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 we recently 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. Since the interview ended up being over 15,000 words, I decided to break it up into two parts.

In today’s installment, McQuarrie starts off by answering some fun questions like what TV show he’d like to direct, what film scared him as a kid, if he collects anything, which films he’s watched dozens of times, what got him into the entertainment industry, and more. He then talks about working with Tom Cruise, the incredible box office on Fallout, if the Mission: Impossible series could ever go to space, if he’s going to come back for Mission: Impossible 7, deleted scenes, future projects, why he can’t get certain projects made even after his recent success, why a break in filming helps the production, the jaw-dropping bathroom fight scene, and a lot more.

Check out what Christopher McQuarrie had to say below and look for part two soon.

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.

Collider: I say this with all sincerity, Fallout is easily one of the best films of the year, and the action is just absolutely stunning. Does Tom ever say no?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE: No. Here's what Tom says, he says "Booooo." Pitch him something, he'll say, "Booo. Boring," there's no bones about it. But no, he never says no.

Now, does the studio, or insurance companies, ever say no?

MCQUARRIE: No. The studio winces. I've never personally heard from the insurance company, that's Jake Myers' job, the producer. Extraordinary producer Jake Myers, who produced not only this, but also Rogue Nation. He produced the the the last few Chris Nolan films, came in on The Revenant. He's an incredible, incredible producer, who manages to wrangle all those people so I don't have to.

I have a million questions, and normally I save some of the fun questions for the end, but I'm gonna mix it up with you, and do some of the fun questions at the beginning.

MCQUARRIE: Let's do that.

This has nothing to do with your movie, so I'm just gonna start with that. What TV show would you love to guest write and direct?

MCQUARRIE: Ozark. Excellent, excellent show. Has anybody here not seen Ozark? You're doing yourself a horrible disservice. Go home, now in the middle of my sentence, and begin binging on Ozark. It's excellent. Jason Bateman's direction is incredible. His performance is amazing. Laura Linney, everybody on that show is great. Love that show.

Haven't seen season two yet, personally.

MCQUARRIE: Like I said. I will handle it from here, just go. Go.

Do you have a favorite sci-fi or fantasy film?

MCQUARRIE: I hate saying the word favorite.

Is there a film that you just absolutely love?

MCQUARRIE: People are asking all the time, "What's your favorite?" And I'm like, "I'm gonna name a movie and by doing so condemn every other movie." Like they're saying, "What's your favorite film this year?" And it's like, I have three or four friends who've made films this year, which one do I like more than my other friends? So, I will give you like a short list of movies that come to mind, which I think are great. John Carpenter's The Thing is the top of my list for sci-fi.

You didn't think the remake was all that?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Didn't catch it, busy watching Ozark. Other great science fiction films. Them!. You guys ever seen Them!? When I was a little kid, Them! was one of the first horror films I can remember, it also has great sound design, but it's really well directed. Like Jaws, it's hiding the monster from you for a lot of the movie. If you've never seen Them!, it's about giant irradiated ants, and it's absurd, but the performances, and the construction of the film are really great. Let’s see, another great science fiction film.

Or fantasy.

MCQUARRIE: Or a fantasy. Fantasy. Have you ever seen The Quiet Earth?

I don't know if I actually have.

MCQUARRIE: Has anybody here ever seen The Quiet Earth? I got 'em all. I stumped all of you. It's a New Zealand film, it's a last man on earth movie. And it's not—it's a flawed movie, but it's got some really interesting stuff in it, really great score. It's like those are the things that appeal to me, it's kind of the ones where I go, "Oh, that's kind of an interesting thing in there."  I'm trying to think of fantasy, like something that really grabs me. Other than kind of the usual stuff. I'll think of one, it'll come to me. Horror? Burnt Offerings. Have you ever seen Burnt Offerings, anybody? There's other better stuff to be doing than listening to me answer questions about this movie. Check out Burnt Offerings. Really effing scary movie when you were seven years old. It might not be scary now, but I was scarred by it.

Speaking of scary movies, what films scared you as a kid?

