Contains major spoiler for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning... obviously.
For two years, Mission: Impossible fans have waited for the conclusion to Dead Reckoning – now finally arrived in the form of The Final Reckoning, a super-sized possible-ending for the franchise, capping off Ethan Hunt’s wrestle with A.I. nemesis The Entity. And so, for two years, Empire has also been waiting to do a big old sit-down with filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie, to get the full scoop on the ins and outs of making his latest epic blockbuster.
As The Final Reckoning entered the world, Empire’s Chris Hewitt sat down with the man known as McQ for an initial three-hour chat on the film’s big questions – getting into its structure, its deleted detours, its biggest narrative swings, and much more. What we’ve detailed below just scratches the surface – listen to the full extensive interview on the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast feed, available now to subscribers. Sign up now and stick it to The Entity. Here are a few highlights from the conversation:
1) Hayley Atwell’s introductory scene was shot perilously late
In most films, pivotal moments would be shot months, maybe even years, ahead of release date. Except, Mission plays by its own rules. In an epic case of reverse engineering, McQuarrie devised the introductory scene for Hayley Atwell’s Grace and shot it as one of the film’s final puzzle pieces. “That scene [at the US Embassy] was shot two months ago,” he tells Empire.
It all came in service of Atwell’s part to play in the final act. “I said to Tom, ‘We have to introduce Hayley as a pickpocket. She needs to be essential to the team’,” McQ explains. “We need to just communicate exactly who she is and what she's doing in this movie, and she must be in a position where she saves Ethan.” The time limit for the scene, given the film’s significant runtime? Two and a half minutes, maximum. The one they shot runs two minutes and 40 seconds – close enough. “It was hitting a bullet with a bullet,” says the director, and it “radically changed Hayley’s character”.
2) Cracking The Final Reckoning's first act was its own Mission: Impossible
You’d think pulling off that jaw-dropping biplane sequence would be the biggest challenge in a film like The Final Reckoning. But delivering an opening act that picked up threads from Dead Reckoning, moved the story forward, introduced all the necessary players, and teed up the most thrilling parts of the film’s back half was “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” says McQ. Yes, that means “harder than the aerial, harder than the submarine. Just the editing and the structure and the compression and the setup. All of those things were extremely, extremely difficult.”
There were attempts to cut the film down, to keep only what initially felt essential, versions that played out more linearly vs. one that flashed back with a countdown to armageddon. But every change had ripple effects. “No Mission movie doesn't have some level of flaw, of convolution. And that's all because of the ambitions of the movie,” says McQ. “The shit that works, works because of the shit that doesn't work."
3) There’s a deleted ‘Part 2’ of the Sevastopol disaster
Cast your minds back to Dead Reckoning’s opening, with its nightmarish submarine disaster. Originally, The Final Reckoning would have had much more where that came from – a scene that plays like “a horrible episode of The Twilight Zone”. It would have followed the sub’s XO [Executive Officer] who escapes the wreckage – and still meets a grisly end. “Everyone dies except the XO, who regains consciousness as he is floating towards the surface, looking down at the wreck of the Sevastopol below him. And suddenly his back hits something. He turns around and he's under the ice cap surrounded by the dead bodies of all of his comrades," reveals McQ. "He survived the wreck only to drown under the ice when his air runs out." Dramatic as it was, it was an easy thing to cut. “It was all to tell you the story of how the [cruciform] keys got to the surface. No one cared, and you just didn't need that much of it.”
