While he only has four films under his belt as a director, Christopher McQuarrie has emerged as one of the more exciting and insightful filmmakers working today. He helmed The Way of the Gun in 2000 after winning the Oscar for scripting The Usual Suspects, but his directorial debut fell short of box office expectations and McQuarrie found himself working mostly as a screenwriter for the next decade, until Tom Cruise—with whom McQuarrie had worked on Valkyrie—signed on to star in McQuarrie’s 2012 directorial effort Jack Reacher. That then led to McQuarrie helming Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation to stellar results, and in between scripting films like Edge of Tomorrow and The Mummy, McQuarrie is now serving as the first repeat director on the Mission franchise with Mission: Impossible 6.

The filmmaker took some time out of his busy M:I 6 filming schedule to appear on John August and Craig Mazin’s Scriptnotes podcast recently, and the one-hour talk is a must-listen for anyone interested in the craft of filmmaking. McQuarrie goes into candid detail about his career both as a director and now script doctor/rewrite specialist on major blockbuster movies, and he also offered some fascinating insight into the making of Mission: Impossible 6.

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Image via Christopher McQuarrie

As for the Mission sequel, McQuarrie—who is in the middle of a seven-week shoot in Paris—revealed the film will be more static when it comes to the geography of the action:

I was determined, unlike the last movie, to spend more time in one location. I went back and I looked at the first movie, which started in Prague, and realized that they’re in Prague for the first half of the movie. So, I sort of pulled back a little bit on the globe-trotting. I think in Rogue Nation I think we might have been in six countries in the first ten minutes of the movie.

Another way McQuarrie decided to set this film apart was taking a different visual approach with cinematographer Rob Hardy, who also shot Ex Machina:

That happened from the conversation I had with Rob Hardy, I said I want to do a very different Mission: Impossible. The franchise relies on a different director every time. That’s what it’s sort of become known for. And so I want to maintain that, even though I’m coming back. And to that end, I’m going to defer to you on certain things. And Rob said, OK. I said, so how do you like to shoot? He said, “Well, I tend to shoot pretty much on a 35 and a 50mm lens. Everything.” Which terrified me, because I tend to start at 75mm. And so 30 and 50 I reserve for very specific things. He shoots everything. He covers scenes in it.

 

What was really interesting was on our second day we were shooting this car chase and we were into the hood mounts on the car chase. And Rob pulled out the 100mm lens. And the 135. And he was sort of shocked to find himself compelled to do it.

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Image via Paramount

As for lessons learned from Rogue Nation, McQuarrie says he now has a much better instinct for what scenes might be trimmed or excised in editing:

That [Rogue Nation] script just blew up as soon as we started making small changes to it. It completely fell apart and we had to then write a whole new script. On this movie, I swore I wouldn’t start a movie without a finished screenplay. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. But, one of the things I learned from that movie, I developed a much more acute sense of what you were going to cut out of the movie. You start to feel a sense of this – I like this scene, but I can easily cut it out of the movie, so I probably should because I definitely will.

As an example, McQuarrie described a scene in Mission: Impossible 6 between Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson that evolved into a version with far less dialogue:

And Rebecca Ferguson’s character is back in this movie and her introduction in the movie was originally this page of dialogue when Ethan runs into her at this event. I also am working with a new cinematographer. And we kept talking about shooting things in longer takes, oners, less editing. And I realized that the scene that I had written for the two of them forced me to cut back and forth. And I was very frustrated in the last movie that every time people started talking, it eventually – the movie just stopped and turned into– just coverage. Just coverage, coverage, coverage. And I thought how do I get out of that. I want the camera to feel lighter. I just want the scenes to feel lighter. So, I realized this scene between Tom and Rebecca was going to just drag me down into coverage. So I started taking away the lines of the scene that weren’t necessary. And one by one I cut away every line until there was nothing left in the scene. And what happens now is Rebecca just bumps into Tom. Tom sees Rebecca. Rebecca sees Tom. And they have this whole moment. There’s a whole story between the two of them and there’s another person standing there. And she can’t say what she wants to say. He can’t say – and they just behave the scene. And it was really liberating. So we’ve gone in and done a lot of that. We’ve just sort of chipped away.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

McQuarrie also says Vanessa Kirby's character changed dramatically from what was on the page once the actress showed up to set:

We have a really fun [mission given to Ethan] at the beginning of this one which we’re very excited about. And it takes you in a direction that it hasn’t quite gone before. We’re quite excited about that. But then also getting back to your question, the other actors. The way the movie tends to come together, there’s a pretty good idea what the story is and what the screenplay is. And we hire actors with an idea of where their character is going. But what Tom and I like to do is work with the actor and on the set start to say, “Well, I’m feeling more of this from you.” For example, Vanessa Kirby’s character in the story started as one thing, and during our conversations, not even rehearsals, but costume fittings and props and things like that we started to play with is your character this – is this a good character or is this a bad character? Is it a character we like to see being bad, or is it a character we want to see get her comeuppance? And we played with all these different shades of the character until we found just who she was. And then on the first day we shot with her, that all proved to be wrong. And Vanessa just found this beautiful tone that she played with Tom. And now I know how to write the rest of the movie.