MCQUARRIE: Burnt Offerings. Burnt Offerings was one I remember what really scared me. Okay, so the scariest ones were ... I went to see the original Fun With Dick & Jane at a drive in movie theater in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the trailer for Race with the Devil came on, and I was so young that my brothers were ordered to cover my eyes, and I could only hear the trailer to Race with the Devil, scariest thing I've ever seen in my life.  And I remember my brother and I had one of those radios that you could pick up TV, back in the days before cable television, and at night we would listen to TV, 'cause we weren't allowed to watch it, and the trailer for The Shining came on, and I was lying in the dark, and I could only hear it, it's that scary music. The other scariest thing I've ever seen is the trailer for The Shining, which I could not see. And Jaws fucked me up pretty good. Very effective movie. Oh, and Nightmare on Elm Street.

The first one?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Yeah, the first one, but I saw it in a completely unique situation. I saw it, as many of you did, at a double feature with The Breakfast Club. One of them was a sneak preview, and I can't remember which, and we went to see The Breakfast Club, and the thing about going to see a horror movie, is there is kind of a contract you have. You're set to see a horror movie, you're preparing yourself to go see it, you've been anticipating it, and you are, in some way or another, buffered for a horror movie. Now imagine going and watching The Breakfast Club, when you're 16 years old, it's right in your wheelhouse, you have a mad crush on the girl next to you, who's never, ever, ever going to be involved with you, and we're watching The Breakfast Club, and it ends with Judd Nelson pumping his fist in the air, and it's great, and then Freddy Krueger comes on.

And I'm not kidding you, the audience was freaking out on a level I have never seen. Grown men. A guy got out of his chair, was like, "I can't take it anymore!" He walked out of the theater, and everybody watched him go, and a minute later, he came back, he goes, "I gotta know what happens!" And the girl next to me, her legs are in my lap, and her arm's around my neck, but she's still in the seat, 'cause she's never gonna be involved with me. And that was my experience watching it. Just a great, great movie.

I was gonna say, that's never gonna get topped, for a horror movie.

MCQUARRIE: No, having a movie sneak up on you. Another great experience with a movie sneaking up on me was Ron Fricke's Baraka. Have you ever seen Baraka?

A long time ago.

MCQUARRIE: Baraka's a documentary film, and it's made by the cinematographer who shot Koyaanisqatsi, it's one of these beautiful, sort of travelog documentaries. And I had no idea what it was. It was a film festival, with my first movie, I got there early, and it was the opening night movie, but I got there too late for the intro My plane was late. So they just said, "Oh, the movie's on, you an go watch the opening film," and it was at a theater which was one of the first restaurant style theaters, so they brought me to a table, and I'm dressed in shabby, LL Bean shammy shit, dirty clothes, had just gotten off a plane. And I get sat down at a table. And I'm watching this documentary that is so mind blowing, and I keep waiting for the narrator to come on and explain to me what it is that I'm watching, and it takes me about ten minutes to realize that the concept of this whole movie is that there is no narrator, and you're just going from one place to another. I was completely blown away. And then the lights came on, and everyone stood up, and it was a black tie screening. I'm standing in the middle of it, as one of the filmmakers there, and I was like, "I'm in the wrong place." So that was my other good experience.

Do you collect anything?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Do I collect anything? Tech. Like I buy the first iPhone, the first watch. I hate it in movies, I hate technology in movies. It ruins narrative filmmaking, but I'm mister gadget. I'm the guy you call at four in the morning to fix your Wi-Fi.

What's the background photo on your phone?

MCQUARRIE: My family tartan. The McQuarrie clan Tartan is this kind of red plaid, along with a message from my daughter. That's also my Twitter avatar...

Oh yeah.

MCQUARRIE: People are always asking me what it is, and I don't answer them, 'cause I like not doing that. You guys now all know.

What TV show have you watched all the way through more than once?

MCQUARRIE: Ooh, more than once? Like the whole series?

Whole series.

MCQUARRIE: You know, to be completely honest with you, I'd have to say it's probably Gilligan's Island.

Not the answer I was expecting.

