While 2018 has seen some incredible movies, I’d argue one of the top films is writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Not only does the film feature some of the most incredible action set pieces I’ve ever seen, the movie shows off unbelievable work from every department, an incredible score by Lorne Balfe, and a script that keeps you on the edge of your seat until the final frame. It’s one of those rare films where everything just works.

As most of you know, Collider has a long-running screening series with IMAX and back in September, we screened Mission: Impossible – Fallout for some of our lucky readers. After the screening ended, I sat down with McQuarrie for an almost 90-minute conversation where we went in-depth on a myriad of subjects (here's part 1 and part 2). As the two of us were leaving the building, I mentioned I still had a lot of things that I didn’t get to ask, and he said he’d be up for doing another screening and Q&A. I figured it would never happen due to his busy schedule, but a little over a week ago we screened the film again and then did another extended Q&A. Since the interview ended up being over 15,000 words, I decided to break it up into two parts.

In today’s installment, McQuarrie talks about shooting without a finished script and what those conversations with the studio are like, how the character of Walker evolved and casting Henry Cavill when another actor passed, how they came up with the ending, changing his entire crew for this sequel, why the Oscars need a "Best Stunts" category, the Jack Reacher franchise, his involvement in Top Gun: Maverick, and a lot more—including some great stories about making Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

Check out what Christopher McQuarrie had to say below and look for part two soon. Mission: Impossible - Fallout is on Digital HD and Digital 4K HDR now, Blu-ray/4K HDR/DVD December 4th)

Mission: Impossible – Fallout stars Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Rebecca Ferguson, Michelle Monaghan, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin, Wes Bentley, Liang Yang, and Frederick Schmidt.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Collider: I guess I'm going to start with the most important thing up front, which is so you quit Twitter.

CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE: Again.

Again?

MCQUARRIE: Yes. Well, I deleted my feed. I walked away from it for a little while.

You answered a lot of fan questions on Twitter. Was there any apprehension about shutting it off?

MCQUARRIE: No, none whatsoever. Every now and again I say, "Okay, I'm just going to wipe the slate clean and step away from a while." The reason I first went on Twitter was to be able to respond to misinformation swiftly. You could correct things that were erroneous in the press. What kept me there was following a lot of funny people. It was a great place to go and have a laugh. It's become very dark and very angry, owing to God knows what. I can't imagine what's going on in the world that might have people feeling divided and dark and angry. I realized that it was affecting me. I was going there to interact with people who were asking me questions and then I would start reading my feed. I would find myself just surfing through that for a very long time, almost desperately searching for something positive... it was just affecting my overall mood, so I just decided to step back for a little bit. When I have something new to interact with everybody with I'll do it again.

I want to give a huge thank you to IMAX. Also, a big thank you to Paramount Home Entertainment. I believe that this thing called Mission: Impossible - Fallout is going to be on Blu-ray and Digital HD really soon.

MCQUARRIE: With aspect ratio changes.

I'm assuming that was something you wanted.

MCQUARRIE: Yes. I figured we'd shot all that film, we might as well keep it.

What are you really looking forward to for fans to get on the Blu-ray/digital release?

MCQUARRIE: There are three commentaries on the Blu-ray. Tom and I do a trip down memory lane and Eddie Hamilton and I do a slightly deeper dive into editorial. Lorne Balfe has his own commentary with an isolated score. There is a deleted footage reel. It's not a deleted scenes reel, but it's deleted selects, which you can listen to either with Eddie and I bloviating further, or you can listen to it with just music. It's a very nice thing that Eddie put together. Then finally, Eddie and Lorne did a fantastic dissection of the score and how we mixed it over the foot chase. It's really phenomenal. It's actually my favorite thing on the DVD. There's a million extras, featurettes, behind the scenes, how we did the helicopter chase, the car chase, the HALO jump. All of that stuff. You're going to be just sick of all of the information you'll get on the DVD.

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What's interesting is that a lot of the studios have pulled back on Blu-ray releases from spending the money because I guess they're saying the sales are down. Was it difficult to get this thing done in terms of commentaries and all these extras?

