Christopher McQuarrie / "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"

were tweeting out the places that are protecting on film. Yes, and I'm from North Carolina. Oh wow. And then one of them, Tarboro, North Carolina, Yah, which is like I was stunned. Of all the places, it's just out close to the coast. Somebody, uh, somebody sent me a photograph of one of the theaters that I had that I

had a right take care. Um, it's just it was very They sent me just this picture of a dilapidated, broken down and run down both inside and outside, and they were like, really, is this where you're sending us And I didn't have a chance to respond to them, but it was like that's where I grew up. I grew up watching movies and theaters like that. Same. Thanks, what movies are all? Right? What we're recording? Okay, jump

in thirty minute conversation. Relax, you're back from the tour. Yes, we're here with Christopher mcquarie everyone, the writer and director of Mission Impossible Fallout. Uh. You're gonna run out of subtitles after a while, you know. We had a we had a subtitle generator. Oh yeah. The studio put it together because coming up with the title is is always a bit of a of a production in and of itself. And they put together a list of It was almost

like the Knocklist. It was a list of different kind of spy words and you could pick one off of each each column. There were two columns, and they were the worst titles you could have ever possibly there were, there were, there was no good company. You gotta hear some. I can't really remember them. I wish I had the rest here, but it was. It was quite awful. Do a parody version of the film with one of those. Uh, first of all, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you.

I saw the movie a few weeks ago. I was blown away. As I was telling you earlier, I was just very much dausted afterwards and like the best of ways. Uh, you know, watching Tom cruise to his thing and just that this movie sends you out on the biggest high because of the finale you guys constructed. But we'll get

into that. Uh. I want to start just to go back a little bit whenever you first came onto the franchise and uh Rogue Nation on the last film, Uh coming into it, what kind of like aesthetic ideas did you have. I mean I kind of felt like, you know, JJ revitalized the series, uh twelve years ago now, which is crazy. I had Brad bird On recently talking about incredible stupid We talked to him. I felt what Brad did really sent things heading in the direction that you

guys have been shipping away out lately. And so when you came in, I just want to know what you wanted to do to really put your stamp on it on on Rogue. What I decided to do was something of the greatest hits. I was going to bring back. Ah. I was going to bring back the members of the team that that it felt like people had responded most to which were vague, and that Simon um And and I wanted to I wanted to tip my hat to the to the four previous movies. It was a little

bit of an anniversary thing. It was just shy of twenty years when the movie came out. Um and I also knew what I do is I take all the movies, on the last movie and again on this movie. I laid them all on top of each other and see what haven't the film's done? What's what's something that's missing from all of those movies, um and I and what I wanted in Rogue Nation was a villain who was a physical threat to Ethan and kind a really strong woman who wasn't a member of the team. And we

ended up with one of those two things. Um Sean Harris, who I had seen in Harry Brown. It became much more of an intellectual threat. He was more of a moriarity to Ethan's Holmes uh than he was, you know, a physically dangerous presence. The danger you feel around Sean is what is his unpredictability as opposed to his physical mass. Um And so that was it. That was the really nice holdover. I was glad we didn't do that because that allowed for Henry cavill in this movie, you can

play with it. Now, how about visually? Um, you know that there is an aesthetic I think even connected all the way back to Di Palma. I think it was consistent in a way. But changing that up when you came in, was there anything that you wanted to do? Was there any were there any touchstones, like any kind of reference points that you had had an idea for the look of the film than for Rogue or for this one for Rogue and then we'll go and then

this one. Yeah, when you came in, Yeah, for Rogue, Tom and I watched a lot of north By, Northwest and Notorious. We talked a lot about Hitchcock, and and of course to Paluma is a is a huge disciple of of Hitchcock. Um, I am less so I definitely

am a huge admirer of h Hitchcock's work. Uh. And the the opera sequence, which a lot of people look at as an homage to the Man who Knew Too Much, was actually more inspired by the Key to Reservo, which was which was sort of a send up of Hitchcock that Martin Scorsese did, And while I wasn't trying to recreate that, I used that as an example of how you could take opera or in this case, a concert,

which because I think Tom's concerned. When I first presented the idea of an opera to him, he was worried that it was going to be this boring opera scene. Um, and I said, no, no no, no, no no, it's going to be more like this here. Look look at it, look at this, Look at this little nine minute thing. Um. So visually it's really interesting. I I did not think in terms of locations as much as I thought in

terms of uh environments that invite an action. And in every one of those instances in Rogue Nation, where the the action scenes were dictated by something that was brought to me, um and when and in the third act, we we did really have the third act, and my my team was very frustrated because they needed to know what they were prepping. And I said, I don't know what we're prepping because I don't have the location yet. And they said, well, we can't give you a location

until we know what the scene is. And I said, I could write the scene, and then we'll be killing ourselves trying to find a location. And the real breakthrough I had late in that process was the insistence that