MCQUARRIE: No, only because I've never gone back to watch a show a second time. Ooh, no, I'm sorry, True Detective season one. I watched that, that was the only thing I've ever gone back and watched. I say Gilligan's Island, 'cause as a kid you watched, you know ... of course you had to watch it out of order, so the story was harder to follow. But yes, True Detective season one, which I thought was brilliant.

Yeah, especially some of those tracking shots.

MCQUARRIE: Yeah.

They're crazy.

MCQUARRIE: Amazing.

What movie have you watched the most? Have you watched anything more than 50 times? Besides your own movies.

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Image via Christopher McQuarrie

MCQUARRIE: More than 50 times?

Or 40, or 30. You know, something a crazy amount.

MCQUARRIE: Okay, movies I watch a crazy amount of times. Certainly The Verdict. I talk about that movie a lot. Sidney Lumet's The Verdict, I'm kind of obsessed with that movie. Everybody watched Star Wars, and E.T., everybody my age watched it a thousand times. That was when you had dollar movie theaters. Like eventually a movie just went down to the one dollar movie theater, and you would just go and go, 'cause it cost a buck to go. The Man Who Would Be King. The Big Country. Let's see, I'm trying to think of other movies I've watched like a hundred times. I was just talking about this the other day to somebody, about a movie I've watched many, many times. I will think of more. Jaws I've seen an unbelievable number of times.

Do you remember what got you interested in the entertainment industry? Wanting to make movies, and write movies?

MCQUARRIE: I always wanted to write from the time I was 12 years old. I had been writing before that, but was not aware of it. I was 12 years old, I was in sixth grade, I was writing a short story in class, and we had a substitute teacher that day, Mrs. Hubert, I will never forget, and she said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm writing a story," and she was not used to seeing me do any work, and she said, "Is that what you want to do when you grow up?" And I had never thought about it until she asked, and I went, "Yes!" I remember saying it like that, like, "Oh my God, yes, I want to do this for a living." And I loved movies, I was obsessed with them, and I had a friend, and we would always go through the newspapers and plan out, like we were casing a robbery. We'd work out all the times so we could go and hit every movie coming out that weekend, until I was eventually limited, by mandate, to one movie a weekend. And I never related the two things. I never considered writing for movies. That came later.

Jumping into your movie, the worldwide box office, as it stands now, is close to 800 million dollars. It's the highest grossing Mission: Impossible movie worldwide, domestically, all of it.

MCQUARRIE: Not a measure of anything, adjusted dollars. Top Gun's made more money.

I think the studio's very happy, though.

MCQUARRIE: Studio's very happy.

Right, exactly, so my question is what was your dream number in the back of your brain? Did you hit your box office goal?

MCQUARRIE: A long time ago. One dollar more than Rogue Nation. I thought Ghost Protocol was the one to beat, and couldn't be beaten. The dream number was, "Can we break the 700 million glass ceiling?" So I was like, 700 million and one dollars? But then you find yourself thinking that, "Eh, that's kinda gross, that's not really what it's about." And, when you get real with it, and you look at it in terms of adjusted dollars…

I think I asked you this before, but I'm gonna ask you again, because maybe you've started thinking about other things. Have you ever thought about taking Mission to space?

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Image via Paramount

MCQUARRIE: I think it's inevitable. We've pretty much gone to the edge of thereof, so yeah, it's sooner or later, Tom is gonna be in orbit. If there's an actor that's going to be the first actor in space practically, it's Tom, or it's somebody ... it's [James] Cameron, Chris Nolan, or Tom. Gonna be one of those three guys. That is the new space race.

What you just said is actually very true.

MCQUARRIE: Yes. For sure. If not a screening in space. Like Cameron will, you know you want to see his new Avatar movie. For 80 million dollars you could see it in space!

I’m gonna wager the Avatar movie will be underwater.

MCQUARRIE: Yes, I think so. They had a screening of this on Pulpit Rock, which was amazing, and 2,000 people actually hiked up to the top of Pulpit Rock, and they set up a giant IMAX screen. I would have given anything to be there. Not to walk up there, but...