MCQUARRIE: No, and as I understand it, where the trend is shifting now, they’re actually including that stuff on the digital release. If you buy the movie on iTunes, it's my understanding you can get it with all those extras. I think that was the big issue. The only commentary I regret not having been able to do is Edge of Tomorrow. They rushed that one out the door. I thought that would have been a great one. One of these days I want to get Tom and Doug in the same place and just do our own. Just sit and watch the movie, record a commentary, and put it out online because I think it would be quite funny. Commentaries are something Tom and I are talking about very early on while we're making the movie and we push very hard for that. Tom is a big, big believer in all that.

We spoke at the end of September. Since there's no one in the theater now and it's just you and I, I think this is the moment you announce what's going on with M:I 7. Because no one's listening.

MCQUARRIE: I can tell you Tom already has a lot of really big ideas. Yeah. World-topping shit.

Because I've asked you this twice. Is it going to go to space?

MCQUARRIE: That would be entirely up to SpaceX or NASA. They would have to be involved with that, I would imagine. Or Paramount Pictures. I don't know how much they want to invest.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

I won't press you on M:I 7 any more but believe me it's on-

MCQUARRIE: I still have not had my nap.

Yeah, by the way, you have been going nonstop.

MCQUARRIE: Yes. That's Tom Cruise. That's what happens. He doesn't really like his friends to have vacations. Yeah, I was pulled right into Top Gun. The last time we talked you asked me about it and I gave the party line, which was, "I know nothing about it." Then when we did an interview for Empire Magazine, Tom decided to just announce it right there in the middle of the interview. Yes, I'm working on Top Gun.

Oh, I have questions, but we're going to get to those in a few.

MCQUARRIE: There are airplanes in it. That's all I know. There, that's an exclusive.

I have a few specific things I want to talk about. Fallout is one of the most critically-acclaimed films of the year. Tom Cruise delivers this phenomenal performance that has him jumping out of a helicopter, breaking his ankle. Do you feel that it's time for the Oscars to finally acknowledge his work on this franchise? Because I think his performance is amazing, and it feels like genre films, when it's action, when they think of it like Mission: Impossible, they don't look at his performance in terms of an Oscar kind of thing. I think it's a shame because he delivered something amazing in this.

MCQUARRIE: I can be diplomatic, but fuck it. There was talk of a popular film category. I'm really glad they're not doing that, because I think the notion of that is to shy away from the fact that a—I don't care, revoke my academy membership. What would be more effective, is I think if you're going to introduce a new category the category should be stunts. I can't think of a film recently that might qualify, but, that's an art, that's a skill, that's a craft. Those are people risking their lives and doing things that are absolutely and utterly truly amazing and are so much a part of an experience like that. Not just in films like this. You go look at Hell or High Water. Lone Survivor. The stunts in that movie were absolutely incredible. In terms of a new category, I think you need to do that.

In terms of the notion of a popular film, if you look at the history of the Academy Awards, you can see that over time the Academy has an idea of what a Best Picture is. What qualifies as a Best Picture. There was an era that you had to be big and giant and bloviated to qualify as Best Picture. There was a time when you had to be cutting edge and out there to do it.

I think that there's a point at which we've lost sight of the fact that what we're here to do first and foremost—sorry if this sounds offensive to anybody—is to entertain people and to move people. A part of me looks at that and says, "Well, there are big movies that do that too." I was reading online the back and forth, the arguments of how certain films didn't qualify because they're just not Academy Award movies. This one guy had this unbelievably articulate seven-paragraph argument for all of the things that qualified a movie, none of which were Titanic. It wasn't that long ago that a film like that was both commercially successful and won all of those Academy Awards. I think some of what we see now is a little bit of a backlash from that. There's a morning after and people say, "We did what? We gave the two billion dollar earning movie an Academy Award and not these other movies?"

They're bringing a lot of new people into the Academy. I think that's great. They're sharing the wealth. I think that's wonderful. It might be nice if they had a bunch of screenings where they talked about what a Best Picture is. How do we define it? Really, if they look at what their mission is. I think ultimately you'll just see the pendulum swing. Some film will do it. Some change in the audience will do it. Look, a film like this made a lot of money. That's perfectly acceptable. There are other films, smaller films, important films, films that are addressing things that people don't necessarily want to confront that don't make money. The awards that they make get that movie attention and might put that movie in front of some other people. I think that's great too. I think I've covered about every single possible perspective you could have on all this. I answered your question. But in the end, stunts.

