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Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible-Fallout .
Paramount Pictures
You do not need much to make a movie Mission: Impossible : Just Tom Cruise, a few obstacles for him to climb or jump, and a rubber mask or two. But Christopher McQuarrie is an increasingly vital element, which with Fallout becomes the first director of the 22-year history of the franchise to come back for a second time. McQuarrie made his first foray into directing after winning an Oscar for his The Usual Suspects in 1996, but the resulting film, The Way of the Gun was a steep (like you'll see further, even McQuarrie does not particularly like it), and it took him 12 years to get back behind the camera.
When he did, with Jack Reacher of 2012 the result was a thin and sparse action film and the cement of a successful partnership with his star , Tom Cruise. McQuarrie continued writing the script for Edge of Tomorrow and writing and directing both Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation and his follow-up. (He also has a script credit on The Mummy but no one has beaten a thousand.) McQuarrie, who also wrote uncredited scripts on Ghost Protocol a helped revitalize a franchise C & # 39; was as if it was running out of gas and took it to new delusional heights, imitating the sense of the spirit with its sequences. action required. In an interview this week, which was edited and condensed for clarity, he spoke to Slate about embracing the chaos of doing a modern blockbuster, why it's a director's job. To attack a scenario rather than protect it The film Mission: Impossible looks a lot like a movie.
You said that one of the strengths of the series Mission: Impossible is that there is a different director for each film, and you wanted to maintain this tradition with Fallout and approach it as a new director, even if it is the second you did. How is the director of Fallout different from the director of Rogue Nation ?
On the surface, I came with a different crew. I came with a different group of collaborators, some of whom had never worked on a film of this magnitude. Under the hood, I came to this story of a more emotional, more character-driven direction than the last movie. I'd noticed that from the previous five movies, including the one I was directing, Ethan was kept at bay. You've never been in Ethan's head. It's a bit of a number. And what we know about Ethan is based on what people around him speculate. And I was determined to put the audience inside Ethan's head right from the start of the film and put them in a place where they knew more about the most intimate secrets of the movie. Ethan and his team.
You wrote the line in Rogue Nation where Ethan is described as "the living manifestation of fate". This is not a description you can give to an actor and say, "OK, play that." 19659010] Exactly.
Over Three M: I Movies – You Did an Uncredited Script on Ghost Protocol Before Writing and Leading the Next Two – You Developed the idea that you want movies to reflect the experience of doing them, which often means reworking important parts of the story on the fly.
Oh, yes. It started with Snape and continued in this movie, for sure …
There are several moments in Fallout where Ethan falls headlong into a situation without really knowing what he's doing, and his attitude is still, "I'm going to understand." [19659015] There is another moment when Benji asks Ethan, " How will you not let that happen?" And Tom thought for a minute and said, "I'm working on it." We find ourselves in creative meetings The time spent with my team watching me and saying, "What will we do when we get to New Zealand?" And I said, "I'm working on it. Give me the set and I'll know what to do on the set when I'm there. First, show me where I'm running and I'll tell you what will happen when we get there.
A film being produced without completed script is usually reported as a sign that a movie is in trouble, but it seems like the more you are experienced in making this type of movies the more you work.
This is the case and it is never by choice. I would much rather have a screenplay and have this plan and not have to spend my weekends watching an empty screen and trying to figure out what the movie is going to be. But what I learned during the work on three of these films is that if the main parts are in place, you can keep the train moving without really knowing what is going to be said in them. places before arriving there. As long as everyone knows, "Okay, it's here that we're going to shoot that day, and that's pretty much what we're going to film." The information, the story, which is transmitted in addition to that is malleable. So we will often shoot broken scenes and these scenes will tell us what scenes around them must include so that the scene you just filmed makes sense. You start with an infinite number of possibilities, and with everything you commit to filming, your possibilities are reduced. The boundaries are created and the infinite possibilities from where the story will become immediately finished. And your choices are made for you at the end of the film.
When someone starts out as a writer and goes on to directing, we can often tell from the movies that they do: They end up being heavy with dialogues and essentially feel like they're doing it. had been filmed as writings. While with Jack Reacher and M: I memorable moments are largely visual. You seem to be someone who cuts the dialogue rather than trying to keep it.
Yes, and I learned that the hard way. I mean, you look at my first film [ The Way of the Gun ] and that's what I did. I shot the scenario. The camera is constantly at eye level. This is not what I would call a visually arresting movie. It depends a lot on the dialogue and the intellect of the film as opposed to the emotion. It's a lot of head and very little heart. It's a bit austere.
I have learned over time that a director's work is not about protecting the screenplay. The director's job is to challenge the script, challenge the script, know when to ignore the script. The job of a writer is just to provide all the information you may need, but it is not a guarantee that you need this information. These are two very different skills, and you have to be able to go from one to the other.
Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie attend the premiere of Mission: Impossible-Fallout July 18 in Tokyo
Christopher Jue / Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
If the director's role is to challenge and challenge the script writer, is it difficult when these two people are you?
Not really, no, because as a writer, I give myself all the material I need to do the story – not only emotional, but to give Is an internal logic that works. The challenge you face is when you put these movies together and you start testing them, the audience does not want all this information. They want to know what's going on, but they do not want the film to stop for you to explain. They get bored very quickly. You must therefore find the balance between information and confusion and boredom. If I do not have enough information, I become confused. And if I have too much, I start to disconnect. I start to escape.
