Mission: Impossible — Fallout: Tom Cruise back to save the world
Director Christopher McQuarrie talks about his vision for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in the latest Mission: Impossible film.
There will always be plans for another Mission: Impossible movie, says director Christopher McQuarrie. The Tom Cruise action franchise began in 1996, and there’s no doubt about its star’s commitment. “We joke about how some Mission: Impossible down the road is going to have Tom, in his 90s, in an iron lung, being thrown out of an airplane.”
Mission: Impossible began in the 1960s as a TV spy series with a catchy theme tune and a nifty narrative gimmick involving a self-destructing mission briefing. Over the decades it has become a blockbuster franchise synonymous with its star. Cruise, producer and lead, magnified the idea of the TV series and brought espionage, subterfuge and action to the big screen in the role of Ethan Hunt, key member of a covert operations team known as the Impossible Mission Force.
Throughout, Cruise has famously done his own stunts, and during the filming of the latest film, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, he broke his ankle during a rooftop chase. In the movie, you can see the moment when it happened.
Although Mission: Impossible has become famous for its action sequences, McQuarrie is at pains to emphasise that they are always conceived in dramatic terms. The spectacular scenes in Fallout — including a leap from a plane, a visceral, punchy dust-up in a bathroom, a frantic car and motorbike chase through Paris, a London rooftop run, and a heart-stopping helicopter chase over the mountains — are never conceived as set pieces, McQuarrie says.
“The only rule is that there has to be story or character,” he says, “otherwise there is only spectacle. And we’re not really interested in just spectacle. We’re much more interested in what makes them emotionally engaging. We’re not ever trying to consciously top the previous movie in the franchise.”
Cruise brought an eclectic range of directors on board for Mission: Impossible. Brian DePalma directed the first film, John Woo the second. JJ Abrams made his feature debut with the third and animation director Brad Bird made his first live action movie with the fourth.
McQuarrie is the first director to return to the series: he co-wrote and directed the previous film, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, and he has also written the script for Fallout.
McQuarrie has a long history with Cruise as both writer and director. He wrote the screenplays for the World War II drama Valkyrie and the science-fiction adventure Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise starred; he also wrote and directed action thriller Jack Reacher, in which Cruise played the title character.
Their projects, he says, begin the same way.
“When I work with Tom, I always say to him, ‘If you only want to do one thing, what would it be?’ ” For Fallout, Cruise wanted to resolve the story of Hunt’s wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who first appeared in Mission: Impossible 3.
Their relationship put her in danger, and in Ghost Protocol, the fourth film, her death was faked so she could assume a new identity and live in safety. “We thought we had tied up that story,” McQuarrie says, “but it was a little too open-ended. There were a lot of unanswered questions. It wasn’t definitive enough for most people.”
He told Cruise there were certain things he had to set in place if he were write about Julia.
“I said: ‘I don’t want it to be something that’s going to end up being cut out of the movie, it can’t be some detour where we just check that box and move on.’ Having made one of these before, I understand that everything in Mission: Impossible is fighting for its right to be in the movie. And we’re always overriding and overshooting everything and over-explaining and pulling it back.”
If he were to resolve her fate, McQuarrie says: “I really had to bake it into the narrative. And I said to him: “The other thing I have to do is reintroduce that character. We can’t presume that anybody has seen Mission: Impossible before, it really has to be able to stand on its own.’ ”
So Fallout opens with a dream sequence that reminds us of the relationship between Hunt and Julia, and reintroduces us to the figure of Solomon Lane, the villain from the fifth film, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.
This set the tone, McQuarrie says, for an important aspect of Fallout: a more vulnerable, fragile Ethan Hunt.
It’s not just that the first mission in the film goes wrong because of a decision Hunt makes. It’s about emphasising fears and anxieties as never before. In that opening scene, McQuarrie says: “Lane is inside Ethan’s head. It became very much a motif that runs through the movie, so Ethan’s relationship with the villain is more intimate than any of the previous movies, perhaps with the exception of the first one,” in which a mentor turns into a betrayer.
In the previous films, McQuarrie says, Hunt’s inner life is absent. “You’re always left wondering. He’s a little bit of a cipher, a little bit of a mystery. I said that in order to make a more emotional movie, which is what I wanted to do, I want the audience to be more connected to him directly.”
With this dream sequence, “the audience knows a secret about Ethan that nobody else does, which is very unusual for Mission: Impossible. Usually Ethan is the one keeping a secret from the audience, and this is the essence of the surprises of these movies. So right from the first frame of the film I wanted people to feel closer and more connected to his inner life.”
It was also important, McQuarrie says, that the action sequences were anchored in a sense of place. “I started with a very basic outline, a very slim structure with a somewhat vague third act that we hadn’t worked out.
“I told the studio: ‘I’m not going to start writing the screenplay until I scout the film. I want to choose all the locations, and I want the locations to dictate what happens on screen, whether that’s action or drama.’ ” If you write a scene in isolation, he says, “you spend a lot of time trying to find the location to fit that scene, and you either end up compromising the scene or you compromise the location.”