I think we can all agree on that. I also think that this year has been an exceptional year in movies.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Empire came out with their list for their top movies of the year. I went, "Oh, that was this year?" There was so many that I didn't realize they were all this year. It was a long year. It was really something. It's crazy.

You worked with a new cinematographer on this film. From the onset, what did you want to do differently visually with this film over Rogue Nation?

MCQUARRIE: Not be Rouge Nation. That was job one. It was important to me, as I've said from the beginning, I wanted to maintain that aesthetic that it was a different director. Mission has a different director for every film and I wanted to maintain that. I was very sensitive to that. When it was first announced that I was directing it, there was a loud reaction to the fact that we were violating, my favorite word: canon. That we were breaking with this notion. I respected that. I said, "Okay, I want to do something different." That meant starting with a whole new key crew. I replaced just about everybody.

What is that conversation like? Because you've obviously worked with certain people again and everyone works on the last one and I'm sure they're like, "Oh, if he does another one, I'm going to come back." Then all of a sudden you're like, "It's all new."

MCQUARRIE: Yeah, sometimes that conversation is, "I get it," and sometimes that conversation is, "Go fuck yourself." In the end, you have to do what's for the good of the movie. There are certain people where I had to draw the line and say, "I absolutely wouldn't change this ..." Eddie Hamilton is somebody who I would not have gone into another movie like this with. There was so much of what Eddie Hamilton did that he was my right arm and my left eye. He was invaluable. Jake Myers, the guy that was ultimately responsible. Tommy Gormley, our first AD, who came in late on Rogue and finished that movie. There's a very small number of ADs that I would have trusted and felt secure with. Just a few key people like that.

But the people who have a profound affect of what you're seeing on the screen in terms of the style of the film, production designers, cinematographer, costume designer, and of course the other big emotional component of the movie is composer. I have worked with Joe Kramer on every film that I had done up to this movie, so much so that Joe had become such a distinct part of whatever passes for a style that I might have, that I felt like I really needed to make a shift there. That was an important one and a difficult one to do because we had such a short hand and a comfortable working relationship. Lorne Balfe was a big unknown for me and I think Lorne did a phenomenal job.

Yes. You talked about how Walker evolved during production. What was the character like as originally conceived?

MCQUARRIE: Walker was a completely different guy written for a completely different actor. We had a whole different vision for what that was. I really liked Henry Cavill, but I knew Henry Cavill was going to be a very hard sell. Superman coming into this movie was going to be very difficult. You've got to imagine that that character began as an absolute polar opposite and he began as ... For example, the HALO sequence. He began as this guy who had specific knowledge, he was an expert in nuclear weapons and nuclear technology, but was not a field agent. He was a guy who just had a specific expertise, so he became this albatross around Ethan's neck. He was a guy that Ethan had to carry with him everywhere. Then of course it was revealed that he was in on it and was actually not what he seemed, the villain of the film.

I had a specific actor in mind that I really liked for this role and this actor would not meet on the movie. He just flatly refused. There were some very strange phone calls about that. There was a little bit of highfalutin-ness. He really had issues with how I had described the character. There was no script for him to read. I described the character. I said, "This character could be whatever you want. It's whatever you make it." He couldn't jive with that idea. I was grateful because I still wanted Henry Cavill and so that strengthened the case that I had for bringing Henry into it and I went through a strategic process for compiling lists of actors that everybody thought would be great. It's always a fantasy. There's always 10 people and you can't get nine of them and the 10th one is unavailable. I just kept putting Henry's name at the bottom of the list, moving it up a couple of notches. His name would always come up in a conversation and people go, "Really, Henry? Superman? How does that fit into the movie?" Over time people just got used to the idea and then I went and met with Henry and said, "Yes, definitely the guy."

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Image via Christopher McQuarrie

That's a great story. Let's talk about the ending. How did you hit upon that final scene and the final shot of the movie, and were there any alternatives considered?