4) The Final Reckoning is purposefully not Fallout 2.0
As with every McQuarrie Mission, The Final Reckoning has its own tone – this one more serious and sombre. That’s very intentional, even if the filmmaker knows the type of adventure that audiences love most. “It's my job to push the boundaries of this. I know you all want Fallout. Go watch Fallout!” he says. “I'm not going to make Fallout again. I'm not going to make Rogue Nation again. There's a bunch of people out there who really want these movies to all feel different, like it's a different director every time. I hear you, and that's what I'm pushing to do.” To be fair, any excuse to watch Fallout again…
5) Guillermo del Toro wanted the Entity to “scream” at the end
When it came to anthropomorphising the Entity, Mexican fabulist Guillermo del Toro gave his long-term pal McQ quite the note: “‘At the end of the movie I want to hear the Entity scream. I want to feel the Entity know it’s been beaten.’” Though McQuarrie did try giving his A.I. big-bad a literal scream, the idea perhaps didn’t work quite so well in practice. “It completely thwarted the emotion of the movie,” remembers McQ. “For everything you think you could suggest that is a fix to something in this movie, you find it undercuts something in the movie that works.”
6) Defeating the Entity proved an “empty idea”
Since the two-part _Reckoning_s are all about destroying an A.I., you would have thought that the films would end… well, with Ethan Hunt destroying said A.I. Except, instead he and his team capture the Entity in a digital prison, rather than eradicating it. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” explains McQ. “Really experienced experts in this field, who have been with it since its infancy, were telling me the only way that you'll ever be able to now combat A.I. is with A.I. It's never going to go away. Destroying the Entity was actually kind of a hollow and empty idea.” Perhaps, like Skynet, this kind of A.I. is… inevitable. “[Destroying the Entity is] not going to stop somebody else from making an Entity,” says McQ. “And so the idea of Ethan keeping the Entity at the end was fully antithetical to everything we believed – and yet, there it was emotionally in the movie, and that's how the ending came to be.”
7) The “biggest stunt” in the whole series was cut from the film
Yes, even bigger than Cruise moving between the two biplanes, or freefalling with a burning parachute. Among “the fucking mind boggling stunts that we cut out”, says McQ, is one glimpsed in the marketing, “where Tom is on the red plane, and his foot slips off the controls, and the plane rolls over, and Tom's holding on to the top wing with one hand while the plane rolls over.” While McQuarrie wanted the moment in the movie for months (“We all almost died getting this shot!”), it was editor Eddie Hamilton (“a fucking ruthless motherfucker”) who saw that it needed to go. “I'm like, ‘You're out of your fucking mind! It's, like, the biggest stunt we've ever done. There's no way we'll cut it out!’ He's like, “It's redundant, man. It's repetitious, and it's just slowing the movie down [...] He just needs to get on the plane.’”
8) Donloe and Tapeesa had a much smaller role originally
One of The Final Reckoning’s biggest hits is the return of Rolf Saxon as William Donloe – a Langley operative in the first film, who now returns as an ally to Hunt and co. While Donloe, and his wife Tapeesa (played by Lucy Tulugarjuk), have a major role to play throughout the narrative, it wasn’t always that way. “[Donloe] was not supposed to be in that much of the movie,” admits McQ. “[Saxon] utterly smashes it, and that's why he's in as much of the movie he’s in. Lucy Tulugarjuk smashes it. That's why they're in the third act.” McQ and Cruise had a hunch the duo would be popular – later proven out in test screenings. “There was a moment where [Donloe] and Ethan met, they had their reconciliation, and then the team went off to Africa,” says McQuarrie. “As I was assembling the movie, I just said, ‘I have a feeling these people are really going to leave a hole if they leave the narrative.’ Tom said, ‘You're absolutely right’, and we reconstructed it.”
9) Tom Cruise came up with the “too much time on the internet” moment
Face it: who hasn’t wanted to beat someone up while telling them they spend too much time on the internet? Ethan Hunt gets to do exactly that in The Final Reckoning – and the scene was a pure Cruise invention. “Tom was like, ‘I wanna say this line’. I didn’t get it,” says McQ. “I’m like, ‘Please can we just fucking get on with it?’ Tom goes, ‘Just watch this, let me do this thing.”’ The star’s instincts proved correct. “Boy, the first time it played, I turned and was like, ‘Fuck you, dude. OK, fine, you win’,” concedes the director.
