Director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise are a power duo in cinema, no doubt. Between collaborating together on last year’s blockbuster sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, and buzz about working on the first film to shoot in space, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is just one of their many cinematic ambitions. While it may not be in space, McQuarrie’s new Mission movie does provide Cruise with ample opportunity to execute some more gnarly stunts, and Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with the filmmaker to find out what exactly that planning process looks like.

Dead Reckoning Part One takes IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) to beautiful locations on a deadly new mission to obtain a powerful weapon before it can fall into the wrong hands. This time, Hunt will have to confront the possibility that the mission comes before everything else — even those closest to him. The movie also stars Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Shea Whigham, Esai Morales, Simon Pegg, Cary Elwes, and more.

While the previous Mission: Impossible installments featured Cruise performing his own death-defying stunts, we were curious which ones ranked highest on McQuarrie’s list, as far as nerves go. In their one-on-one, which you can watch or read below, the filmmaker explains what the discussion around these stunts looks like during production, the precautions taken, and why none of them are without risk. We also learn which stunt, since helming Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, gave McQuarrie the most grief and why. Despite Part One seeing Cruise riding a motorcycle off the side of a cliff and freefalling through the air, McQuarrie also tells us that there will be sequences in Part Two that will be “beyond anything” we’ve seen to this point.

COLLIDER: I really want to start with a sincere congratulations. I loved the movie. I wish I could watch Part Two, like, tomorrow.

CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE: Me too. [Laughs]

So you and Tom [Cruise], in the Mission: Impossible movies, have done incredible stunts and we all know Tom does these things, they’re incredibly difficult, they’re risking his life. In terms of all the stunts that you’ve worked with Tom on, how would you rank the difficulty of the stunts for the Missions and how nervous you were watching Tom do them?

MCQUARRIE: They all have their own risks, and it’s not always what you perceive the risk to be. For example, with the A400, the concern was less that Tom would fall off the plane than he would be hit by a rock on the runway or a bird when we were in mid-air. So there’s all of these different factors and variables that you’re constantly thinking about that could go wrong outside of all the variables that you’ve eliminated. The more variables, the scarier the stunt. I think that’s kind of, to me, what makes it terrifying is how many different ways Tom could be killed doing the stunt, but they’re all knowns. They’re all things that you’ve thought about and can’t control.

Going off that ramp, he was entering the unknown. We had eliminated everything we possibly could. We just didn’t know what would actually happen when he did it because we could, in no way, shape or form, test or replicate those conditions anywhere else. So when he went off that ramp, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t know if the bike would get away from him, we didn’t know if a crosswind would tangle him up, and we didn’t know if the drone would hit him based on the environment that we were in. So once we called “action,” you had to hold your breath until the parachute opened. That was pretty terrifying.

Image via Paramount Pictures

I do want to bring in all the Missions you’ve worked on. What I’m curious about is how would you rank all the set pieces that you’ve worked on. What are your top three or top five in terms of level of difficulty and how nervous you are before Tom did them?

MCQUARRIE: I would say they probably go in chronological order. Only because when we were doing Rogue Nation and we were doing the A400, it was really my first time directing anything like that. It was obviously Tom’s first time doing anything like that. And everything you are seeing, every movie you’re watching, is Tom and I applying our knowledge from the previous movies to the next one and pushing it a little bit further. So the motorcycle jump in this film, for example, is taking all of the motorcycle stunts from Rogue Nation, taking the BASE jumping from Fallout, and applying them to the same stunt. They’re all just, in order of magnitude, scarier. If you just follow them in order, each one is scarier for me and more of an unknown because we’re just pushing ourselves that much further. And I can tell you there’s stuff coming in [Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two] that is beyond anything we’ve done.

For me personally, the scariest thing we ever did was the helicopter chase in Fallout, for the simple fact that I had to be in a helicopter chasing after Tom [laughs]. So there’s the added factor of my own life [being] at risk. When you’re watching Tom go off the bike ramp, I’m there, I’m definitely watching my life flash before my eyes as well as his, but I also know in the event of anything terrible, I’m still going to be there. So I would have to say probably number one scariest, most stressful was the helicopter chase in Fallout just because I was there.

Tom risks his life, for real, making these movies.

MCQUARRIE: Yes.

Have you guys ever had a conversation or talked about…god forbid?