For those worried this sounds like a hectic shoot with writing happening at the same time as production, McQuarrie says he’s fortunate enough to be able to evolve the script while they’re shooting in Paris since there aren’t many dialogue scenes on the streets:

We’re also very fortunate in that as long as we’re in Paris – we’re here for almost seven weeks, I only have three dialogue scenes in Paris. Everything else is action. All of the – the interior action in Paris will be shot in London. And what that allows me to do is play with the characters on a very, very, very minute scale and start to find what the movie looks like and know that, oh, I don’t have to explain what happens in this scene until the end of the summer when I’m in London. So it allowed us to sort of prioritize what did I really need to know in Paris before I left and what does that tie me into. And what we’re always trying to do is leave ourselves as many outs as possible.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

McQuarrie continued, saying he wanted to focus on a more emotional story for Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible 6:

The problem with something like Mission, the action is dictating the narrative. And I was determined to change that on this movie. And I started with that. I started with more of an emotional story for this character and more of a character arc within it. It’s definitely more of an emotional journey for Ethan Hunt in that movie. But then the action comes in. And the ambitions of that action, so there’s a sequence at the end of the movie which is fabulous. It’s never been done. It’s all photo real. It’s going to be incredible. You then have to create the contrivances for that sequence to happen. And then there’s only a few locations in the world where you can shoot that sequence. So suddenly you find yourself going, well, I have this resource and that resource, and I have to put them in my movie. Why are they in my movie? And now I’ve got to explain that.

The filmmaker also said M:I 6 may be taking the franchise into a different direction tonally:

You know, you worry all the time. Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because [Ghost Protocol director] Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” And we did. But now we find ourselves going, you know, are we going where Bond went where Bond became–serious. It’s another kind of tone. Which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place. But we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Well thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “But we can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. And we’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying well how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

Image via Paramount Pictures
Image via Paramount Pictures

It’ll be fascinating to see how this all turns out. McQuarrie is still in the middle of filming, then there’s post-production, and also the possibility of reshoots, so the film could evolve further. But McQuarrie has become something of a go-to for “fixing” blockbuster movies nowadays, and for good reason. Cruise called him in to work on Ghost Protocol during production on that film, and McQuarrie says it allowed him to solve a puzzle with certain known and unknown pieces:

So now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. And having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in moviemaking, I now understood, OK, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.

 

And so I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. And I could only reshoot what I still had sets for. Like sets they hadn’t torn down. And it gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie – I was originally only supposed to go for a week – my first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, OK, well these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else if I have this idea? Is there something you can build? And so that really gave me, without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned. So that when it came my time to do it, I had a slightly better – I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. And it’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule. For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years. That was a $60 million movie. With Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million. But I wasn’t directing. And that the budgets continued to get bigger over time, now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million and he’ll make a billion.”

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Image via Paramount Pictures

McQuarrie’s name has continued to come up as a screenwriter even as his directorial career is flourishing, although he no doubt works on some major films without his involvement becoming public knowledge. During the podcast conversation, he recalled a certain instance where he offered a filmmaker advice on how to navigate the major studio blockbuster waters:

There was one director in particular, his movie is in trouble, he was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. And I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” And I have had that happen, too. I have had studios try to sort of manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.

But when McQuarrie offered his advice, the unnamed director didn’t take it:

So I walked in and I told him here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. And a lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, “I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works. But if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.” I said, what you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. And the producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served. And he didn’t do it.

The situation came up again later on, with the same filmmaker:

And we had another meeting and half an hour before I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” And he didn’t do it again. And eventually everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. And I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had sort of been taken over. His worst nightmare sort of happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies on those – those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.

I can’t stress enough how much I recommend listening to this entire conversation, as well as the audio commentary tracks from McQuarrie on the Jack Reacher and Rogue Nation Blu-rays. The guy is tremendously insightful, and he’s worked out a deft and successful way of navigating these massive blockbuster movies in a way that still surprises, thrills, and moves audiences.

Mission: Impossible 6 is currently in production and opens in theaters on July 27, 2018.

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Image via Paramount