10) It’s all about humans choosing to trust each other
The stakes in The Final Reckoning are higher than any other Mission movie – and to save the day, Ethan doesn’t just need his own team. He needs the trust of Hannah Waddingham’s admiral, of Trammell Tillman’s submarine captain, and many others along the way, everyone taking a chance on him, against the odds, for human ingenuity to win. “That’s the big emotional core of this movie,” says McQ. “What you're feeling at the end of the movie is, ‘My God, we're here because all of these people chose – emphasis, chose – to contribute, and to fight together, and to trust humans and not what they were taught to believe.’”
11) There were thoughts of killing off Ethan Hunt
Ever since the title The Final Reckoning was announced, the rumour mill cranked up over whether Ethan Hunt would die saving the day. It wasn’t a (mission) impossibility. “Everything is on the table,” recalls McQ. “There was a moment in the editing of the final sequence of the movie where Ethan goes spinning into that cloud bank where I thought, ‘If you cut to his grave right now, you’d feel the sacrifice was sufficient. Wow, that’s very, very effective.’”
Ultimately, though, killing off Ethan Hunt didn’t feel like an actual ending. “The idea of a conclusion of a story being the death of that character… they are not one and the same,” says McQ. Instead, the mission itself is over – and audiences are left to imagine for themselves whatever the future has in store for Ethan. “When you fully tie off the story, the story ceases to be. And that’s not life,” McQ explains. “Stories go on, whether or not the movies do.”
12) There were worries that Gabriel’s death wouldn’t work
After two movies of godlike grandstanding, Esai Morales’ human baddie gets a hilariously blunt death: his head slammed into a biplane rudder as he tries to make his escape. Whoops! “We lived in constant fucking terror of that moment,” McQ admits. While it’s intentionally throwaway, it hits big with the audience. “It was the incredible work of a lot of very talented people to get that thing right, and to make it pay off the way that it does,” says the director. “That was a nail-biter for us, right up until the first proper screening of the finished film in Tokyo with an international audience. Would it work? And when it played in Tokyo, we were like, ‘Okay, it was all worth it. We live to fight another day.’”
13) The movie needed Luther’s sacrifice
RIP, Ethan’s oldest ally. Ving Rhames’ Luther is the only other character to appear in every single Mission – but The Final Reckoning proves to be his last. It’s a big loss – to the audience, and to Ethan – but one that needed to happen. “The story was about sacrifice,” points out McQ. “The sacrifice in [Dead Reckoning], the movie had no teeth without it, without some loss.” Rhames himself was game. “It was a sacrifice Ving leaned fully into,” the director says. “It was one he wanted to do, and one he was most moved by.” It’s the payoff to a decision McQuarrie made several Mission movies ago. “Ving is such a phenomenal actor, such a giving actor, and the franchise wasn't giving him those opportunities,” he says. “I said, ‘We’ve got to get him out of the van and give him the more emotional stuff to play’. And he leaned into it. This was already forming in Fallout.” Gone, but not forgotten.
14) It’s McQ’s final mission… probably
There’s a good chance this Mission is Tom Cruise’s final reckoning as Ethan Hunt. And it may be that way for McQ too. “Do I think [Mission] is in my rear-view mirror? I want to say yes,” he says, with a caveat: “Tom Cruise is a force of nature, and a very, very tricky one.” But with a decade-plus now devoted to telling Hunt’s adventures, the filmmaker is keen to explore elsewhere. “I only have so much time on this Earth, and I’m still at a place, 30 years into my career, where I have never made one of the movies I want to make. I’ve been warming up.” One of those dream projects? The mythical ‘Gnarly Movie’, a project McQ and Cruise have spoken about in hushed terms over the years that would be a gritty, R-rated film. “Should ‘The Gnarly Movie’ happen, that would be the first,” he says. “My first film that was ever one where I said, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
While McQ is “hugely grateful” for his time with the series, he’s now in the position of an IMF agent: it’d be up to him to choose to accept another Mission. “I'd only do it if it was the movie I desperately wanted to make,” he explains. Maybe prepare a fuse, just in case.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is out now in cinemas. Listen to Empire’s full three-hour Christopher McQuarrie interview on the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast.