It was inevitable. On Wednesday at Cannes at the packed grand théâtre Lumière, Christopher McQuarrie, wearing a pale yellow suit, measuredly answered questions from French journalist Didier Allouch about his writing and directing career, from “The Usual Suspects” (social media would give away the twisty ending today) and “The Way of the Gun” with Benicio del Toro, to collaborating with Tom Cruise on 11 movies. Then his star popped in, sporting a short-sleeved maroon jumpsuit, to hijack the conversation.
While Cruise and McQuarrie say the right things about respecting each other, it’s clear how much power Cruise has over the “Mission” franchise, now in its eighth iteration. While “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” is billed as the finale (Paramount is bidding to increase box office over the last disappointing installment, which was creamed by “Barbenheimer”), a special IMAX screening later that evening played rousingly and offered an open-ended conclusion. (The $400 million film was shot in IMAX.) After a London premiere and buzzy Cannes launch, the movie hits global screens on May 23. The box office will tell whether there’s an appetite for more.
“I’m a diehard believer in the big-screen experience,” said McQuarrie. “What makes film special is however many hundreds of strangers all come together to sit in the room and watch something together and experience something together. Streaming is in danger of driving that into extinction. How do I define cinema? It’s a place where people come to watch movies, which some people in the industry view as an anachronism, and I don’t. More and more over the 30 years I’ve been doing it, a wedge has been driven through the center of cinema. Are you going to be an artist? Are you going to be an entertainer and an artist? What defines cinema for me ss one that merges the two. What you see in these ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies: I’m trying to find, through that vessel, a way to say things, a way to imbue meaning and to make commentary. And the movie is constantly fighting those things back. That is the struggle. And that’s where I choose to exist.”
Ever since they met on “Valkyrie” (2009), McQuarrie and Cruise have been joined at the hip. And they agree that Hollywood needs to thrive by not trying to crush each other’s opening weekend, but to support others’ success.
“We should not be competing with one another,” said McQuarrie. “We should all be serving one another. We should be working for this. We should be working to serve the mechanism…I look at things in terms of deposits and withdrawals. ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is a deposit. That is something where we are doing what we can to bring as many people into the theater and to keep that mechanism thriving, so that a film like ‘Anora’ can come and be in theaters and take the time to grow.”
The secret of their bond as auteur and producer-star? “It’s not complicated,” said Cruise. “We love movies. We love telling stories.” The “Mission” movies are “meticulously worked out. The material assets of the film are figured out long in advance. What isn’t in stone is the heart of the story, which is character.”
Added to the established “Mission” crew (Ving Rhames, Pom Klementieff, Hayley Atwell, and Simon Pegg) in the new movie are Hannah Waddington as the commander of a destroyer and Angela Bassett as the president of the United States, which is on the brink of the apocalypse as cyber foe Entity is taking over nuclear arsenals around the world. The only man who can stop the Entity? Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, of course.
In order to retrieve the original source code of the Entity and destroy it, Hunt has to risk life and limb and dive into icy arctic waters to a sunken Soviet submarine teetering 500 feet underwater. Filming that sequence in rotating tanks was a masterful technical and artistic achievement. “You have to understand how to put these pieces together,” said Cruise. “It is a Swiss watch of keeping the audience’s attention, investment in the characters.”
In order to achieve these ambitious set pieces, McQuarrie has learned over time what he has to do. “When you design something that ambitious, you come up with a plan, you prepare meticulously, you pat yourself on the back, and then physics hits you square in the face,” he said. “What Tom and I do is take everything we learned from the last film and apply it to this one. The submarine is its own ecosystem. Remember that when you’re watching Tom inside this semi-submerged rotating room inside the submarine that is housed inside a 60-foot diameter, 1000-ton, 360-degree rotating, fully submersible steel drum in an 8.5 million liter tank. And he’s inside it. What you’re watching is us testing it, because there is no way to test that thing. There’s no model. We built a model and we put a little plastic figure and a bunch of torpedoes in it, and rotated it once, and they smashed the little plastic figure. When you set a camera, then you turn the set on, and the set is rotating, the camera won’t be where you put it when Tom gets there. It was a talented group of people who had to anticipate where to put the camera, so that it was always collecting Tom. That in and of itself is a level of engineering that you can’t imagine.”