we start with location. UM, My visual sense did not really kick in until midway through that movie, because I was so busy working on the screenplay and trying to execute that, and so busy trying to figure out the motorcycle chase and the underwater sequence that I really didn't have the confidence to push back on my cinematographer or to trust my instincts about lighting until I started editing the movie over the Christmas break I had about two weeks UM, and as I was putting it together, I

was like, well, why does certain things work for me? And why does certain things not? Why do I like the photography in this scene and not like the photography in that scene? And what is it about my writing or my style of directing that is dictating the good and the bad in what I'm doing? I was? I was. I spent a lot of time analyzing what had gone

right as well as what had gone wrong. So when I came back from the Christmas break, I was much more confident to to start to mandate certain things about lighting and photography that I was not comfortable with before. And I applied all of that too. I applied all of that too, fall up from the very beginning. The thing you mentioned earlier about the opera, and Tom was worried that maybe it wouldn't be slower or something. I'm

curious if that's is that a consistent hurdle? Is he is he like always trying to like, like thinking that something might not be as amped up as he wants it to be, or anything quite the eposit What Tom really wants is he wants things to breathe, and he wants he likes the word he uses all the time, it is elegant. And you know, he loves he loves Hitchcock, he loves the classic UH Studio system style movies. And we find ourselves constantly trying to do that and being

thwarted by an audience that's just not buying it. They don't they don't have the patients, they don't have the they don't have the conditioning to just sit there and enjoy. You have to be constantly engaging them. And so we were very pleasantly surprised with this movie that, um, the only time we didn't have a problem with the test audiences were those were those scenes that we thought were

going to be the first things to go. All the character stuff and you know that the scene where Ilsa is following Ethan through the through Paris, that is the definition of shoe leather. That's a that's a moment that gets cut out of the movie after the first test scre name and I kept waiting for people to come

for it, and they never did. And meanwhile we found ourselves getting notes on this movie that there was too much action, the car chase was too long, the helicopter chase was too long, and that stuff we know how to fix. We have sinse. Yeah, well what you saw is definitely the pair down version of it. But you'd

be surprised. There's it doesn't take much. Sometimes it takes us as few as as too sometimes even one shot where if there there was a moment when Ethan and the motorcycle drive away from us and we let them get away from us before jumping back in the car. And when we took that shot out, all the notes about the car chase went away because you just tweet little things. Well, it's just because the car chase kept going, but you were left behind and you had to catch

back up with it. Uh And and it's a it's a it's a classic Hitchcock technique of filmmaking, which is you grabbed the audience by the throat and you never let go. And this movie was engineered to do that. It was also engineered to start quietly and get bigger and bigger and bigger as it as it went on, we didn't understand how big. We really had no grasp of it. Interesting. Uh, these kinds of movies often you'll have like a cadre of writers on them. You know,

you you're the writer, director, single vision. Um, I want to talk about on the page. Uh, you know, how do action set pieces come to you? How do you how do you find yourself writing them in ways that are different than maybe you were taught to right screenplays? Uh? You know, because there's such you know what I mean. Yeah, we'll give you two examples. The foot Chase. I knew what it was before I wrote it, described its story boarded it, and simply did not have the time to

generate the pages. So I brought in a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, and I said, here's all my nights. Would you just please write this in script form because it's it was twelve or thirteen pages, and I was working on other stuff and I write very specific action. I write. What I do with writing action is I write everything I want you to see in the order I want you to see it. So it my action sequences tend to be long in their description and incredibly

boring to read. There's nothing more boring than reading a car chase. But you write that out because you want to communicate to your crew. It's not really am meant for anybody else to read. It's a it's a very dry technical document. The helicopter chase was another instance where this the the The script form of the helicopter chase was an afterthought to figuring out what exactly is the helicopter chase um and how that all came together. I'll give you the very short version. Tom said, I want

to do a helicopter chase. I'm gonna learn how to fly, figure out a sequence that I can fly in. Uh So, the first thing you have to ask is, well, where are we actually shooting this sequence? Doesn't matter where I think it should be some something. The production is going

to dictate where I can go. And very few countries were comfortable letting Tom cruise with six weeks of training, come and fly aerobatics over their country, and of those countries there was there were very We were looking at the most photographically interesting one, what's going to have the most vibrant color, what's going to be And these were things I was not thinking about when I was doing rog Nation Rognation. I was just trying to execute the story. Uh,

