Christopher McQuarrie was a 27-year-old former movie-theater security guard when he won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1996 for “The Usual Suspects.” Things went a little pear-shaped from that early peak, as they tend to do in Hollywood, and the Princeton, N.J., native was looking to leave the industry altogether when he piqued Tom Cruise’s interest for another script that became the 2008 Hitler-assassination drama “Valkyrie.”
It was the start of a professional relationship that has culminated in McQuarrie, now 56, directing and co-producing the past four films of the “Mission Impossible” franchise, including “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” in which Cruise famously stars as the unsinkable (and seemingly unkillable) special agent Ethan Hunt.
Recently, McQuarrie spoke with The Times in New York and later via video call from the back of an SUV in Mexico City about the choice to make A.I. the villain, the question of whether the franchise is coming to an end, and a “gnarly” secret Tom Cruise movie in the works. Here are edited excerpts from those conversations.
When did the decision come that “Dead Reckoning” and “Final Reckoning” would be the final two films in the franchise?
Over the course of “Rogue Nation” [2015], “Fallout” [2018] and then “Dead Reckoning” [2023], we were delving deeper and deeper into the emotions of the characters and their arcs. I said, “Look, we know that it’s going to be a long movie, let’s just cut it in half.”
I understand the irony of me saying we were going to make two two-hour movies and we ended up making these two much, much bigger ones. But we didn’t really think of it as being the conclusion of anything until we were about halfway through “Dead Reckoning.” Over time, we started to feel that this is a movie about the franchise more than just about the mission.
During production, you also had to contend with a pandemic and two Hollywood strikes. How did that affect you?
We paused and caught our breath. We edited and re-evaluated. The writers strike meant that I couldn’t write, but I could edit. The actors strike meant that Tom could not act or produce. Nobody was going to separate Tom the actor from Tom the producer, so he couldn’t scout [locations]. It created a completely different approach to the movies.
You can’t control [events] any more than you can control the weather, so you just lean into it. We’ve had sets destroyed, we’ve had actors in the hospital. Every lead actress we’ve ever worked with has been pregnant at one point or another. There are always those things coming at you.
Why the title change from “Dead Reckoning” to “Final Reckoning”?
Very simply, once “Dead Reckoning” performed the way that it did, and the time between the two movies was getting longer and longer, we knew we were getting further and further away from “Part One.” Why present a movie to which people would hear the title and say, “Well, I didn’t see ‘Part One,’ so I’m not going to see ‘Part Two’”?
We were always making “Part Two,” as it was then called, to be a stand-alone movie, the same way “Top Gun: Maverick” is engineered to be a stand-alone movie. [McQuarrie was a writer and producer on that movie.] We don’t expect you to have seen “Top Gun,” and even if you have, we’re not going to ask you to remember it.
The stunts in these movies are famously risky and elaborate. But you don’t hear much about injuries on set, aside from Tom breaking his ankle on “Fallout.”
The biggest stress on a movie is time. That’s where all the anxiety comes from for me. And I simply had to let go of the deadline and the calendar, and everything that you’re programmed as a director to base your entire life on.
It has changed the way I direct. I now look at the camera crew as a holistic organism and how stress and anxiety lead to mistakes, some of them life and death, and some of them just hugely costly and financial. That doesn’t mean I still didn’t get stressed or angry. But no deadline is worth somebody’s life, so it’s very clarifying when you’re making movies like this.
Tom and I also have a very simple rule: Only one of us can be crazy at a time. Whoever is the person that’s really angry and frustrated, the other person just immediately becomes chill. And that is an agreement between us, but it’s also an automatic response. It’s another big reason we work so well together.
There’s a major character death in the first act of “Final Reckoning,” which we won’t spoil here. Do actors ever volunteer for that?
Yes. Rebecca Ferguson [who appeared as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust in three “Mission” movies before perishing in 2023’s “Dead Reckoning”]. Rebecca and I talked very early on and she just said, “I’d rather die than be a love interest.” And I said, “OK, we can work with that.”
But death is a part of the franchise. Ethan loses his entire team in [the original] “Mission,” he loses Lindsey, Keri Russell’s character, in “Mission” III, he loses the secretary in “Ghost Protocol,” He loses the secretary again in “Fallout.” There’s always death nearby. You wouldn’t be as invested in the characters that do survive if there wasn’t someone who died along the way.
There is also a villain death here that is, unusually for a “Mission” movie, pretty slapstick and funny, especially because it comes in the middle of a very tense high-stakes scene.
It is quite unexpected, and I’ll tell you, we lived in total terror of it. Until an audience saw it, we did not know if it would work. It could be a total needle scratch.
We’ve learned our lesson too many times where it’s like, “This is going to kill!” and it doesn’t. So much so that with the submarine sequence in “Final Reckoning,” I felt nothing. I would turn to somebody and go, “Does this actually work?” I had a friend in the editing room and he was like, “I haven’t breathed in 10 minutes. What do you mean?”
Henry Cavill in the bathroom fight in “Fallout,” when he does what they called the arm reload — that got the biggest reaction, but nobody even thought about it in the moment. It was just a thing Henry did.
Instead of a political enemy or a rogue terrorist group, the main villain here is a malevolent A.I. called the Entity. How did you end up there?