MCQUARRIE: The shot on Ethan? Something that you will enjoy if you go back and watch this ... Eddie Hamilton and I laugh every time we watched the last shot of the movie. That was originally a different angle on Tom. It was that shot more from Benji and Luther's point of view. It's a slightly tighter angle of it but it's a profile of Tom saying, "Please don't make me laugh." I watched it and I was like, "We can't end on that." It's just a weird angle. We went to the overhead angle of him lying on the bed and we had one take of that ... Everything in that tent was improvised. It was just us going," I don't know how to end the movie. Say this, try that." I would be like, "How about this?" The last witty lines of a movie are very hard to come by, especially because when you're trying to be funny, you're not. You never are. Tom and I had learned after making many movies together the big rule is when you're reaching for it, you'll always miss. You just have to be real. There was one where Tom did it. I was like, "Great, use that." We watched the first cut of it and I said to Eddie, "Can you extend it? It just cuts from Tom a little too soon." Eddie said, "Well, there's a reason why."

He showed it to me and right as Tom says, "Please don't make me laugh," the film rolled out of the camera. When the film rolls out, it goes into a half frame in the flash, and I said, "Great, leave that in the movie." Eddie was like, "What?" I was like, "Just leave it in the movie." He goes, "You can't have a rollout in your movie." I said, "We're cutting into fuse. Nobody's ever going to notice." Sure enough, nobody ever did. Go back and watch it again. You'll see the camera actually rolls out at the end of the film and Eddie and I really appreciate the fact that nothing typifies Mission: Impossible more than Tom Cruise says the line, the last line in the movie, and the camera runs out of film. Yes, that's how we came to that last shot.

Okay, you went into the film without a finished script, which is par for the course on these movies. What are the conversations like with the studio when you say to them, "We're filming on February 1st, got about 90 pages-"

MCQUARRIE: 30.

30 pages.

MCQUARRIE: 90 would be like, "Oh, thank God, you're only 10 pages from the end." 40 pages from the end.

How does it actually work? You've got 30 pages, you've got the rough idea of the film, and you have a start date. How are those conversations with the studio and Skydance and trying to pull this thing off?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Well, you would be amazed at how many films get made nowadays that do not have a finished script. They have 120 pages, or sometimes more, but they don't have a finished screenplay. Movies are made with a very, very, very healthy dose of denial where you just convince yourself that the movie is ready because it's got to go. There's a start date, or an actor's availability. Screenplays are, and I've said this before, screenplays don't get movies made. Screenplays are the afterthought to the decision to make a movie. They're very, very hard to do. If we sat around and waited for the script to be finished, we'd still be developing this movie.

When Rogue Nation was finished, I went to dinner with Marc Evans, who was then running the studio. He was very excited about the movie. We had just tested it, it tested very well. We're feeling very good about the release. I said, "Marc, admit it. Six months ago if I'd handed you a script where the villain is captured in a plexiglass box, Luther and Brandt went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of shit to catch the villain, you would not have greenlit this movie." He said, "No, absolutely not. I would not have done that." The only reason that that movie finished the way that it did is we ran out of time, we ran out of money, we ran out of screenplay. We had shut the movie down for 10 days. They basically assessed all of our resources and said, "With the time you've just lost to the shutdown, scouting locations, et cetera, et cetera, you have 10 days left. Do whatever you want to. This is your box." We just had to figure out the movie within that.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

On this movie, what was killing us on that movie is we couldn't find a location for the end of the film. When we finally did find it, it dictated everything. On this movie I said, "I'm not going to start writing until I know where I'm shooting." On Rogue, there had been a huge tug of war with people saying, "What's the last scene?" I'd say, "Well, where are we shooting it?" "We don't know where we're shooting it, we don't know what the scene is." I said, "Well, I don't know what the scene is because I don't know where we're shooting it. If you tell me it's set in a mall, that's one kind of scene. If you tell me it's set on a bullet train, that's another kind of scene. What's visually interesting? You guys keep coming to me with places I can shoot in, that don't particularly look great or invite action."

On this movie I presented them with a framework of what the story was. A lot of it changed over time. But, with that framework I was able to go to Paris, I went to India, I went to New Zealand. We were looking around London. What I did was I focused entirely on what is photographically interesting. What invites action. Without really worrying about what the action was. I let the spaces tell me what it was.