You knock down a bit when the character of Henry Cavill yells to the villain of the film: "Why must everything be so complicated?"
Yeah, and believe me, there are two things out there. The first is this scene, there is a two-minute version, which explains everything in the movie, all the questions you might have, who he was and what happened in the background, and where was the plutonium, etc. etc. And no one wanted it, and everyone had the impression that this part of the film was sagging. Quite frankly, if it was a 90-minute movie, you could have this scene, but it was not the case. It was a two hour film and 27 minutes when we cut it to bone.
The other thing that happens in this scene is when Walker said that this line, part of me, immediately imagined reading a criticism whose first sentence is, "In the second act of Mission Impossible: Fallout Henry Cavill tells Sean Harris, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?" That's exactly what I thought while watching this movie. "[ Editor's note: it was the end of the fourth paragraph.] I realized that I was giving people a stick to beat me in. And I had to be very careful if I had a line like that in the film to make sure it was not that complicated.
What's the best thing you've eliminated from the movie?
Nothing.
OK.
There was nothing that I cut that did not need to leave. There were shots that I liked. There have been times that I like. There were shows that I love. There is nothing in terms of history. All that could go was gone.
What I did for the DVD, is that I put together … I do not like the deleted scenes. For me, the director's cut is the movie you see, but this film has come to the screen. That's what the process ultimately produced. But there were clichés that we really liked. So, Eddie Hamilton and I put up a reel of deleted clips as opposed to deleted scenes. And you will see everything I would have liked to find a way to put in the movie, but they did not have to be there.
So, these are all images, not "I would have liked to find a way to tell this people, this or that."
No, no. Everything is just pictures. And you will see it. You will see very clearly. Like, yeah, it looks really cool, but no. Where it happened in the film that would have simply slowed things down.
There is a tradition in the M: I movies to design great pieces and build a story around them: OK, so Tom Cruise is climbing the biggest building of the world. What is he doing here? What were the things you knew you had to have in Fallout ?
We knew we were going to have a helicopter pursuit. It was Tom's baby. And I knew I was going to have some kind of attack sequence. That was the very first idea we were talking about, while we were still shooting Snape – that what Ethan managed to get at the end of the last movie by capturing the villain gave the Opportunity for this villain to come back. And I thought, "What's better than having Ethan to dissuade?", Which of course resulted in the pursuit of the bike, which spread in the pursuit of the car.
So, I knew what that sequence was. And because I knew what they were, or I knew at least roughly what they were going to be, I put them aside and I focused on the character first, what which is not the case Snape . Snape was very, "I had a motorcycle chase, I had an underwater scene, I had the A400. We know that we need another sequence of action, but we do not know what it's all about or where it's going in the movie, go. "Everything that happened in this movie was just trying to create rationalizations to explain why the characters were jumping in the hoops that they were.
And you wanted to approach Fallout differently?
Yes, I did not want to live in fear of a big scene of explanation that was going to make all the plot of the film together. Of course, it is inevitable. We have this scene. We have a scene like that when Alec Baldwin arrives in London. So I asked myself: "How to make this scene exciting? How can I give life to this scene?" And it is there that we had the very late notion of conflict rather than information. That Hunley comes in and is not there to support the team, is not there to help Ethan. In all previous versions, I liked the idea that Hunley was appearing to warn the team and to help them and be a kind of paternal figure out there. And I realized that it hindered the functioning of the scene. Hunley must be there almost as another kind of antagonist, another kind of pressure. So the scene immediately became a scene of conflict. And this conflict, you feel it begin to fracture the team. He does not just stretch Ethan, he's going on Benji, he's going on Luther. And of course, we know more than the characters on the stage. We know what really creates the pressure. And so, we watch the team dissolve. This suddenly took a scene that is normally the information dump, the obligatory scene that says, "Let me explain why you watch this movie for an hour and a half," [and instead] it appears as a drama and no information.
Now, for an extremely old-fashioned question: Fallout is set in motion by Ethan's refusal to sacrifice Luther's life to prevent plutonium from falling into the hands of terrorists, even though this could cause the death of millions of people and the idea of choosing, or refusing to choose, between saving a life and saving a lot of it is threaded throughout the film – making it a version of trolley problem with explosive helicopters. You even have the character of Ving Rhames refers to the "greater good", which is the foundation of utilitarianism. Is it important for you to turn these kinds of ideas into blockbuster action, even if they are ultimately not so important to the plot? Or is it just a matter of your villain having to believe in something, so that might as well be that?
First of all, yes, the bad guy must have a reason. And the stakes must be as big as possible. What we never see in a movie is the villain who wins. These films are safe and the stakes are never felt. They are discussed, but you do not get to see the catastrophic results. You do not see Ethan's worst nightmares. What you see in the opening sequence of the film, which leads to the credits, is that Ethan's worst nightmares come true, not only personally, but also professionally. So you have the right to experience all these things in the worst possible way, then I restart the movie, and the movie starts again with a clean slate. There is, hopefully, a palpable sense of relief when you go in the credits: "Oh, my God, for a minute I thought it was going to be a horrible film Mission: Impossible And now I understand.Now I look Mission Impossible . "It was the design.
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