McQuarrie, Christopher

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    The Director of ‘Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning’ Unpacks Key Franchise Moments

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    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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How They Pulled Off That Wild ‘Mission: Impossible’ Plane Stunt

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      Of the many storied stunts that Tom Cruise has performed over eight “Mission Impossible” movies — scaling the world’s tallest building in Dubai, riding a motorcycle off a Norwegian cliff, retrieving a stolen ledger from an underwater centrifuge — it seems unlikely that one of the most shock-and-awe set pieces in the series’ nearly 30-year history would involve two old-timey biplanes that look like they should have Snoopy at the controls.And yet many viewers have emerged from the newest installment of the franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” astonished by that scene: a 12-and-a-half-minute sequence in which Cruise’s seemingly indefatigable special agent, Ethan Hunt, hitches a ride on the undercarriage of a small brightly colored aircraft, overtakes the pilot, then leaps onto another plane midair to fistfight the film’s grinning villain (Esai Morales) — all while being bashed and batted by the elements like a human windsock.If it looks as if Cruise is genuinely getting blown sideways in the sky, it’s because he was. The actor’s well-known penchant for performing his own stunts meant that the scene was shot largely as it appears onscreen, minus the digital removal in postproduction of certain elements like safety harnesses and a secondary pilot.Most “Mission” stunts, said Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed the last four films in the series, begin with either finding or building the right vehicle for the job. In this case it was a Boeing Stearman, primarily used to train fighter pilots during World War II. Eventually, the production bought multiples: two red, two yellow — “because if you have just one plane and that plane breaks,” he explained, “the whole movie shuts down.”“The colder it gets, the faster Tom gets hypothermia on the wing,” the director Christopher McQuarrie said about the dangers of shooting the scene.Paramount PicturesAccording to the stunt coordinator and second unit director, Wade Eastwood, Cruise, 62, trained for months on the ground before the full concept took flight. “Tom’s already a very established and very proficient pilot,” Eastwood said, “but being on the wing of a plane is not something that people do. So we tied it down and put out big fans and wind machines, and we had the prop running just to see what the effects would be on the body, and it was absolutely exhausting. I mean, you’re fighting the biggest resistance band you’ve ever fought in your life.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A ‘Mission: Impossible’ Fan Favorite Returns 3 Decades Later

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      When Rolf Saxon first auditioned to play William Donloe in Brian De Palma’s 1996 “Mission: Impossible,” he didn’t think he had gotten the role of the bumbling C.I.A. analyst who is outsmarted by Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt during a break-in at Langley headquarters.He waited an hour and a half for De Palma, who then saw him for just five minutes. Saxon figured that was it. But not only did he get the role, making him a crucial player in what would become an iconic scene, he’s now back playing that same character nearly 30 years later in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.” It’s a return that distinctly raises the profile of the self-described “jobbing actor,” who spent the past 10 years mostly doing theater in the Bay Area.“When this came along, it was like, ‘Wow, are you kidding?’” he said in a video interview. “This is fantastic. This is a nice little cherry on top.”In the first film, Donloe only has a few minutes of screen time. He’s a working stooge who is poisoned by Ethan’s team in its quest to steal a list of covert agents off his computer housed in a secure vault. While Donloe goes back and forth to the bathroom to throw up, Ethan drops down from a ceiling vent to pull off his caper. When Donloe returns to the vault, he finds a knife on his desk and realizes he messed up big time. His fate is sealed by Kittridge, the Impossible Mission Force official, who says, “I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day.” Donloe’s main role is collateral damage.But according to the “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tom Cruise Teaches Cannes About Star Power

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      Whether in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” or on the red carpet, the 62-year-old actor ensured that all eyes were on him.At Wednesday night’s Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, shared a story with the audience about his imaginative childhood, then clasped a hand on the shoulder of his star, Tom Cruise.“I got to grow up and have my very own action figure,” McQuarrie said.With his deep tan, blinding smile and He-Man haircut, Cruise surely looked the part of a kid’s favorite toy. Certainly, Cannes has proved ever eager to play with him: Even in recent years, when Cruise has moved away from auteur-driven dramas to focus almost exclusively on action films, the festival continues to find new reasons to welcome him back.Three years ago, Cannes honored Cruise with a fighter-jet flyover for the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” where he sat with an obsequious moderator for a 90-minute talk about his devotion to big-screen filmmaking. This time, Cruise’s presence was more subdued. Instead of a solo spotlight, he made a surprise appearance at the end of McQuarrie’s panel, and while major studios often hold lavish parties at Cannes, Paramount staged no such celebration for what’s been billed as the final chapter of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise.(Perhaps the movie’s rumored mega-budget of around $400 million played a part in the studio’s penny-pinching.)The “Final Reckoning” premiere had to stand on its own, then, and Cruise ensured that it would. At two hours and forty-five minutes, the film already dwarfed every Cannes title in competition for the Palme d’Or (though the movie, which opens May 23 in the United States, isn’t in the running for the prize). Cruise further goosed the experience beforehand by signing autographs outside the Palais, where the festival is held, for fans who offered him hand-drawn portraits and beckoned him in for selfies. Even on the red carpet, even as the film’s sprawling cast gathered for a group photo, most photographers kept their cameras focused solely on Cruise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Review: Tom Cruise Defies All

