Over the last few years, Christopher McQuarrie – whom you may recall as the Oscar-winning writer of The Usual Suspects – has nudged his way onto the major-studio action landscape, writing The Tourist and Jack The Giant Slayer and working with producer/star Tom Cruise on the scripts for Valkyrie, Edge Of Tomorrow and Jack Reacher.
The success of Jack Reacher (which McQuarrie directed as well as scripted) led Paramount Pictures and Cruise to entrust McQuarrie with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, one of this summer’s bigger hits. With that film arriving on Blu-ray and DVD this week, I talked to McQuarrie about working with Cruise, introducing the franchise’s most intriguing new character in a decade, and leaving his mark on a franchise previously steered by Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird.
Each Mission: Impossible movie has had a new director and a different style, and with Rogue Nation you decided to build a new vehicle out of the parts of its predecessors. What brought you to that?
What I said from the very beginning was, “Look, it’s the fifth film, it’s been almost 20 years – I think it’d be nice if we had a slight element of the greatest hits.” And that’s why I brought together a team of familiar [characters] and made subtle references to the earlier films. I wanted to kind of pay respect to all the other films that had gotten us there.
But you also make a point of showing us how the world has changed with Ilsa Faust, a mysterious new operative who’s not just the equal of Ethan Hunt but of his entire team.
The other women that had been in the franchise were either members of his team [Emmanuelle Béart, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Paula Patton], or his wife [Michelle Monaghan] – they were all known quantities to Ethan. And I wanted someone to be an unknown to him. I wanted somebody that was outside of Ethan’s sphere of influence.
Did you always have Rebecca Ferguson in mind for Ilsa?
I did not know anything about Rebecca. She had done an audition, put herself on tape, and it was one of the very last tapes that we saw. In fact, it was the last tape that we saw. We’d been going in a different direction entirely, and it was the very last day we had to make a decision. And Tom and I took one last look through a whole bunch of tapes, and there was Rebecca. And as soon as we saw her, we looked at each other and said, “That’s her.” She really had that certain classic movie-star quality that we were looking for.
You’ve talked about Casablanca as a reference point for Ethan and Ilsa’s relationship, and Ilsa even shares a name with Ingrid Bergman’s character. How heavily did you lean on it while developing Rogue Nation?
What I definitely lean on is the knowledge that all of the great onscreen romances are unrequited – and even with the ones that are resolved, the resolution is never as good as the yearning to see those people together. But more importantly, I wasn’t really looking for a romance I was really more looking for a woman who challenged Ethan, and kept Ethan off-balance. The word “equal” is used a lot, and I feel like that’s degrading to everybody that came before Ilsa. It’s not about comparing the women in these films to the male lead. But I definitely wanted somebody [opposite Ethan] where their relationship was not defined by the romantic nature of it.
You’ve been making movies with Tom Cruise for a while now, and Valkyrie and Edge Of Tomorrow play with his on-screen persona in some pretty interesting ways, casting him as a Nazi conspirator – even if he is plotting to kill Hitler — and a shallow coward. Rogue Nation flirts with that, too, pushing Ethan Hunt to the limits of his endurance and beyond. How easy is it to get Cruise on board with those ideas?
For Tom, it’s always about the purest pursuit: “What’s the most emotional story arc?” And what’s the most engaging, or what’s a new experience for the audience. When we were working on Edge, I came to him with this idea of a character who was a coward, and who was sort of the antithesis of Tom, in order to give the movie someplace to go. Then within that, we had his relationship with [Emily Blunt’s character] Rita, and we really believed that that should be a romance. We really wanted that, but couldn’t find a way to make it work without it feeling forced and contrived. So we didn’t pursue it. And it was only when we were in the moment, and actually making the movie, that Emily Blunt was saying goodbye to Tom and decided to kiss him goodbye. That was something we discovered within the moment, and when we asked her after the take she said, “I don’t know, it just felt like the right thing to do.” And that really came as an extension of the relationship that they had found with each other, between their two characters, over the course of the movie. But at the same time, everything that we learned about Rita and learned about having a character who could be that – and that there was room in the movie for that to occur – all of those things were lessons that we took away from Edge Of Tomorrow and were determined to expand upon in Rogue Nation. We just had such a great time with Emily, and a great time with Rita, that we wanted to keep going.
You’ve just been announced as the director of the next Mission movie, which makes you the first filmmaker to return to the franchise. And the internet is buzzing about Rebecca Ferguson coming back …
That announcement is not correct. That’s not to say that it couldn’t happen, but that announcement – no one from our side confirmed that. What I tell everybody is: unless you read about it on my social media or you hear about it from the studio, you should never assume that it’s true.
Gotcha. Is there anything you can say about the next film?
[after a moment] We have something that’s going in a different direction, and we’re really excited about it.
Honestly, I don’t want to know anything else.
Thanks!
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is available now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD.
