After working with Tom Cruise on two previous Mission: Impossible movies, you would think that director Christopher McQuarrie would know what to expect by now from the action-packed franchise and its ever-youthful star. However while discussing the latest movie in the series with Empire magazine, McQuarrie revealed that the challenges of pulling off some of the epic stunts almost make him wish he had not started the whole thing at all.
Work on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been ongoing for two years due to the many delays that Hollywood has been caught up in thanks to the Covid pandemic. Much of that work has involved Tom Cruise throwing himself out of planes, sky diving and having a fist-fight on top of a train. The problem is, Cruise doesn’t do fake-out CGI when it comes to his stunts, meaning that McQuarrie had to find a way of actually making them all happen in real life. Talking specifically about the extraordinary challenges of the train stunt in particular, McQuarry said:
“We’re making a movie that involves sequences that they just don’t shoot practically anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time. The sequence that we’re shooting right now is no exception. And like most things on Mission: Impossible, if we had known what the challenges were when we started out, we would never have done it.”
Christopher McQuarrie Says it Would Have Been a Mission: Impossible to Do Dead Reckoning as One Movie.
Two-part movie releases are nothing new, with many films being split to prevent a story being truncated to the point it doesn’t deliver the kind of engagement required to pull in a big audience. When it comes to the latest Mission: Impossible adventure, without splitting the film in two, McQuarrie says there simply wouldn’t be any room for the story. He continued:
“When you subtract the action from these action movies, there’s very little time for story and character. I said to Tom, ‘Look, I want to do what we did with Fallout, but I want to take it beyond that. We know that’s going to mean an even bigger movie, so let’s just make a bigger movie and break it into two parts.’ We’re telling a much bigger, overarching story about Ethan and the team that goes a lot deeper than previous installments without compromising on the action.”
There has been much speculation about whether Dead Reckoning will be the final outing for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, but that is something McQuarrie is not willing to confirm one way or the other. What he does make clear is that the Mission: Impossible movies are all about inspiring awe in theaters and if this two-part action-thriller is Cruise’s swan song, then he is certainly going out with not just one, but many bangs. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will arrive in cinemas on July 12. Filming on Dead Reckoning Part Two is currently ongoing, with the concluding part set to debut on June 28, 2024.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