Speaking of Tom, 'cause he's filming, or about to film Top Gun 2. I think he's filming. I'm not 100%.

MCQUARRIE: I don't know anything about that.

I was gonna say, but you do know enough that you might've been in a jet fighter with him the other day flying, or am I wrong about this?

MCQUARRIE: How would you know that? What would make you think that?

I would think Instagram is a good give away.

MCQUARRIE: Instagram. Oh, what can you extrapolate from the Instagram photo?

That someone named Chris could have been in the back of a jet fighter, taking a picture of Tom.

MCQUARRIE: What makes you think it was a jet fighter? Propeller very clearly in the front of it. Enormous

Okay, a plane in the sky.

MCQUARRIE: A P-51 Mustang. Tom has a P-51 Mustang. And I was supposed to go flying in that plane 12 years ago, when we started making Valkyrie. Everybody went on this awesome fly day, formation flying in all these P-51s. Tom and all of his, you know, we all have P-51s, and Tom went out with his, and all of the guys from Valkyrie who were in LA, got to go in the P-51 days, and I was in Berlin with Nathan Alexander, looking at pictures of the fighter. And we've been busy ever since, so I finally got to go in the P-51.

Was it everything you thought it could be, and more?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: It was a P-51! It was like the thing I'd been —you know, that and the Spitfire are the two coolest planes in the world. If I ever publish anything from where we went in the P-51, that's the story.

I feel like I'm getting shanked.

MCQUARRIE: Yeah, you are, you brought it up.

Right. I accept that.

MCQUARRIE: I did not post pictures of that, or video.

So, I know you've been asked this before, and you basically said that the reaction to this movie has been so strong, between box office, reviews, people raving about it, that you're nervous about coming back to do another one. Is that still the case?

MCQUARRIE: Yeah, it's terrifying and it's daunting. And actually what I said was, and unfortunately it was printed, I said I would rather have leprosy than contemplate that. And then got a letter from Lepra, and I had the most gracious conversation I've ever had with somebody in my life, and this is my mea culpa, I'm now gonna do an interview about this, I had one of [those calls t]hat could have been outrage…  and I got the nicest letter from them, saying, "Can we just explain to you a couple things about leprosy?" I felt so horrible, and this is my apology, publicly, to them for saying that. I'll go into that, more into that another time. Not here on the podcast.

My question is, though, I would imagine, that with the critical and box office, the studio, I mean everyone over there must be polling you, what, daily? And being like, "Hey, so we heard you might want to do another?"

MCQUARRIE: That question has been floated, and I'm ... fortunately Tom's busy on another project. And I'm kind of taking a breather, and just thinking about ... clearing my head. I've been on Mission for five years. Two of them, back to back. We went right from one into the other one, so certainly they asked that question, and I said, "Can I just breathe for a minute, and think about that?" So that's kind of where we are.

The other thing is, obviously all of us in the world would love to see you do another Mission, but at the same time, because of the success of this film, and what you've done the last five years, you've shown yourself as this really gifted filmmaker, and delivered these incredible things onscreen, and it sort of allows you that magical moment right now, to do whatever the fuck you want as your next movie.

MCQUARRIE: My dream movie. A script I've worked on with a friend of mine. It's a movie I would love to do, I'm dying to do it, it is sitting, ice locked in a studio, they will not even call me back.

It’s not The Weinstein Company is it?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: No. I would understand why they're not calling me. No, it's just... we all believe from the outside that there is this life-changing event. The same way when Usual Suspects, very early in my career, my second movie, won an Academy Award, and I was quite convinced the next day, that I got this thing now, and it's gonna open doors for me. And it does not. It holds door open at your own house. It does not open doors for you. What it determines is that you will get paid more money to make what they want you to make, and the overwhelming number of offers that I have received have been, "Awesome movie! Here's what we would like you to do." I have not had the phone call yet, where somebody said, "We'll do anything you want." And this particular studio, I've been asked by any number of people, "What is your next movie? We want to know what your next film is." And movies that I'm interested in, they say, "Will you declare this as your next movie?" This studio, they walked right up to me and said, "Is this your next movie?" And I said, "This is it. This is the movie I will do right now. You say you're doing this movie, and I'll do it." Never called me back.

So crazy.

MCQUARRIE: The business is—do you guys know this podcast Hardcore History? It's another thing you should be listening to while I'm talking. Hardcore History has one episode called Countdown to the Apocalypse, and it's all about the buildup to World War I, and how this inevitable, tidal, gravitational event was occurring all because of the assassination of one man, and you could just feel that Europe was headed for this catastrophic morgue, and couldn't do anything to stop it. Didn't know how long it would last. Very few people understood that it was going to erase the map of Europe and rewrite it for 100 years, that's the movie business right now.

In this podcast they describe how everybody in London was walking around like someone with a terminal disease that didn't know they were sick, and that their whole way of life was gonna change. That's what's happening right now. Nobody knows what's happening, knows what to do, there's big tectonic shifts happening, with companies acquiring other companies, other companies hoping to be acquired, companies merging, and Netflix is just gobbling up the planet, because their subscriber based model, based on data that has completely blown the rest of the business out of the water. The rest of the business doesn't have the data. They don't have the mechanism to compete on that level, and so some of what you're seeing is an apprehension to do anything that isn't what we have in our pipeline.

Well then it becomes, like for example, the project that you would love to do, that the studio's not letting you do, is it a question of the cost of that script?

MCQUARRIE: No.

Or is it more about how do we market this, and the P&A?

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Unlike all the dream movies that I had been foolishly bringing to studios for years, saying, "Of course you want to make a hundred million dollar World War II movie with no stars and half of it in Japanese, of course you do!" This movie was completely scalable, I can make this movie for a fraction of what this cost. There’s no way I could make it for how much Fallout cost. I mean, if you did like the big, giant version, I couldn't get to 100 million. I couldn't get to 80. I shouldn't say that, 'cause someday I'll be in an office, and the executive will be going, "Look what you said on,"... But the biggest version of this movie isn't that big, and I said, "Just tell me what the budget is and I'll back into it." Because I've learned my lesson, from trying to go to them with my dream movies, which can't really be done. And that's not the issue, it's not in their pipeline. It's just not a thing. It's not a slam-dunk, it's not a ... you know, the business is weird right now.

My last question on that project, will you reveal the title?

MCQUARRIE: No.

I didn't think you would, but I figured I'd ask.

MCQUARRIE: Okay good.

From the first cut to the finished film. I think you guys did a test screening in Arizona, New Mexico?

MCQUARRIE: We did two screenings in Arizona, one in Las Vegas, and one in Orange County.

So, I believe you said that your first cut was two hours, 43 minutes.

MCQUARRIE: Correct.

And the final release is two twenty.

MCQUARRIE: Yes.

Will we get the deleted scenes on a Blu-ray?

MCQUARRIE: No. You will get a deleted reel. Like a deleted shots reel. Sort of the hardest shots to cut out of the movie. But ones that had to go.

So not scenes, just specific shots?

MCQUARRIE: No, I don't like them. I mean, to me the movie is ... and I talk about this a lot online, people are asking all the time. And the reason I even talk about deleted scenes—if you're here listening to me jabber on about this movie, two and a half hours since it started, and any of you haven't gone to the bathroom before, I have to imagine a lot of you are kind of into movies, and how movies are made. I look at everything I do as, "This is film school for people who can't, for whatever reason, go to film school." That's why I do the DVDs and I do six-hour podcasts, I'm like, "This is everything I learned, and everything I wish I knew, take it all." And so that's why I talk about the scenes that I deleted. But I've also gone and watched deleted scenes on other DVDs, and I'm always left with the feeling of, "I just drank one glass too many of lemonade, and now I've got that taste." You watch those scenes, and you always know why they're cut. Now, I understand director's cuts, when the director, for whatever reason, was shot in the knees, and finally got to make the movie he wanted to make. And I've seen that even go too far. I don't know that I've needed to see every cut of Blade Runner that I have seen.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