How does it exactly work? You get greenlit, you start filming, let's say, February 1st. You've got 30 pages. How are you writing this dialogue? How are you writing the story while also directing a movie?

MCQUARRIE: Enormous, enormous stress, and wishing a lot of times that you could slip and fall and have the kind of injury that would stop you from going to work but not writing. I could be in the hospital, propped up, and take two weeks to write the script. Then Tom Cruise broke his ankle. Solved that problem. In the case of this movie, we knew a lot more. The only thing that was missing for us was everything that happened in London. That whole chunk of the movie. When Tom Cruise started running, we weren't exactly sure what he was running after. We knew there was a foot chase, we didn't know quite what motivated the chase, where he was running from or where he was going, but there's this rooftop and it looks really cool. How we did the foot chase is we started scouting rooftops because we wanted a rooftop chase. I'm standing on the rooftop and I was like, "There's the Tate Modern over there. That's obviously where the chase has to end. And St. Paul's Cathedral is going to be in every fricking shot, so why don't we try to get in there?"

I sent guys in two directions. Go get me the Tate and go get me St. Paul's, and boy, I hope they both say yes because if they don't we don't have a chase. Then there's a lot of talk in the movie about an exchange. You remember Ethan is going to this exchange and he's going to meet a courier, and blah blah blah blah blah. Well, that's where we thought the movie was really going. We were killing ourselves to get there. The lesson I've learned from Mission: Impossible is when you hit resistance, change direction. Nobody cares.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

The reason I couldn't write the middle of the movie is because I had this scene that I wanted to put in the movie. It was a scene I pitched to Tom. It was the darkest possible place for Ethan to go and Tom said, "Really? Well, go darker." I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Okay." I was writing the whole movie, trying to make that work. Well, I learned my lesson from Rogue. Rogue, it took me months to come around to, why can't I kill the villain? The answer to that question was because I don't really want to. I don't feel this abiding desire to see Ethan and Solomon Lane fight it out. The movie has become about Ethan and Ilsa and their relationship. The villain is the pressure that interferes with that relationship. It's not really the core relationship of the movie. Now I was in this movie going, well, it took me months to learn that lesson. If I'm stuck, it's because I'm going in the wrong direction. I'm not doing what Mission wants me to do.

As soon as I let that go, everything that you see happen in those arches, it's a place that is gone now, sadly. Days after we left they went in and tore it all up and reconstructed it. But everything that happened there came together like that. We wrote in a couple of days and we wrote it just in time. I went to that location and the entire gun fight had not been worked out on the day we started shooting. I then had to go with my brother, who's a retired Navy SEAL, and all we do—every gun fight you've ever seen in my movies is my brother and I just playing Cowboys and Indians with each other. He and I just did a tactical up and down, back and forth. It was like, what would happen if guns started going off in here? He's taught me enough that I can be a reasonable dummy for him to shoot at.

We choreographed that entire sequence in about two hours in the morning and then everybody came in and of course now ... To give you a sense of insies and outsies and timelines. Tom broke his ankle on the first day of the foot chase. You can see the shot in the movie where he quite clearly breaks his ankle. I love watching this movie with an audience because whenever that shot happens I see at least one person go, "That's where he broke his ankle." Tom broke his ankle on the first day. We went back months later to finish the foot chase. You see it's the summertime when he's running and it's the winter when he finishes. Every other shot in the foot chase his ankle is broken. He's still recovering from a shattered ankle at that point in the film. Everything you're watching he's in extreme pain.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

The next day, after he finished the foot chase, we went and shot everything in Pennington. The reason why you'll notice Tom standing at a table, not moving, is because Tom is in extraordinary pain from having run on a broken ankle for the previous two days. Alec Baldwin, if you watch very carefully, is limping because Alec Baldwin is overdue for a double hip replacement which he has forgone so that he can be in this movie. Alec is in extraordinary pain, Tom's in extraordinary pain, and everybody else is in agony because they're wondering what the hell this scene is all about. They just got these pages two days ago. But it's going to be a really good one. Okay.