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      For the eighth installment of this stunt-spectacular franchise, the star returns to fight off A.I. planetary domination, the bends, gravity and maybe mortality itself.For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the “Mission: Impossible” series. It’s been fun, on and off, but it’s no wonder he looks so beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, “The Final Reckoning.” Cruise — who turns 63 this year — long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he were challenging physical death itself.Cruise is at it again in “The Final Reckoning” — the enjoyably unhinged follow-up to “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) — plunging into deep waters, hanging off an airborne plane and insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality. It’s unclear why the title changed between the two parts. It might have been a marketing decision; dead is a bummer, of course, and the word implied that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, an American operative extraordinaire, was heading toward the sort of bleak sign-off that capped Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Whatever the case, the change suits Cruise’s Ethan, whose abilities have grown so progressively super since the series began in 1996 they seem quasi-mystical.“Dead Reckoning” ended with Ethan and his team trying to stop an artificial intelligence called the Entity that’s set on destroying Earth. (Why? Why not?) The A.I.’s plan is the ultimate power grab, although it also seems like overkill, given that humanity is already hurtling toward self-destruction. But the Entity’s exceedingly possible mission keeps everyone busy, including Ethan’s right-hand whizzes, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), along with his love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell), and the giddily anarchic one-woman wrecking machine Paris (Pom Klementieff). Mostly, though, the Entity’s annihilating designs mean that Ethan has to step up his game from superhero to global redeemer.So, once more, Ethan et. al. go unto the breach as they try to stop the Entity, which has thrown the world into chaos, inspired a doomsday cult and is trying to seize the world’s nukes — the usual. One of the dividends of the better big-studio productions is that they tend to be crowded with talented performers who can keep a straight face when delivering nonsense and sometimes bring feeling to the proceedings. So, as the clock runs down, characters enter and exit, including Angela Bassett’s tight-jawed American president and an army of appealing supporting players: Tramell Tillman, Janet McTeer, Shea Whigham, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman and Hannah Waddingham.This is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who keeps the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running, even when cutting among multiple lines of action. (He shares screenwriting credit with Erik Jendresen.) Shrewdly, he often uses a similar approach when the pace slows and characters convene to explain what’s going on and why (mainly to us), cutting from one person to another, as each delivers a helpful sentence or two. This conversational turn-taking livens up all the information-heavy explanations and helps feed the forward momentum. None of it makes any sense, of course, no matter how sincerely the actors say their lines, yet everything flows.Logic isn’t the reason movies like this exist or why we go to them, and one of the sustaining pleasures of the “Mission: Impossible” series has been its commitment to its own outrageousness. Cruise’s stunts have always been among the most outlandish and most memorable attractions in the series, which was spun off from the 1960s television show of the same title. He stepped into the role by escaping a wall of water and descending spiderlike into a luminously white, high-security vault, hanging by an unnervingly thin rope. The entire thing popped with cool stunts, striking locations, exotic doings and the sheer spectacle of Cruise’s intense physical performance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Tom Cruise Roll a Fiat 500 in ‘Mission: Impossible’

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      The director Christopher McQuarrie discusses a chase scene involving the star and Hayley Atwell in ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Ethan Hunt has found himself in many elaborate car chases throughout the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. But while the stunts have gotten bigger, this time, the car has gotten smaller.In “Dead Reckoning Part One,” a Fiat 500 becomes the star of a sequence set in Rome involving Ethan (Tom Cruise) and Grace (Hayley Atwell). The two find themselves handcuffed to each other as Ethan gets behind the wheel of their tiny getaway vehicle.Narrating the scene, the director Christopher McQuarrie said the inspiration for it occurred to him when he was scouting locations in Paris for a chase sequence in “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” and came across a Fiat 500 parked along the Seine.“I thought it would be great, the idea of watching Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise driving in a car like that,” he said.This scene includes more humorous moments than the series’ previous car chases. And it involves Cruise having to navigate the Fiat around cobblestone streets, which the actor did himself.A climactic moment in the scene involves the Spanish Steps, when the Fiat bumbles its way right down the monument.The production was not allowed to let cars actually touch the steps, so they built a replica of the landmark on a backlot and tumbled the vehicle down there.Read the “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” review.Read an interview with the franchise co-star Henry Czerny.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More