I remember the version of Brazil, another movie I've watched 50 times, that I saw in the theater, it blew my mind, and then I saw a longer cut of it, and I was like, "I don't know that I needed that," then I saw what the studio did to it, and was like, "That definitely was horrible and they shouldn't have done that." To me, the movie that you finally see is the result of the process, and if ... I've made four movies, in all of the movies that I've made, I've never been forced to make a cut. The only people who can tell me to cut my movie are you guys. I go to a test, and the test audience says, "This part sucks, I started to fall asleep during that, I don't want to see those two people kiss," and you take that stuff out of the movie, and the movie does better. And if you're measuring it by that egregious number, that's one way to measure it. For me, it's just the sense of feel. I could show you those scenes, and the only reason I would put those scenes on the DVD is to have you go, "Yeah, I can see why you cut that out of the movie."

So you had the 2:43 cut, two hour 43 minute version, you show it, it goes to 2:20. What was a scene or two that was in that, that you were like, "Yeah, these don't work."?

MCQUARRIE: The big ones, the White Widow was singing when you first walked into the room with her, and if you watch very carefully you can see a couple of her movements give that away. [Cinematographer] Rob Hardy and I had this idea of wanting to move from the nightclub into a completely different environment, and we got one of those ideas, we got very giddy with each other, like, "Oh my God, she could be singing!" And Vanessa Kirby was game, she learned how to sing this song, we brought in an orchestra, we did all this work, it was really great. She looked fabulous. And you're watching a two hour and 43 minute movie with an audience for the first time, went, "Yeah, this can go. This can definitely go." And [editor] Eddie Hamilton pointed out, before we ever screened it for an audience, "This movie doesn't start until Solomon Lane shows up onscreen. And every minute that you're waiting for him to show up onscreen is a minute that we're not in the movie, and every minute has to fight for its reason to be there."

Eddie and I say it all the time, if it can go, it should go. And it's not that anybody cited it, it's not like the audience went through with a red pen and said take the singing out. There were definitely people who were like, "That's weird, that there's this musical number in the movie." But what I said to Eddie was, "Just take out all the singing and see what's left." And it's that scene. We just took all the singing out. And we still had to have Ethan walk into the bar, and there was no way to just hard cut to the bar, and I went, "Okay, I know what we can do here," and there's a little bit of voice ... and the problem with the singing was, the singing took you off story. It was meant to be this tense scene, of Ethan kind of walking into a room. You forgot all about that there were bad guys supposed to be in the room, even though we showed them, you were paying attention to this singing and kind of going, "Why are we this musical, suddenly?" and it took all the tension out of the scene. It's not that the singing bothered anybody. It didn't serve the scene.

When you realize that scene's gonna come out, are you like texting Vanessa? Or calling her and being like, "Hey, just to let you know…”

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: No, I let her find out at the premiere. [Laughter] No, I always, any film I make, and I don't care, like if you're a dude with two lines in the movie. Caspar Phillipson, who plays The European we called him, at the beginning of the movie, the guy with the plutonium. In that scene there was a little bit more to that scene. There was this beautiful 360 that went around him, and he's talking about, there's talk in my circle of a man, a terrorist who calls himself Lark, he moves like a ghost they say, and he's basically saying to Ethan, "Are you this man? Or are you the man the Americans sent to catch him? One of these men would be a very good customer, the other I would have to kill."

And it's all just there to sort of turn up the tension in that scene, and I'm explaining the tension in the scene. So, all the bad things that you're getting are immediately being undercut by the fact I'm explaining why you should be, and the lesson I learned on this movie is information is the death of emotion. It's just not scary enough, and it's a minute, and when your movie is two hours and 43 minutes long, and you can cut a minute out in one simple snip, it's gone. So I call Caspar and say, "Hey, remember when you came out and shot this scene twice? I had to cut it out." But I'm gonna give it to him for his reel. It'll probably get leaked out, and you'll see that. There you go. There's a deleted scene for you. Call Caspar Phillipson, he will show you his deleted scene.

Mission accomplished.

MCQUARRIE: There you go.

