Before Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was released in theaters and IMAX, Collider’s Steve Weintraub conducted an extended interview with co-writer and director Christopher McQuarrie about his epic two-parter. The seventh Mission promises high stakes and even more death-defying stunts with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, and McQuarrie discusses why this penultimate operation surpassed even Mission: Impossible – Fallout in intensity.

In the build-up to release, fans learn so much about the daredevil tactics employed by Cruise and the cast and crew of the Mission: Impossible films, like the hundreds of hours of training the cinema star puts in and the dedication to pushing the limits in ways that best serve the story. During their interview, McQuarrie talks about the processes of getting to that point, the collaboration between him and Cruise to discover what new timely threat Hunt will take down next, and tons more.

From the practical stunts and elaborate set pieces, we mine the details for what’s to come in Part Two, why we’ll be digging into Ethan Hunt’s past before he joined the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) in Part One, and how real-life technologies shaped the story. Dead Reckoning’s talented cast, featuring Rebecca Ferguson, Pom Klementieff, Hayley Atwell, Henry Czerny, Esai Morales, and Simon Pegg, also played a part in the narrative of Part One, and McQuarrie tells us all about that and more, which you can check out in the transcript below.

COLLIDER: If someone has never seen anything you’ve done before, what is the first thing you’d like them to watch and why?

CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE: I would say this movie. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Two contain every movie I ever wanted to make and wasn’t able to. They contain parts of everything I’ve ever wanted to do. It’s really the first time I’ve really felt comfortable as a filmmaker. I felt really in my element as a filmmaker.

Which Mission that you were involved with changed the most in the editing room, and why?

MCQUARRIE: Dead Reckoning Part One, absolutely. It changed because there were a lot of extremely complex ideas that we were trying to communicate emotionally rather than intellectually, and it was how to get those things across in a way that you felt them rather than we were feeding them to you. It was just a constant process of refinement in terms of the big ideas of the movie, but also the performances. There’s kind of an embarrassment of riches with this cast. There was a point in postproduction, towards the end, toward the final few edits of the movie, where every cut was—I liken it to the scene in Master and Commander where Paul Bettany is having to perform surgery on himself; it was that painful taking things out because virtually everything in it was just some great performance, some great moment for an actor.

Image via Paramount Pictures

When it’s eventually on Blu-ray, will you include deleted scenes and stuff? Would you consider, when Part One and Part Two are done releasing, an even longer cut, or are the theatrical versions always going to be the ones?

MCQUARRIE: With the exception of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, I’ve never seen a director’s cut that was an improvement. You may have seen one, I’ve just never seen one.

Have you seen Kingdom of Heaven, the director’s cut?

MCQUARRIE: No.

That’s a masterpiece.

MCQUARRIE: I’ll watch that. When I see genre movies, especially ones I’m very familiar with, when I suddenly see a director’s cut, it’s like adding a verse to a song, and you’re like, “Wait, what is this?” So, I haven’t seen it. If I thought that there was something that would make the movie better—there are 30 to 35 seconds of the movie that I miss, but rhythmically, where they were in the story, you simply couldn’t have them. They were creating a sense of air and length and a delay. They were an indulgence. I only miss them because I know they were there.

What Eddie Hamilton and I will do is we’ll create a deleted footage montage, which we did on [Mission: Impossible -] Fallout, where we take these shots that I think represent the extraordinary work of a lot of people that would otherwise just disappear into the ether. I think that’s kind of more fascinating, and we’ll do a commentary on it and explain, “Here’s why we took it out. Here’s why we didn’t use it,” to show that you can’t be precious in editing. In the end, the story is king, and your engagement matters more than my—big air quotes here—artistic vision for whatever that is.

Totally. I almost wore a Star Blazers shirt today so I could ask you whatever happened with that?

MCQUARRIE: The project came to me through someone who controlled the rights, this guy named Josh Kline. He’s a very nice guy and a very tenacious producer who managed to secure these extremely unsecurable rights. We went to Skydance, we set the project up there, and we tried to get it done as a feature, we tried to get it done as a limited series, we went to streaming, and streaming was booming, and nobody wanted it. Nobody touched it. Nobody would pick it up.