This goes back to Tom asking me to be in one of the earlier meetings for “Top Gun: Maverick.” It was [producer] Jerry Bruckheimer, [the original’s director] Tony Scott and Tom, and I didn’t know why I was there. I was the only guy who didn’t work on the first one. And the only thing I could bring to it is that I remembered being a 17-year-old kid watching that movie. I could bring the audience’s perspective. So I said, “Maverick was America. And whatever America is, that’s what Maverick needs to be in order for us to make this movie.” People brought the Cold War to the first “Top Gun.” The filmmakers didn’t have to establish that, it was there.
And so what is this generation’s version of that? What is the Cold War presence in the zeitgeist? Now, we had talked about information technology going all the way back to “Rogue Nation.” I had talked about it in 1999 with Oliver Stone when he was at one point flirting with directing “Mission: Impossible.” This is years before I met Tom.
The problem was that information technology was always something intellectual where you had to explain the mechanics of the threat. It wasn’t emotional. Come 2019, we had finished “Fallout.” We were making “Top Gun: Maverick,” and I said to Tom, “The audience is ready for technology to be the villain, not just the threat.”
People have really responded to seeing the actor Rolf Saxon, who in the first “Mission” played the C.I.A. analyst William Donloe, the unwitting victim of Ethan Hunt’s famous Langley wire heist, and returns in “Final Reckoning” living in a remote Arctic outpost. How did that come about?
I had been asked many times about bringing back his character, and I don’t really get into fan service at all. I think it’s actually detrimental and it leaves out a part of the audience if it’s not handled correctly.
But one night, someone approached me on social media and said, “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?” And I realized suddenly why he lingered in people’s minds. They want a movie to adhere to its own internal sense of justice — which a movie like “Seven” does, or “Chinatown,” even if it’s very dark.
So I texted my writing partner, Erik Jendresen, and said, “Hey, you know who should be on that island when they get there?” And he responded, “I already put Donloe in the script.” We had the same idea at the exact same time, and he knew exactly where I was going.
And then I called Rolf Saxon — or rather I tried to. It took me a week to get in touch with him because when he heard that we were looking for him, he thought it was a prank and he didn’t reply. It wasn’t until he joined the Zoom and saw me onscreen that he realized it was real.
The opening of “Final Reckoning” features a sort of greatest-hits montage from the series. What was the calculus in bringing those past clips in and balancing it with the current story?
You want it to feel fluid. There’s always the struggle, the balance of how much exposition is too much and how much is not enough. And I think we found a nice balance.
But look, I would love to make the movie with no dialogue at all. If you go back and watch “Rogue Nation,” “Fallout” and “Dead Reckoning,” you can watch them with just the score. And you can watch it as a silent movie when you watch the mission brief in “Fallout”: “Good evening, Mr. Hunt.” It’s so much more compelling without dialogue.
There have been criticisms about the amount of exposition in “Final Reckoning.” Does that faze you?
Everything we do, we’re doing for the audience — all the information that we’re shooting, all the exposition, all the flashbacks, everything is there to absolve them of the burden of having to concentrate on the movie. We don’t want it to be work. We want it to be an experience. Then there are people who don’t care how much time and effort and work you put into it. They’re just going, “I don’t need that.”
That’s the push and pull of these movies. We always want them to start faster. We always want them to be shorter. We always want less dialogue, because they’re global movies and billions of people all over the world are reading this movie rather than just listening to it.
You have said that you’re working on something with Tom and your “Final Reckoning” co-writer that is “gnarlier” than “Mission.” What can you say about that?
It’s gnarly! Tom has fewer than 500 words in the entire movie. His co-star has fewer words than that. I think between the two of them, they have about 750 words. It stems from my having worked on these movies so much and learned so much about the power of composition and behavior over dialogue, and that dialogue is a symptom. It’s a consequence of plot.
“Mission” [movies] are so plotty because you’re trying to stitch together many ambitious sequences in one movie. You have to create the reasons that make them emotional. That’s where all the plot comes from, which is where all the exposition comes from. And the “gnarly” movie has without a doubt, probably the simplest plot. It’s the most straightforward human story I’ve worked on, and it’s the kind of movie I’ve always wanted to make.
If you don’t surrender to “Mission,” it will crush you. You just put your ego in check and push yourself technically as far as you can go. The impression is that it’s Tom’s movie, and Tom is totally in control. The reality is the movie is in control. The audience is in control.
There’s no getting around the dialogue that people were wincing at. You need to communicate it simply, to a global audience. Don’t be a snob. Just say it upfront, get it done with and done right. The “gnarly” movie is not burdened by that plot or those sequences. It’s still a deeply human story and it’s still very, very emotional, but they’re in a much more intimate and brutal world than a “Mission Impossible” world.
The “John Wick” movies are moving away from Keanu Reeves as the main character after four films, but is continuing the franchise with Ana de Armas in “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.” Do you see that kind of continuation for this series?
Well, I mean, what is “Mission”? It’s a very specific thing with a very specific kind of filmmaking, involving an actor who performs all that action himself. If you were to spin characters off, it’d be another kind of story altogether. I’d be curious to see how that worked.
One of the things I love about them is that they are a team. They’re all great characters, but if you spin them off, you would lose two things entirely: One, you’d lose what Ethan Hunt brings to the franchise in terms of its scale and its action, and you’d also lose the team. It would cease to be the “Mission” we know. That’s not to say somebody couldn’t invent a new “Mission Impossible.” Having worked on a few of them, I can say, “Good luck.”
The post The Director of ‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Unpacks Key Moments appeared first on New York Times.