Any other scenes that you remember?

MCQUARRIE: Yes. The one I've talked about before, there was a fight between Ilsa and Ethan, which culminated in a kiss, and was bullshit. There was a scene at a border crossing. These are scenes you see little snippets of in the trailer. There was a border crossing prior to Cashmere, we shot it when we were in New Zealand, which was early on. And it was, again, an information scene about making Walker a bad guy, and it was before we had shot, or even made friends with, or written the scene where Walker kills Hunley, so we were kind of trying to make Walker bad, and he murdered a bunch of people at the border, to whom you had no emotional connection. It was gorgeous looking, the whole set was fogged in. The fog, usually, you're used to coming into work, the fog disappears five minutes after you get there, but it sat there all day. So it was a very eerie looking. It looks a lot like The Thing, of which Rob Hardy's a huge fan, and Rob was like, "Oh my God, this scene looks like The Thing!" And I was like, "Yes it does! It's gone." And I knew when I was shooting it. I was like, "This is a safety. We can do better than this," 'cause it's a scene that's making only one point. And if you look at scenes, a lot of times scenes that bug you in movies, or feel like, "What was that there for?" It's 'cause the scene was just making a point, as opposed to being integral to the story, and it just feels like a detour.

One of the things on this movie is Tom broke his ankle. You had a long break. I talk to a lot of directors, and one of the things they all lament is that, say they have a five month shoot. It's five months, there's no break, you can't really make heads or tails out of anything until you get into the editing room. Do you think Hollywood could ever reach the place where every movie has a week or two in the middle of production to look at what you have, examine the results, and then move forward with maybe a clearer sense of what you need?

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MCQUARRIE: Movies that cost as much as these movies do, I don't see why you wouldn't build that in. It's expensive, it's difficult. You gotta hold onto crew, and stuff like that. But the sheer savings, as a guy who's been parachuted in, and fixed movies that were in crisis for precisely this reason, that cost is far greater, and more egregious, than if—look, it happens anyway. It happens on a lot of these movies, where they shoot the movie, they test it, they realize they gotta go back and do reshoots, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Why it works on this movie, this team is so good, a lot of these people have experience having made a number of these movies, but we confront the material every day. We're there every day, not shooing, going, "Oh, you just gotta film pages!" I get it from the studio all the time, they're like, "We just want a finished script." And I'm like, "A bad one? I can give you a bad one? How about I give you the script to another movie, 'cause it'll be just as similar as the finished film as," ... but they need the comfort of 120 pages, and Tom and I come from a place of, "No, we just need to know what we're shooting tomorrow, and what our locations are next week. As long as we have locations, we're okay." And so that's the only thing we really tie ourselves to, is where does the crew need to be, like in a day? And we'll have the story when we get there.

You made two Mission movies, both of which, I don't think they had finished scripts.

MCQUARRIE: No.

It obviously works out, but aren't you going through your head a little bit, when you're shooting and you're trying to write? That nervousness?

MCQUARRIE: I've read so many quote unquote finished scripts that are so bad and unshootable-

And then they get made.

MCQUARRIE: And they get made, and then they get reshot, and remade, and they spend lots of money on it. I'd much rather give the studio ... on this one what I did, having learned from Rogue Nation. Rogue Nation, the big problem was, couldn't figure out the third act of the movie. The reason why we couldn't figure out the third act of the movie was eventually, we realized, it's because we think we know what the third act of the movie has to be. We think the end of the movie is a confrontation between hero and villain that ends in the villain dying.  And that, as [Fallout] demonstrates, doesn't really work. [Laughter] Kidding. God. But in that instance, in the case of Tom, and Sean Harris, I went to Tom and said, "I don't have this abiding need to see you guys fight it out." He’s an intellectual nemesis, not a physical one, which is why Walker ended up in this movie, 'cause I was like, "Well I don't want to do that again." So I need to create a physical nemesis for Tom, that you believe can kick Tom's ass, and let's get Superman! He can have a mustache! Not my idea. That is, by the way, that is not me making fun, I feel terrible about that whole situation. I would not wish that on anybody. I've never joked about, I've been asked all the time, they wanted to cut together an ad that kind of mentioned the epic mustache, and I was like, "You will not fuckin' do that." Those people are miserable, they're having a really hard time. If it were happening to you, you'd wanna kill somebody. I'm not laughing at them when I say that.

