These days, CGI makes nearly anything possible in the movies – but every so often a blockbuster commits to practical stunts, delivering visceral movie moments that are all the more impressive for their daring feats of filmmaking. This summer, that was Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the latest fruitful partnership between star-producer Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, which unmistakably put Cruise front-and-centre of its jaw-dropping set-pieces. The pair might have just delivered their action masterpiece – and so for Empire’s Review of the Year issue we got them together on the phone to talk through their collaborative process, and how they brought the biggest and best Mission yet to the big screen. Read an extract from the interview here, and check out the full thing in December's Empire, on shelves from 1 November.
This will only take four or five hours.
Christopher McQuarrie: That’s nothing for us, dude. That’s a walk in the park. Not even half a script session.
I’m going to start with a tough one. Fallout is the biggest Mission to date. Critics went nuts, it’s in our top ten of the year. You must be fairly happy with how it turned out.
Tom Cruise: You’re always happy and there’s relief and joy in seeing a response. I make movies for audiences, and to see how much they’re enjoying themselves, that’s really incredibly satisfying.
McQuarrie: There’s also a mild layer of terror, knowing we have to outdo it.
Cruise: It’s always that way. We always start that way. You have that slight bit of nausea as you’re going, “Okay, let’s go.” That’s the way we always feel beforehand, believe me.
Did that feeling of mild terror drive Fallout?
Cruise: You always feel it. On every movie, I want it to fulfil its potential. There’s that wonderful feeling. It’s actually this pleasure/terror/pain/excitement of creating something. It’s that adrenaline and focus that I think McQ and I have together. We just keep having fun with the pressure, and creating it. We have a saying: “Pressure’s a privilege.” Like on Rogue Nation, I couldn’t figure out the third act. It’s alright, pressure’s a privilege. Now we’ve got to figure this out.
McQuarrie: We get to do this. We get to have this problem.
Cruise: If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t feel like this.
Tom, this is your sixth Mission. Chris, it’s your third.
Cruise: And our ninth film together. Top Gun’s our tenth.
Does it get easier making one of these giant juggernauts?
Cruise: In some ways yes, and in some ways no. It gets clearer.
McQuarrie: We now have the collective experience of three movies. You can now look at three Mission: Impossibles and go, here’s where we were in our own way. Here’s where we were making things harder than they needed to be, more complicated than they needed to be, bigger than they needed to be. And you’re able to streamline it and you’re able to look at a handful of movies now and go, “Boy, we thought it needed to be big and spectacular and really what it needed was story and character and storytelling.” That’s king.
Cruise: Story is king. That’s something we always talk about. With each one, we have dreams of what we want it to be in the future. You look at what McQ did at the end of the movie, and you see the scale of the film. But also the personal nature that we’re always reaching for with a Mission. Each one we try to remind ourselves what we’ve learned. That doesn’t mean we’re there. There’s times in the editing room where we’re like, “Fuck, we had this rule…” You know? “We agreed we wouldn’t do this!”
McQuarrie: “We swore we would never do this!”
Cruise: Then we have to go back and pick it up!
McQuarrie: “Why did you let me do that?”
Cruise: “I was there, why didn’t you remind me?” You know? [Laughs] Jim Gianapoulos [Paramount chief] is a good friend of mine. I’ve known him since I was a kid, basically. This was his first Mission. He was like, “Okay, where’s the script?” “We don’t have it. But we’ll get it. We have the locations.” We said, “Look, we’re not going to go over-budget — this is how you make a Mission.”
Read the rest of the interview with Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie in Empire's December 2018 issue, on sale from 1 November.
Read Empire’s Best Movies of 2018 list, starring Mission: Impossible – Fallout, here