Before you ask the next question, in Rogue, and this is my favorite story of telling Rogue Nation. At the end of Rogue Nation you remember they're all sitting around a table and Benji's wearing an explosive vest with a contact lens. He's got a thing in his ear and he's talking to Tom. Now, that was the scene that we couldn't figure out. We finally found this location, they brought me to a restaurant at the Tower Bridge. I said, "This place is great, but it's in the wrong place. There's no background. Let's take a walk." We went and found the best photographic location. I said, "Build a restaurant here." They said, "Well, what's happening at the restaurant?" I said, "I have no idea. Build the restaurant. I'll figure it out by the time we get back here." We were shooting other stuff.

Well, the day came to shoot the restaurant. We had built the restaurant and we had four nights and our box of 10 to shoot whatever we wanted to shoot at the restaurant. I'd still not figured out the scene. I was driving to work that night and I came up with the scene. I knew some stuff. I knew about the explosive vest, et cetera. Tom and I, we always come up with ideas that we like and then struggle to get them in the movie and then ultimately jettison them. In some weird way they come back. The very first scene we had talked about on Rogue was Tom sitting in a restaurant and the villain comes and sits down. He's in the middle of a mission. The villain comes down and sits opposite him. Tom's not able to react because he realizes his chair is wired to explode. We tried to make this scene work as the opening of the film. It never did. I forgot all about it, and you should too.

I'm driving to work and I realized what the scene needed was this notion that he had memorized the disc and all of that. The whole scene fell together. I come into rehearsal, of course we have no pages to rehearse. I said, "I got it. I got the end of the movie." Tom says, "What is it?" I pitch him the end of Rogue Nation. He goes, "I love that. What are we doing tonight?" I said, "Well, it's going to take me the better part of the night to shoot all the business with you getting to the table. There's other stuff we can do that's no dialogue so we'll shoot all that tonight. I'll get up tomorrow at about noon. I'll write the scene. We'll come in tomorrow and we'll start shooting the dialogue tomorrow night and the night after. Then on the fourth night, we'll shoot the gun fight, which was the only part of it we'd worked out.” He was like, "That's great."

We shoot a bunch of stuff of Tom walking around. Next night, I come to work with the written scene. I hand it to Tom, and Tom reads it and he goes, "This is great. I've got a page and a half of dialogue." I said, "Yes." And he goes, "I can't learn that in an hour. What are we going to do?" We took an index card the size of my iPhone and we printed all of Tom's dialog on it. I put the camera over Simon Pegg's left shoulder. Simon Pegg is holding the index card in front of his face. Like a human teleprompter, he's watching Tom's eyes and he's raising the card so that Tom's eyes never have to track down.

If you go back and watch the end of Rogue Nation, Tom's reading all of his dialogue, which is literally smoldering hot from having been written an hour before. You'll notice Rebecca Ferguson has only one line in the entire scene. I've never known an actress more excited to have only one line to memorize. She was like, "Thank you. Thank God I don't have to learn anything." She just got to sit there and watch these two guys work it out. Then of course the dialogue scene, because there were so many little pieces, we went half a night over. On the fourth night we had to finish shooting the dialogue and we only had half a night to shoot the entire gun fight. Then it started raining. That's the kind of chaos that existed in Rogue. When you asked the question of what does the studio say, after having gone through Rogue Nation, the studio was like, "We don't want to know. In color, in focus, July." And I'm out.

That's crazy and I need to watch that scene again.

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Image via Paramount

MCQUARRIE: It's a testament to the brilliance of Simon Pegg because Simon Pegg is the guy who can come to set and remember not only his whole monologue but Tom's whole monologue and work as that kind of support. He's an incredibly giving, incredibly supportive, and really extremely professional actor. We think of Simon as the cut up, et cetera et cetera, but on set Simon is... It's his music. It's what he does.

He's also a very talented writer.

MCQUARRIE: A very talented writer, yes.

Digging a little deeper, what the hell is it like for you on a Saturday, Sunday? Do you shoot five day weeks on these things?

MCQUARRIE: We try to shoot five day weeks. As you get closer to the end that becomes harder. Because you start shooting splinter unit and whatnot. You're budgeting your time and knowing that as I get closer to the end of the movie I will have a one day weekend, not a two day weekend, so I'd better have my script finished by then. The day you write the last scene it's like you've been cured of an illness. It's really amazing. But yes, my weekends are sitting in front of the computer and stressing about this.