Even more impressive is what Cruise had to do during the biplane aerial sequence, “the craziest stunt in this movie,” McQuarrie said. “Now put Tom on the wing of the biplane with that camera in between the wings of the biplane. When we started designing the sequence, we went to Wingwalkers who do this professionally, and they said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And Tom said, ‘I want to be zero G in between the wings of the plane.’ And these people, who do this for a living and are part of a decades-long tradition, said, ‘No, you’re not going to do that,’ and Tom said, ‘Thank you for your time.’ And we went on to some other people.”
Added Cruise: “But also it’s finding the camera positions and all of the engineering. It represents thousands of hours of work of many people, craftsmen, pilots, engineers, decades of work to be able to develop these things, which is studying these aerial sequences. I fly jets, I fly aerobatic airplanes, helicopters. And then how do we apply an understanding of those physics? I will be pulling this in or parachuting, and I say, ‘OK, I understand enough about this. I really do believe we can do it.’”
The airplane stunt was the result of McQuarrie “foolishly showing Tom a TikTok video, thinking he’d simply be amused by it,” McQuarrie said. “And he said, ‘I could do that.’ And I said, ‘No, you can’t.’ And then we went about developing that process to do it.”
When Cruise is in the biplane, he is completely alone. “He’s at the controls, and his biplane suffers some damage,” said McQuarrie. “There’s tension. There’s a moment where the camera is in profile, and Tom Cruise looks over at the damaged strut of his biplane. The camera throws focus, and it’s this beautiful backlit-shot sun. You see this vibrating strut, and Tom turns back, and the camera racks focus to Tom.”
There’s no crew with Cruise in an airplane at 10,000 feet above Africa. “Tom is lighting the shot by how he’s positioning the plane in its relationship to the sun, and he’s operating focus just off-camera. He is the crew in every single shot you see. I’m talking to Tom on a radio where he can barely hear me, and he’s flying in an open cockpit.”
When Cruise was on the wing of the plane, the only way to communicate with him was through hand signals. “He has no radio, which means I have to fly up next to Tom in my helicopter,” said McQuarrie, “and Tom can’t see me unless I open the door and step out onto the seat with my first A.D. Mary Boulding reminding me to keep my seat belt. When you leave the cockpit of the plane, it’s like stepping onto the surface of another planet. The wind is hitting you in excess of 140 miles an hour, coming off the propeller. The molecules of the air are so dispersed that you’re breathing, but only physically. You’re not actually getting oxygen, and Mary Boulding is sitting next to me, and she’s got a stopwatch. And when Tom climbs out of the cockpit, I’ll say, ‘Start the clock.’ And every minute, Mary Boulding says, ‘One minute on the waiting.’ Tom is going through his performance. ‘Two minutes on the waiting.’ Tom has 12 minutes.”
McQuarrie continued, “We know this from experimentation that, at about 12 minutes, the fatigue of being blasted by this wind is breaking his entire body down to the point where it’s literally like two hours in the gym. And Tom being the perfectionist that he is, would get to about 12 minutes, and I would lean out the door of the helicopter, and Tom would go, ’13 minutes.’ There [was] more than one moment where Tom had pushed himself to the point that he was so physically exhausted he couldn’t get back up off the wing. He was laying on the wing of the plane, arms hanging over the front of the wing. We could not tell if he was conscious or not, so we’re waiting to see if there’s any indication if Tom is OK. We’re waiting to see this sign, and Tom is laying on the wing of the plane.”
Another issue: in order to do aerobatics, the plane was light on fuel. “This was a typical day shooting in Africa,” said McQuarrie, “and watching Tom, at the point of physical exhaustion, get himself up because the plane can’t land if Tom’s on the wing. He’s got three minutes to get up, but he’s been on that wing for 20 minutes, and we watched as he pulled himself up and stuck his head in the cockpit so that he could replenish the oxygen in his body and then climb up into the cockpit and bring the plane safely down the land. No one on Earth can do that.”
McQuarrie deals with these stressful, dangerous stunts by eliminating one risk factor: his fear. “Fear is a wasted emotion. Stress is a wasted emotion. Anger is a wasted emotion, and in situations like this, they can get somebody killed. After you’ve done it, and you go home, you can be all stressed out all you want. Tom and I are often sitting in the editing room watching what we’ve done, and say, ‘Did they actually let us do this?’ And then we become numb.”