I will say though, that Henry said that he's been collecting the mustache memes.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

MCQUARRIE: Oh, God. Well first of all, we got a helicopter chase. We got a HALO jump. We got a car chase through Paris, motorcycle chase through Paris. Henry Cavill grows a mustache and cocks his arms, and gets more traction, right? Out of like, it's not even a fake mustache that I had to pay for, the guy just grew it. He did this for free. It didn't cost anything. And if you think about that—'cause friends will send you trailer reactions of people watching the trailer, and Henry cocks his arms, and everybody screams like a murder is happening, and at no point does it ... Tom Cruise is flying a helicopter! And it's real! And Henry just does this. Milking a cow. So, sorry, where were we? My first tangent of the night.

When you were on the set, and we're gonna get into the bathroom scene soon, but when he did that in the bathroom scene, at that moment, did you have any idea it would be a thing?

MCQUARRIE: It was the reaction videos to the trailers. We couldn't perceive ... like we just thought, "Oh yeah, he just does this thing before he fights." It was no different than if he had just parted his hair. So yeah, he did it, and you were like, whatever, okay. I mean, there were other things in that fight scene that I was like, "Ha! That's really funny." Crickets. The audience doesn't react to it. You can't predict it. I mean, most of the big laughs I've ever gotten in a movie were not ... I'd love to take credit for them, but everything Jeremy Renner did in Rogue Nation that's funny, is Jeremy Renner. And every funny line I wrote for him just fell flat, and I cut it out of the movie.

Let's talk about the editing process. How long from beginning to end did it take?

MCQUARRIE: Okay. This I'm very proud of. When you make a movie like this, you're contractual director's cut is ten weeks. You have ten weeks before anyone can see your movie. Go lock yourself in a room, and I don't have to show the studio anything, the Director's Guild throws themself bodily over the movie and protects you. That's before a test audience sees it, anything. When you're making these movies, to get the movie ready for a test, that's two weeks. You've got to do a temp sound mix, temp music. We didn't do any temp music on this movie—we'll get into that later. And so this movie, the first screening for an audience was friends and family, it was a theater about half this size, and we screened it six days after we finished principal photography, and 11 weeks later, the final cut was delivered to the studio. It was a constant state of preparing for test screenings. So the final mix was happening simultaneous to the fuller, temp mix, and all those visual effects, of which there are many, many, many, were all being done at this frantic pace, and we delivered it in 11 weeks.

I was gonna say, in both Missions that you've been involved with, had very close release dates to when you finished filming.

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MCQUARRIE: Yeah, Rogue was 13 weeks, and this was 11. And we have ruined it for everybody at Paramount Pictures, 'cause everybody's like, "C'mon, Mission did it in 11 weeks!" They’re like, “Go fuck yourself.”

It's crazy, though.

MCQUARRIE: Yeah, it's crazy. Now I will say that the secret weapon here is Eddie Hamilton, the editor of the film, who is one of the very, very, very best on the planet, and Tom's broken ankle. Tom's amazing broken ankle, which is the gift that kept giving. It shut the movie down for six weeks. That allowed me to finish the screenplay. Everything that happened in London was written while Tom was recovering from his broken ankle. And he breaks his foot on the first day of the foot chase. So the scene where he jumps from one building to another, he shattered his talus bone, not his foot, it's his ankle. Shattered his ankle. Every other shot in the foot chase is Tom running on that shattered ankle, five months later. That injury takes a year and a half, could take two years before you really recover. So everything you're seeing him doing is running on a shattered ankle, but that hiatus was the magical gift that allowed us to go and rewrite the screenplay. Eddie and I immediately went into the editing room and were like Edward Scissorhands. Just frantically cutting together as much of the movie as we could, to say, "okay, what we actually, what did we make?"

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