The problem [with] Star Blazers is there wasn’t an element there, you didn’t have a big name that got them excited, mine didn’t seem to, and the IP didn’t really get them excited. What I’ve learned from pitching—and why I’ll just never do it again, ever—is, essentially, what you’re doing is going around town and showing people what they’re not buying. They just want to make sure that what they’re not buying is not something somebody else wants. And until enough people want it, nobody wants it. That was kind of what happened with that. There wasn’t any traction, there wasn’t any excitement, and you couldn’t convince people, “There are four great space operas, and this is the one that’s never really been done.”

We did all sorts of stuff in terms of expanding the universe, and you accepted a lot of things as a kid—that the physics of it and the geography of it are all kind of weird. We went so vast with it. It was so amazing, and it could have gone on forever. It’s a world I really love, but you can’t convince people something is great, other people have to convince them it’s great by wanting it first. If you can’t get that ignition started, it’s DOA.

It’s such an interesting IP, the idea of going to the other side of the galaxy to get the technology to save our planet.

MCQUARRIE: It’s a hugely environmental message. And we’re talking about something that I’ve been working on going back 10 years or more. So many of the issues and so many of the trends and so many of the things that you see happening in film right now were all in there. I mean, the fact that you’re looking at this movie, Dead Reckoning, and the stuff that’s topical in Dead Reckoning, we were making that kind of projection.

Image by Jefferson Chacon

That’s the thing I wanted to talk about; when you guys were writing the movie, you could not have known how much AI was going to be what everyone is talking about when this movie came out, or maybe you did know! Maybe you’re Nostradamus. So talk a little bit about that.

MCQUARRIE: Very early conversations, probably the earliest conversations about this were in 2018/2019, and we were looking for the villain, the next threat in Mission. We’ve done nuclear threats, we’ve done chemical threats, biological threats, you did the Rabbit’s Foot, and God knows what threat that was. In trying to keep it fresh, we were looking outward, and the big conversation I had with Tom [Cruise] very early on was about technology, information technology, and what, now, everyone is talking about is AI.

When I presented it to Tom, I said, “Two or three years ago, this idea would have been too intellectual for most people.” We would have been explaining too much of what it was and what I count on from the audience. The thing I liken it to is the Cold War. When I was growing up, the Cold War was very real, it was a very present thing. We were under the threat, we believed, of nuclear annihilation, that at any point, there could be a war between two or three nuclear superpowers. So when you went to see a Cold War movie, you didn’t need somebody to set up the threat of the Cold War, you just felt it. It was something you brought to the movie. So my conversation with Tom was, “What are people bringing to the movie now? They’re not bringing the Cold War, they’re not bringing the war on terror, they’re bringing something new, and what is it? What’s this anxiety?”

I felt, in the zeitgeist, this anxiety about technology and what and how technology was beginning to influence our lives, and how do we take that anxiety that the audience is bringing to the movie and give them a release? That’s really what the movie boils down to. When you go to see Top Gun in 1986, the Cold War was a very real thing. That anxiety was something you were bringing to it, and you enjoyed that movie because that movie was telling you that everything was ultimately gonna be okay. You were showing them a way out.

So yeah, we were talking about AI, the algorithm, and information technology going all the way back to 2018/2019. (Co-writer) Erik Jendresen and I have been working on this and Part Two for a long time, and there are things very prescient in Part Two that, if you think this is trippy, it’ll freak you out in Part Two.

The last time we spoke, you talked about how for some of these movies you would have 30 pages done, and on set, you would be doing a lot of writing and the stress. How is it different when you’re making a two-part movie and you’re going somewhere? How was it different in terms of making this and Part Two versus the other movies?