MCQUARRIE: That’s definitely a specter in every single one of those conversations, but that’s a reality in simple things. In Jack Reacher, a shot where Rosamund Pike was backing out of a parking spot with a camera over her shoulder, and revealing Tom standing in front of her, she went to drive away. That’s a very dangerous stunt. That’s an extremely dangerous stunt. Because Rosamund Pike, who is not an experienced stunt driver, could make one simple mistake, hit the accelerator instead of the gas, and that’s lights out. So we treat everything the exact same way. In the stunt where he broke his ankle in Fallout, jumping from building to building, there are a million variables where something could go wrong. We have an expression we repeat all the time, which is, “Don’t be careful, be competent.” You can’t make these movies without taking risks and without doing extremely dangerous things. But you could be very, very, very smart and very, very considered about the way you do it.

The other thing that’s really critical whenever we’re doing it is I deputize the crew down to camera operators, focus pullers, anyone can yell, “cut.” If you see something wrong, you can stop the movie, it’s not worth doing. And we don’t want a culture where people are thinking, “I felt something was wrong, but I didn’t think it was my place to say.” So there’s a huge bubble that everybody is participating in, that everybody is aware of, just to make those things safer. But yeah, we think about that all the time, but you can’t factor it into your planning. It’s that thing of, I was watching a video recently where someone was saying, “If you’re skiing through the woods and you’re saying, ‘don’t hit the trees, don’t hit the trees,’ all you’re thinking about is the trees.” You really have to be thinking, “Stay on the trail, stay on the trail,” and that’s what we do. It’s just, how do you do it safely? Just safety, safety, safety.

Image via Paramount

You know I like talking about editing and runtimes and all that stuff, so I’ll just bring it in now. The movie’s like 2.5 hours, maybe a few minutes over. Did you have a much longer cut?

MCQUARRIE: Oh, yes. Yes, very, very long, but that’s not unusual. I think probably every movie I’ve done has been– Your first assembly is close to three hours.

I don’t even want you to say the assembly because everyone thinks that’s the real running time. What was your first director’s cut that you were like, “Oh, this is really good, and I’m showing the studio?”

MCQUARRIE: I never had that. With every cut, we knew it could be better, we knew it could be tighter. When we finally screened it for the last test audience and were happy with the result, we were about two minutes longer than we are now, and we walked away from it. The studio was very happy, the scores were great, but we still knew we had issues. We knew we had issues with pace and length, and we went back into the editing room, reconfigured the first act, and ended up taking two minutes out of the movie, which was critical. And it can literally be that close. The difference in two minutes can make the difference between the movie feeling long or feeling just right.

Fallout, we had a cut of the movie that was five minutes shorter but scored lower. It was cut too tight, it couldn’t breathe. We’re just absolutely microscopic and surgical about it in terms of how we get there. But I’d say where the movie started to work for me– Because what you’re seeing is the director’s cut. I mean, that’s really how we look at it. There’s not some extended version of the movie that I would show you, thinking it was an improvement on it. Where we got into a place where I was approaching satisfaction, it’s the difference of a couple of minutes.

When Part Two is eventually done, do you want people to watch Part One and Part Two in one sitting, or will you always want people to take a break after the first one, digest, and come back?

MCQUARRIE: Ideally, I will have made two movies that you can watch on their own or together. We never want you to have to check out of the movie you’re in to remember another movie. We did the same thing with Top Gun: Maverick. We’ve done it with all of the Missions that we’ve done. We want to keep you immersed in the movie. That’s a big red line for us.

Image via Paramount Pictures

How did you decide where to end the movie in Part One, and was it ever going to be something else?

MCQUARRIE: When the movie was so long, and we were too close to it, we couldn’t figure out how to cut it down further. We talked about breaking the movie up, and the problem was there was just no place for the movie to end. The story was so interconnected. That was the only time we really discussed any other kind of ending, and that’s just, frankly, exhaustion and not wanting to confront the reality of, “We still have work to do.” The movie always ended where it did, we just didn’t know what the ending exactly was. It was really critical for us that when you watch this movie as part of a two-parter, you feel satisfied at the end of Part One, that it’s not just suddenly ending, and, “We’ll see you later!” It had to feel like a complete movie. It had to be a movie that if Part Two didn’t exist, or we hadn’t figured out what Part Two was, or you had to wait two years to see the next one, you would have been satisfied with this one, I think. That’s what we did.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One freefalls into theaters on July 12. Can’t believe Tom Cruise would go to such lengths? Check out Collider’s interview with him on the red carpet in Rome below.