I watched this video recently, you should go look it up. If anybody in here has ambitions to write ... In fact if you do anything creative, go and look at this. John Cleese, he gives a lecture on creativity. It's really actually quite amazing. He talks about there are two states of mind. There's an open state and a closed state, and that the open state is useful for one kind of activity, and a closed state is for another. His description of it, I realized, God, that's what I've been doing for a long, long time. How you're really only creative in the open state.

The problem was that I was sitting down every weekend with another version of myself over my shoulder going, "Fix the problem." Which is actually not how you create anything. You have to let go. With every solution we've ever come up with, it's come from a place of letting go, giving into it, trusting the process, and knowing that the answer will come, and not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by the schedule of the ticking clock. It's a discipline of almost not focusing on the problem. That's how the opera house came together in Rogue. I couldn't solve the problem so I went away for a weekend. We went to the opera in Paris. While I wasn't trying to write the movie, I had the idea that saved the movie.

How often have you gotten real sick while directing a film? For example, I think Matt Reeves on one of the Apes movies, I don't know if it was the first Apes or the second ... The first one he did, I think he got pneumonia during filming. He was real sick.

MCQUARRIE: I'll tell you. On The Way of the Gun, I had massive migraines every weekend. It was like I had the flu. Every weekend. At any point when my body could shut down it did shut down. I only realized 12 years later when I was directing my next film that that was stress caused by my inability to—I was being resistant and I didn't know how to overcome that resistance. I was not comfortable with my role as a director. I did not understand that my job was essentially parenting, and that it's possible to be a parent and still have your kids love you at the end but say no to them. On The Way of the Gun I was in constant physical turmoil. I was in a lot of pain. I had plantar fasciitis in one foot. I was limping everywhere. I was completely drained.

On Jack Reacher, we were working 22, sometimes 36 hours nonstop. It was pure momentum and I never got sick. After every project, after every script I've ever finished, I have an absolute, complete meltdown. I have not had a chance to have one of those since I finished Jack Reacher. Tom's kept me working so much. I'm like, "Can I have my meltdown yet?" I'm imagining some time a couple years from now I'm going to go into a coma for seven, eight years.

You've worked with Tom a lot. What do you feel is underutilized in him as a performer that you wish more filmmakers brought out?

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Image via Paramount

MCQUARRIE: Well, that's the thing. It's not up to you. With Tom, you're talking about somebody who is a real collaborator. What Tom's looking for all the time is the emotional experience that you're having and he will do whatever it takes to get that out of you. There are things that I have seen him do in his career that I think he doesn't get as much credit for. One of the scenes that I talk about all the time, if you haven't seen it, Tom and War of the Worlds. There's a scene where he's singing a lullaby to Dakota Fanning and he can't think of any lullabies. He's an absentee father. All he can really think to sing to her is Beach Boys songs. He starts singing “Little Deuce Coupe.”

How many people have seen War of the Worlds? It is an extraordinary performance. It's this really wonderful, incredible performance, and one I was thinking about when I was directing this scene at the end with Tom and Michelle. It's that emotional side of Tom that's really extraordinary. It's not about the directors, it's about movies today. Movies don't go there. When we set out to make this movie, the first thing I said to him was, "I want to make a more emotional movie. I want to get to the heart of who Ethan is." I think more people could do that. I think more movies could do that.

Top Gun question. What can you actually say about the sequel? Are you allowed to say anything?

MCQUARRIE: It is called Top Gun: Maverick. I can't think of anything ... Like I said, there are planes in it. Maverick is in it.

Obviously Joseph's directing. Can you say what your contributions are to the script/story?

MCQUARRIE: I'm a compass on the movie, I think more than anything else. It was all there. It was all there when I came on board. It was such a long process getting there. I met on Top Gun years ago. There was rumors that I was on the project because I had met with Tony Scott back when he was attached to the movie. There was a moment where I was going to do it then. The way into the movie was just seemingly insurmountable. The movie is so iconic. It has permeated the culture so unbelievably that it's very hard to find people that haven't seen Top Gun. I found one. I found a guy. I said, "Don't watch it." He said, "Why?" We go, "Because we want you at the test screening. Don't watch the movie. You're the perfect specimen. There's only one of you."

