“McQ and I wanted to blow (these two movies) out and make a big, big epic adventure,” he said of the old-school action extravaganza.

One thing that was different this time out was Cruise’s reaction at the end.

McQuarrie says whenever they finish a Mission movie, Cruise will turn to him and say, “‘We can do better.'”

“At the end of (Dead Reckoning), he turned to me and he was about to say it, and I said, ‘We already did,'” McQuarrie says.

Below, McQuarrie speaks more about the making of The Final Reckoning, his relationship with Cruise and his “timely” decision to cast an AI villain.

Take us through the aerial stunt that Tom performs in this movie. Audiences have seen snippets of it in the trailer, but people aren’t prepared for what they’re going to see on the big screen.

“No. I’m delighted to say that with everything you’re seeing and the marketing, you’re not even scratching the surface of what’s in the sequence. One of the things I was most excited about while we were doing this sequence was watching as Tom would do a stunt in the morning that would top anything he’d done in his career, and then he’d go out in the afternoon and dunk on that two more times. There are so many big stunts in that sequence alone that we had to cut some out.”

Final Reckoning also boasts an exhilarating underwater stunt. Tom has done underwater stuff before. How did you want to make this one different?

“We wanted to learn from all the mistakes of past underwater sequences we had done. I think the first time Tom and I worked underwater was on Edge of Tomorrow and then we did a sequence in Rogue Nation that left us unsatisfied. But we learned a lot from doing that. We learned how efficiency and expediency and decisions you make thinking you are making a practical decision turns into something that creates a lot of problems for you later. Doing things virtually or cutting corners didn’t actually make the sequence go faster. It just left you frustrated with the end result. So this time, we decided we were going to just do it all for real. It turns out we were vindicated.”

Final Reckoning is also in many ways the most emotional Mission: Impossible movie. Your partnership with Tom goes back 17, 18 years. Can you speak about his range as an actor. Because that’s not something that gets talked about when it comes to Tom Cruise and these movies.

“No, it doesn’t. It gets lost in the spectacle of these films. Someone recently asked Eddie Hamilton, our editor, ‘You’ve been working on these action movies for over 10 years. Don’t you get tired of working on action movies?’ And Eddie replied, ‘I’m not working on action movies. I’m working on movies that have action in them.’ Mission: Impossible has drama, it has comedy, it has pathos, horror. Every kind of genre is encapsulated in these movies.”

Why does this partnership between you and Tom work so well? You’ve made 11 movies together and the collaborations keep getting better.

“There’s no pride of authorship. We don’t have creative conflicts. I’m asked all the time if Tom and I argue and I say, ‘Yes, we argue everyday on (the audience’s) behalf.’ The only real debates Tom and I have is over what an audience needs or doesn’t need. In terms of our approach to storytelling we are very much cheek by jowl. We tend to see it the same way. We tend to understand what a story needs in order to communicate whatever emotion we’re after, and we don’t take for granted that just because (one of us) thinks that’s what it needs to be that’s what it is. We’re always shooting things and then stopping and looking at it and saying, ‘Never mind what we meant to say. What did we say? Let’s look at it through the audiences point of view and ask ourselves if we achieved what we set out to do.’

“That makes these action sequences very difficult because when you’re doing them, and you’re doing them over such a long period of time you become quite numb to it. So it’s hard to tell if the submarine sequence is working or if the aerial sequence is working. Are audiences going to be thrilled by this? We never take for granted that any of this stuff is going to work. We never stop confronting it.”

AI is the main villain of Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning. When you were writing these two entries back in 2018 and 2019, did you foresee that it would become such a big part of our culture and lives?

“We could see it coming. We’d been talking about technology becoming a threat in these movies going back to the first Mission I did with Tom. But it goes back to an earlier Mission before I even met Tom. I had a meeting with Oliver Stone when he was being considered as a possible director for Mission II. They were talking about technology back then. This is 1999, when they were talking about the Millennium Bug and Y2K. The problem with that was it was always a very intellectual idea. We’re always looking at these films and saying, ‘What does the audience bring to the movie? What anxieties and stresses are they bringing to the stories and how can we use those in the movie to create suspense and create an escape from that?’

“Around 2019, after we had finished Fallout and we were working on Top Gun Maverick, we were talking about the original Top Gun and how that’s a movie that took place during the Cold War and the audience brought the Cold War to the movie. You didn’t have to explain what the stakes of what the Cold War was, the audience just felt it. I said to Tom, ‘People are starting to understand how information technology is affecting their lives. I don’t think it’s an intellectual idea anymore. It’s more of an emotional one. I think we can use it now. (The audience) is only going to become more aware of it over the time it takes us to make this movie.’ That’s when we were talking about two movies that were going to be shot over two-and-a-half years. This movie was originally supposed to come out in 2023. The fact that it took as long as it did to make just meant that those ideas were more and more relatable by the time we got here.”

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning opens in theatres May 23.

mdaniell@postmedia.com