MCQUARRIE: With Fallout, the whole idea of starting with a 30-page outline was to avoid the confusion created by writing a screenplay just to have a screenplay and then having to change it all. People get locked in, and it’s very difficult, as the script is evolving, for them to pivot. It was even more challenging on this one because when it started, and this is, again, back in 2019, there was a very different release calendar for these two movies. When they gave me the release calendar and I calculated how long it would take to make the movie, I said, “If you want to hit these dates, I have to start scouting next week. I won’t have time to write an outline. I won’t have time to write a screenplay to hit these dates.” So I immediately got on a plane and started scouting while trying to figure out what the movie was. It was a scramble. It was even more intense on this one than it was on Fallout. Then you had the pandemic, and the pandemic was something that none of us could have calculated, and the disruption of that.

While on the one hand, we had lots more time over the course of this long process, we never really had the writing time because of so many other things. We were in the process of constantly recovering and scrambling, so I would say this was, despite the fact that it took much longer, the writing on this was even more intense and trickier to figure out. There were a lot more characters, it was a bigger, more complicated, more nuanced threat in the movie, and we were constantly in a state of trying to figure out how to make it as digestible as the movie now is. What’s really critical about these movies is that when you sit down to watch them, you’re not doing any work in watching them. They’re happening to you, you’re along for the ride, and you’re having the experience of that protagonist. All the thinking you do about the movie I want you doing after. It’s not to say I don’t want you thinking, I just don’t want you having to think.

Image via Paramount Pictures

You are introducing such a badass threat of AI and omnipresence; it can see everything, it can know everything, and in this modern world, if you look at London, there are cameras everywhere. How hard is it to figure out how to defeat something like that? Did you figure out the end and then work backward a little bit?

MCQUARRIE: We know how impossible it is, and that’s a problem for Part Two.

Sure. Is Part Two the end of the Mission franchise?

MCQUARRIE: I don’t know what the ending of Part Two is, so I couldn’t tell you.

Okay.

MCQUARRIE: [Laughs] I’m not being evasive. I could tell you that I know what the end of Part Two is, but I can’t guarantee that that will be the ending when we get there.

Sure.

MCQUARRIE: Tom and I never obsess about executing the plan. We always have a direction, we always have a place we’re going. In our trying to describe the process, in retrospect, it sounds as though what we do is just flying by the seat of our pants and making it up as we go along. That’s not an accurate description. You are definitely flying in a direction, you’re definitely prepared. You couldn’t be that cavalier without somebody getting seriously physically hurt. These things are planned within an inch of their life. Along the way, we see a shiny object and go for it.

I totally get it.

MCQUARRIE: When we were making Part One, when we got back from all of our foreign locations and were back on stage, I brought everyone to the set to figure out what was going to happen in the train now that I knew more about the characters and had a different understanding of the story than when we started making the movie. I brought everyone together into that red car on the train and said, “I do not know how this movie ends, but I know it ends in this car. That’s all I know.” And sure enough, it did, and sure enough, it kept ending in that car.

As we were reshooting the movie, as we were doing pickups, that car sat on a stage, and we kept returning to it. We kept tweaking it because instinctively and on a gut level I knew, based on how the action scene was constructed, the entire movie was gonna end there. Could I tell you what was going to happen, who would be in that car, and how it would all play out when I first stepped foot in that car? Absolutely not. Did I think it would be what it ultimately was? No. The one thing I did know was the stuff involving Vanessa Kirby and Henry [Czerny]. I didn’t know who else would be in that car and how all those things would come together. The challenge of the train sequence was untying that knot.

Image via Paramount Pictures

How much more do you have to do in Part Two in terms of the filming and stunts?

MCQUARRIE: We’ve shot all but one of our international locations. We’ve shot our big action except for the biggest set piece, the central set piece of the film, which is massive and unlike anything we’ve done, and, I think, unlike anything you’ve seen. All the interstitial stuff is shot. There are characters in the movie you don’t even know about yet. And I have one—how would I call it? It’s a sidebar action sequence involving the team, which we haven’t shot yet, and that’s first up as soon as we get back. It’s involving elements that I’ve never worked with before. It’s a big challenge, and it’s a tight schedule.

When is the plan to be wrapped in all principal photography?

MCQUARRIE: The plan to be wrapped for all principal photography is early next year.