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Image via Paramount

What was really interesting is coming into it in those early conversations and talking about what is Top Gun, really. Because there's what we remember Top Gun to be and then there's what Top Gun is when you sit down and watch it in a completely objective way, or try to watch it as objectively as you can. I came to the process very late after they'd been through many iterations of ... It had been through a lot of writers, they had been developing the script, and they have a really, really good story.

I came to it with a clearer head and I also came to it off of this movie. That was my head space. It would be like if Joe Kosinski came in to the editing room on this movie and went, "You're fine, dude. You're okay." Because we thought we had made a train wreck out of the third act. It just helps to have somebody to come in and say, "You're all right. You're actually making a really good movie and it's okay. Things you think you need you don't need." That's what my job ... I'm a security blanket.

Have you been on set a lot or is it one of these things where you went on set a little bit?

MCQUARRIE: A little bit. As a writer, I don't actually like being on set. There's not really much for me to do. I know writers make a big deal out of that. Over the last few years there's been some provision put in the Writer's Guild that you have to be invited to set. It's like, who wants to go to a party where you're not invited? They'll call me as they're rehearsing a scene that we've gone over, and you can think the scene is great in the read-through, and then you get there on the day and people are saying the lines and suddenly you're like, "Hey, all of this that we've read 55 times doesn't make sense anymore." If there's a specific scene that's coming up I'll go. I'll sit there in the morning. We'll talk through it. My ear will hear something. Usually I'm deaf to it. I've just written the script and I just want to go home. I don't want to rewrite what I've written. Some actor in the movie will say, "Hey ..." Jen Connelly is in the film. And I've got to say, she's great on script. She's an absolutely phenomenal actress, and has asked me really great questions about the character and provided some really beautiful stuff. I love that because then I don't have to work as hard.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

But mostly it's been— I've got to say, Joe runs the most calm, quiet, collected, organized, peaceful set, which is really weird for me because I'm used to just chaos and stress. The really beautiful thing about working on this movie is, we were shooting one scene at sunset. Well, it was very, very complicated. It wasn't my problem the sun was going down. I was just looking at Joe going, "You must be stressed out right now. I love it, I can just go home." Because he can't.

I think it came out earlier today that Lee Child is going to take the Jack Reacher character and adapt him for a TV series. He said he felt that "Tom wasn't the right guy" for a reason I will not say here. I loved the first Jack Reacher. What's your thoughts on what Lee said in terms of the Jack Reacher thing?

MCQUARRIE: I didn't read what he said.

Do you want me to say it?

MCQUARRIE: Probably not. No. I know a little bit about the decision-making in why they did what they did and it comes down to the reality of television works at a completely different pace than feature films do. The big issue of another Jack Reacher movie was not if but when. I think that was what went into that decision.

You're talking about the sequel?

MCQUARRIE: No, I'm talking ... whether or not we did another one. There had been some question after we finished this about whether or not we'd revisit Jack Reacher. Everything that you talk about comes down to a schedule and availability and just the possibility. If Tom and I took all the things that we're each looking at individually and as a team, and try to put Jack Reacher into it, he'd be 85 years old when we were making the next Jack Reacher. It's like when are we going to do it? After you've done all these other things. Edge of Tomorrow 2, trying to figure out where Edge of Tomorrow 2 would even happen. You think that sounds really simple but then you have to factor in, well, you've got this other thing that you're scheduled to do for these months at this point and that throws everything out of wack. It's a giant math problem and I don't really know how any movies get made.

I think a lot of people don't realize how much changes right before a movie gets made with scheduling, with actor availability. There's not a lot of limelight on it.

MCQUARRIE: No. It's just a reality of making movies. There's no right or wrong way to make a movie and I've said it before, a plan is not a guarantee of success and chaos is not a guarantee of failure. Different directors and different movies are just giant accidents. Hit movies are even bigger accidents. It's all just a chemistry test. Some work and some don't. You have the best laid plans go completely awry and going in half-ass, sometimes that just completely works. The thing is you just have to keep making movies.

Look for the second half of our conversation Wednesday.

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Image via Paramount Pictures