Action has to be crucial to the narrative. “I wanted the movie to be conveying the story visually — I wanted essentially to make a silent film, so you could watch the movie and not understand anything of what was going on [being said] to be able to grasp the story.”
Although he wasn’t trying to create spectacle for its own sake, he says, he had a range of cinematic inspirations. In Paris, one of his reference points was a famous short film, Rendezvous, made covertly in 1976 by French director Claude Lelouch. It’s the ultimate automotive trip, with the director at the wheel, driving non-stop at high speed through the city in the early morning, with a camera mounted on the bumper of his Mercedes sports car.
Another regular touchstone, McQuarrie says, is Buster Keaton’s 1926 silent action-comedy The General, with its story of romantic frustration and its intricately choreographed locomotive chase sequences. “It’s a film Tom and I reference all the time.
“For the overall feel,” he says, “I was inspired by one of my favourite films growing up, The Great Escape.” John Sturges’s 1963 World War II adventure about soldiers trying to escape from a maximum-security POW camp by digging their way out, is “a constant mixture of triumph and tragedy. The characters are always moving forward, always getting closer to their goal, always suffering setbacks.” This dynamic, he says, is what makes audiences invest emotionally in a film through reversal after reversal.
When he was working on the script for 2016’s Rogue Nation, he also looked back at earlier films in the series. “When I laid the four previous movies on top of one another, the things missing for me were a villain who posed a real physical threat, and a strong female character who was not subordinate to Ethan: not a part of his team, not dependent on him.”
The Rogue Nation villain he came up with was Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), a former British agent who became head of the Syndicate, an organisation whose ethos is a commitment to chaos and destruction. McQuarrie says Harris was reluctant to take part in a franchise film.
“He did the movie on the condition that he not be asked back. I said: ‘Sean, the villain always dies, don’t worry about it.’ But as it went on, we realised we were struggling with the end: we kept trying to come up with a sequence in which Ethan and Solomon Lane fought it out, and they were very unsatisfactory. I couldn’t work out why. And I finally realised that the problem was I was trying to kill Lane, and that’s not where the story wanted to go.”
Cruise separately came to the same conclusion, McQuarrie says. In fact, he and Cruise independently came up with an idea for how Hunt and Lane would be linked once again in Fallout in ways Hunt would find devastating to contemplate.
In Rogue Nation, McQuarrie also introduced Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an enigmatic figure associated with British espionage whose allegiances are constantly in doubt. She’s Hunt’s counterpart, in some ways his equal.
Writing Fallout, McQuarrie discovered that the best way to emphasise their importance to one another was not to bring them together but to be “constantly tearing them apart. Faust comes into the narrative and almost immediately they’re separated, and she comes back into it and again they’re separated.
“The essence of her in that role is that whenever she leaves, all you’re thinking about is, ‘When is she going to come back?’ ”
Three female characters play a role in Fallout alongside Ilsa and Julia. There’s Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett), the decisive new head of the CIA, who wants to put the brakes on the Impossible Mission Force; there is a character known as the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), a wealthy philanthropist with a shady agenda; and there is, fleetingly, a French police officer (Alix Benezech), whose unexpected intervention in one of Hunt’s operations provides him with a significant dilemma.
“They all own the scenes they’re in, not Ethan Hunt,” McQuarrie says. “The thing I’m most proud of in his movie is that they don’t exist to serve Ethan’s agenda.”
Hunt might be more vulnerable in Fallout, but so is his organisation: Erica Sloan doesn’t trust the IMF, its tradition of disguises or its resistance to supervision. She insists that one of her operatives, August Walker (Henry Cavill), accompany Hunt on his next mission. His presence disrupts another important element of IMF: its team ethos.
Hacker Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) has been in every Mission: Impossible film; technician turned agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) has become a regular. “Fallout was an effort to push this to its absolute limit,” McQuarrie says. “Every single person has something to do and if any one of them was missing, they wouldn’t be able to accomplish the mission.
For McQuarrie, there’s also a global context that needs to be part of the film. “We can’t deny that we are making a spy movie, these are government agents.” But they differ from the movies he watched when he was young.
“I grew up during the Cold War,” he says, “when we were constantly living with the fear of nuclear annihilation. But life was a lot simpler. You had two giant superpowers poised in a face-off of mutually assured destruction.”
It was easier then, he says, to resolve things at the end of the film. “It was left versus right, East versus West. The notion of good and evil is far more complicated now.
“So I asked myself: What’s the anxiety now, as compared to the one I experienced as a teenager? What is the experience the audience is bringing to the movie and how do we access those fears and how do we assuage them?”
Mission: Impossible has always traded on confusion, secrecy and sudden reversals, on the possibility that familiar figures are not who they seem. In Fallout, it’s harder to pick sides.
“If there is any contemporary feeling I was looking to exploit and address, it is this,” McQuarrie says. “These are agents working for a government in an age when we are not only looking at the enemy, we are also looking at ourselves. We are divided against ourselves. I couldn’t ignore that. If you made the story a blanket ‘good versus evil’ it would feel almost naive. I wanted to bring in some awareness of the conflict we’re all feeling about each other.”
Mission: Impossible — Fallout opens on Thursday.