So you still have a lot of…

MCQUARRIE: Yeah, like I said, there’s a big logistically complicated sequence. We did all the stuff that we did in Africa, you may have seen stuff online about an aerial sequence we did in Africa.

I think Tom was welcoming people to the movies.

MCQUARRIE: [Laughs] Yes, exactly. That was hugely complex and challenging and very, very, very dangerous. I would say, now that I’m having flashbacks about it, that probably superseded Fallout when I think about it in terms of– That’s the thing we’ll have to talk about when you see it so I can walk you through just horrifying it was to shoot.

One of the things about this film is there is a submarine, and it makes me think that in Part Two, Tom’s going to have to do some sort of Avatar-like dive, holding his breath. How accurate am I?

MCQUARRIE: There are two answers to that. One is come and see, and you’re a smart kid. I’m not gonna invalidate you.

Image via Paramount

[Laughs] The thing about the ocean is that there’s been a million action set pieces everywhere on this planet, but the ocean is one of the few places where there’s not a lot of stuff. It’s one of those places where you can really make a mark.

MCQUARRIE: Go there at your peril. You’re always warned, “Don’t shoot little kids, dogs, and boats. Don’t go in the water. Certainly, don’t go underwater.” Look, Tom and I are constantly reevaluating our own work and asking ourselves how we could have done it better. We’ve done underwater sequences previously. We’ve worked underwater in Edge of Tomorrow, and we worked underwater in [Mission: Impossible – ] Rogue Nation, and we left very dissatisfied with those sequences. And we analyze why we were dissatisfied. What were all the factors working against us? The biggest being, not having real knowledge in that area.

Everything you’re looking at in Dead Reckoning is the application of knowledge from previous sequences. In Part Two, the aerial sequence is taking all of the knowledge that we acquired on Fallout, Top Gun, all those things, and applied to that. I can only tell you that Tom and I are deeply dissatisfied with the work we’ve done underwater and someday fully intend to make good on that.

Currently, how long can Tom Cruise hold his breath?

MCQUARRIE: Tom Cruise, the record was a little bit over 6.5 minutes. I would never ask him to do it again. It’s a physically punishing thing to do. I would not recommend it to anybody who doesn’t want to make a lifestyle out of it.

I can’t hold my breath for 15 seconds, let alone a minute.

MCQUARRIE: It’s fine, that’s all you need. [Laughs] Let’s hope that’s all you need!

Image via Paramount Pictures

[Laughs] So, Angela Bassett was originally going to be in the movie, but between scheduling and COVID couldn’t work it out. Was she going to be in that scene with all the people near the beginning?

MCQUARRIE: Yes, Angela Bassett was going to reprise her role as the head of the CIA, and Henry Czerny was going to be there in some other capacity. Then, yes, because of her schedule and because of COVID, and a million other things, we couldn’t have her in there, and that consolidated that scene.

So she was going to be on the train originally?

MCQUARRIE: We didn’t know who in that scene would carry through the movie. So yeah, she could have been, absolutely, but the idea of what was gonna happen on that train, whether it would involve Henry Czerny, we didn’t know. Here’s how we approach it, when you cast these extraordinary actors in the movie, once they’ve agreed to be in it, you owe them. We take that as a huge responsibility. It’s not like, “Oh, I got Shea Whigham, and now I could just wave him in front of you and send him away.” We suddenly feel this enormous sense of responsibility to deliver on that. And every time we cast another extraordinary actor, we’re making our jobs that much harder [laughs] because we suddenly realize, “I’ve gotta serve that person.”

So when we cast Henry, we had talked about casting him many, many times, we just never had anything worthy, really, for him to do. It always felt a little bit like fan service and that we were using Henry and not serving him. So, Angela was unavailable to us in the very early stages of the movie, so it would have been a very different movie. Nicholas Hoult was originally cast as the antagonist in the movie. It wouldn’t be the same film. The chemical reaction of Nic Hoult and Tom would never have led us to the place of Esai [Morales’] character being part of his past. We would never have made those discoveries. It was very organic, the whole process.

Which film or films influenced Dead Reckoning?

MCQUARRIE: So many and none. There are films I am inspired by, competing with, in a sportsman-like way, kind of friendly. There are films that I deeply, deeply admire and kind of get stuck in my head. I love movies about the Arctic, I love movies about submarines. Submarines are just cool. The Arctic is just cool. I love The Thing, but I can’t really say that The Thing is an influence on Dead Reckoning. I love Das Boot and Crimson Tide, submarines are an amazing high-pressure environment. I can’t really say that they’re influences on the movie. They’re gauntlets. It’s a filmmaker showing me some cool environment and me going, “I want to do that! I want my opportunity to play in that space.”

What happened in Rogue, there were very deliberate inside references to The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. That stuff, in retrospect, it’s kind of cute, and I don’t need to be cute, and I don’t need to be referencing. What I now notice is no matter what you do, someone thinks it’s a reference to some other thing. Whether they think we’re making references to other spy franchises or other movies, everybody thinks the Fiat is a reference to Lupin the Third, which I had never seen, and I have heard more about since putting a yellow Fiat in the movie. The Fiat is yellow because it’s a really distinct, fun color [laughs] and that’s about it. I didn’t really know about Lupin the Third.

So yeah, I could list for you a million movies that inspire me as a filmmaker and made me want to work in those environments—desert environments, Arctic environments. I would say more than anything, what I keep seeing in the movie without any intention, I see the ghosts of other films and filmmakers I really admire, largely to do with the fact that we worked with a lot of extreme conditions—high winds, water, sandstorms, and ice. We worked with a lot of extreme environments and I got hooked on it. I actually like the messiness and the complications of that and what it does to the energy in the sequence. Just the wind in the train sequence alone…all that stuff gives it a certain drama that I got hooked on. I see a lot of John Ford in there. I see a lot of Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters, where I’m suddenly looking at something and where I wasn’t intending for that to happen. I’m seeing the ghosts of that stuff in there.

I was very determined from the very beginning of this process not to be deliberate, to not to let myself be influenced by anything other than the emotion I was out to express in the frame, and I ended up with a very unusual—however nerdy this is for you—I ended up with a very unusual dynamic with my camera crew on this movie. Fraser Taggart is the cinematographer, Martin Smith is the gaffer, and [Jonathan “Chunky” Richmond] is the first camera operator, and we had a very unusual dynamic as compared to other dynamics that I’ve had before, where we paired off, with Martin and Fraser as one pair and myself and Chunky as another. And every morning, we came in, and Chunky and I would have discussions about lenses, we’d have discussions about the camera position that we were gonna do, and at the onset of the movie, I told Fraser, “Here’s what I want to eliminate from the movie. This is not what I want to do in the movie, it’s what I don’t want to do in the movie. These are the things I want to take out because of the consequences later on and how they become a problem in editorial. And I want the movie to feel alive, I want it to feel fluid. I want the camera to feel lighter and not so leaden and stuck in coverage.”

And that ultimately created lots and lots of complications. Once you committed to it, you couldn’t back out of it. The camera is almost never on rails, it’s almost never mounted on a tripod. It’s almost entirely steadicam, stabileye, and crane. The camera is floating, and it has this very light feel to it. When you suddenly put a camera on rails to shoot and insert, you feel it, it doesn’t feel like you’re in your movie anymore. So we were never saying, “Oh, this is not my style,” because I’m not in pursuit of a style. Chunky and I would be looking at it, saying, “It just doesn’t feel like our movie. It doesn’t feel like Dead Reckoning, what it’s become.” And we let the film find its own style and create its own language, and over time, we were obligated to obey that.

So what you’re really feeling is a style emerging from the movie and from the specific drama within it. All the Dutch angles that you’re seeing in the story, it’s not me walking in, “I want to use a lot of Dutch angles!” It was, “It just looks better if you Dutch it, and if the camera is going to be that low and you want the frame to be balanced, this is what…” Everything you’re looking at is Chunky and I slowly shaping the shots and creating it, and over time, realizing, “Holy shit, there are a lot of Dutch angles in this movie. It’s kind of become the feeling of it.” We found the visual style of the movie as we went.

Image via Paramount

Will Part Two have a completely different visual style, or is it going to be very similar to Part One?

MCQUARRIE: I wouldn’t care either way. It’ll have its own style. I can say that the things that I have shot in Part Two were all– We knew better. We learned more about the language and the equipment we were using. If you watch the alley fight with Pom [Klementieff] and Tom, we were using a camera called the Rialto, the Sony VENICE camera. With the Rialto, you can take the sensor and the lens off of the camera body—it’s attached with an umbilical—so you now have this very compact handheld unit. If you watch the scene again, you’ll see that the third axis of that fight scene, when it’s not Pom and Tom, is Chunky, and the way he’s operating the camera is giving an energy to that fight scene. That was much later in production after we had shot the fight on the train, so we actually went back to the roof of the train and reshot certain little bits of the fight because we suddenly realized, “Hey, you can use this as a force magnifier.” It’s actually a really effective piece of equipment.

So, the drama would tell us where to put the camera and how to move it. And there’s a thread in Part Two, there’s an interstitial story that you keep cutting back to, all of the visual language we learned in the Cary Elwes scene at the beginning of the movie was applied to better effect in Part Two. So yes, it’ll have its own style only because it will have evolved. We’ll just know better. We’ll just apply what we learned.

You’re touching on Tom’s [Impossible Mission Force], how he got involved, and what really happened, and the reason I’m wondering if the next one is the end is because you’re finally talking about his real past, so it’s like the connective tissue to the very beginning. Talk a little bit about how you came up with his origin and mixing in the whole IMF… It’s a brilliant way of how missions happened for IMF and how Tom got involved.

MCQUARRIE: Again, it was very organic. The scene in Venice with Hayley Atwell, where the team is alluding to Haley how they all came to be, that scene arose organically out of the events of Venice and about going into the third act of the movie. I think I’m telling you the truth, but I can’t be sure because it was such a long process and such an organic and evolutionary one. What I do know is we didn’t set out to be that specific with those allusions to his past. We actually set out to establish his past on screen and had many, many conversations about it. It felt inevitable, it felt like the only place to go was deeper into Ethan’s past. And as we were doing the research into it and we were looking at de-aging, and we were looking at all that stuff, I went, and I looked at all of this amazing de-aging work that people were doing and looked at deepfake, looked at, “Is there a cheap way to do it?” And as I was looking at it, all I kept thinking was, “Wow, this de-aging is really good,” or, “Wow, this de-aging is not so good.” And at no point was I ever paying attention to the story or emotionally connected to the characters. I was aware all the time of the technology that was in front of me. It was a distraction.

There were other things about it. I discovered little secret things about it, which I’m gonna keep to myself because I may apply that technology down the road, but I learned kind of a secret ingredient of one of the reasons even the most perfect de-aging CG is uncanny. So we didn’t do it, and we kind of threw that out. But it wanted to be in the movie. It just kept going there. So even as we were looking at it and going, “Let’s not bother with that. It’s a lot of time and effort for what gain?” And the fact that Esai and Tom kind of came up at the same time, it kept wanting to get out. Mission really does have a mind of its own. It is this living, breathing thing that is constantly telling you where it wants to go, and you ignore it at your peril. It will end up there, you can ignore it all you want.

Tom and I resisted a lot of different things that we said, “I don’t want to see that in this movie. I don’t like when movies do that,” and the movie just kept saying, “Yeah, but this is kind of organic to the story,” and that’s how we ended up where we did. We think we know where it’s going, but we also know, most importantly, what we want you to feel at the end of the movie. So even if I wanted the movie to end a specific way, if it didn’t leave you with the right feeling leaving the movie, we’ll never do it. We’ll just absolutely never do it. Because to us, the audience’s experience is the thing, and if you don’t feel satisfaction, if you don’t feel inspired, if you don’t walk out of that movie feeling great and excited about what’s next, it’s not worth doing. It’s just not worth it to us.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is now in theaters. Check out Collider’s red carpet interview with Tom Cruise below.