And we very quickly settled on New Zealand. New Zealand is not a hotbed of political intrigue. It's it's a far flung corner of the world and it's sent the country as national parks. There's no terrorism plot that's going to that's going to kick off in New Zealand and plausibly. So we said, well, what does New Zealand look like? And then that became Kashmir. So Kashmir suddenly entered into the story and I had to come up with reasons

for why was this ending in Kashmir. Then I had to decide, well, if Ethan is flying in the helicopter, what's the rest of the team doing. If this is an in sequence, I don't have to answer that. The team can just you can just introduce them doing a little bit of banter. If it's the climax of the movie, they all have to have a vital role in stopping

whatever the ticking clock is. We didn't even know what the ticking clock was at that point, but I knew from Rogue Nation how once you add the scene, once you add the team to the scene, the scene becomes exponentially larger and more complex. We had tried to to develop the A four hundred as a team sequence instead of just a stunt, and the movie really came together when I just let that go, that that is the pebble that starts rolling down the hill that ultimately creates

an avalanche. And and so I had a helicopter chase. I knew, I knew that it was taking place in New Zealand. I knew that the team had to be involved. I knew uh and and and and ideally they were split up. So I started to have an understanding of, well, whatever they're working on there, there at least in there's at least two bits of parallel action going on on the ground. Three is probably too many. And how is the helicopter chase going to begin? And how's it going

to end? It's really boring to get in a helicopter throw on all the switches. So I had to figure out a way to get Ethan in the helicopter, and then I had to figure out a way to get him out and have a fight with the villain, because this chase is going to be really boring if it just if it just ends with the chase. So I knew I was going to have spoiler alert a mid air collision, and and now I'm thinking plausibly in my mind, we'll have two helicopters collide. They're not gonna land together.

It's gonna be extremely it's gonna go from chaos to extreme chaos. And I went to my production designer and my visual effects guys um and said, what I need you to do is I need you to create a bathroom sink. So if I dropped two marbles in a bathroom sink, no matter where I dropped them, they're going to meet at the drain, and I want both marbles to go down the drain and bill out onto this cliff side somewhere and we'll have this climactic fight on

a on a cliff's edge. Um. And the problem is that in New Zealand, there is no mountain like that. And the problem with New Zealand is very beautiful that's not a problem with New Zealand. Is the unique feature of New Zealand is that there's very little in the way of precipitous drops. It's mostly sloping cliffs, um or and and places that did have a precipitous drop didn't have any sort of plateau. Uh. And so I put

that to my um my location guy. And in fact, it was the only thing the entire movie that I specifically asked for from my locations. Everything else was I mandated to them. Go find me stuff that looks cool and I'll tell you what's happening there. This was the one time where I said I need this and he brought me a picture of Pulpit Rock and Norway. So right then I knew my helicopter chase starting in New Zealand would have a lot of transitional elements in England

and it would end in Norway. And in fact, that helicopter impacted probably about thirty seconds of screen time. You're you you travel through three countries. That's crazy movie magic, right, Yeah. Um, you know, your your Twitter feed is a wealth of information. It was a nice uh made for nice prep for today. One thing you were talking about yesterday that blew my mind was just the focus pulling on the halo jump,

which just walk people through this. I mean, first of all, first of all, I want to ask, what was the drive to do it this way when it's something that you could probably just do in a wind tunnel or whatever. Uh talk Really, I mean, we any any of the stuff that you see in Mission Impossible, we could very easily do on a stage somewhere. It will not give you the same visceral energy that you're experiencing when you watch your start doing it. And I'm able to shoot

things in a way that I couldn't otherwise. Be honestly, how much is that him also just wanting to have that experience. Um, there's no doubt that there's a large element of him having a great time doing it. But for Tom, it's not about hey, look at me, it's look at Ethan. It's putting it what it enables me

to do. And I had read somewhere today somebody uh somebody sent an email to my wife who had watched the film, and they completely nailed what my intention, which is often very rare, um that he felt like he was a spectator in those sequences. He felt like he was there, which is very much why I placed the camera where I do. I shoot everything in a somewhat voyeuristic point of view, but not a voyor ap peering into the room from the doorway. You're right over Henry

Cavill's shoulder, You're right over Tom's shoulder. Um. And so Tom and I work together to create that sort of immersive experience so that you're with Ethan and you feel what's what's happening, You're just that much more invested. That's really what we're after. UM. So when Tom said he wanted to do a halo sequence, I knew right away first order of business is I had to pull him out as opposed to push him out, that the camera had to be looking at Ethan and going backwards off

the back of the plane. And I knew right away I needed to play bigger than the A four hundred C seventeen was the only plane to do it. There was a lot of it said. There were attempts to discourage us from that and to use the C one thirty. I knew the C one thirty was not going to be as big. It just wasn't going to be as there's almost a spaceship quality to the C seventeen. It's got kind of a weird interior environment that looks a

little bit surreal, especially when it's empty. Um and that was again me pushing the visual palette in a way that I had uh So we then had to figure out, well, what kind of cameras it going to be. Is going to be steadicam? Is it going to be handheld? We then decided that we were going to do as much of the scene in the plane before Tom went out,

so that you you and once I decided that. Once we decided that, I said, well, if we're gonna have a warner inside the plane, we might as well keep going and just do the whole thing as a warner. And we devised it originally as five pieces that could be stitched together, and we masked those stitches. The lightning strike hides one of the stitches. His collision with Henry hides one of those stitches. They're originally five shots, and

we distilled them down to three. But of course in doing that, you're adding more action to each of those three segments, and they become exponentially more complicated to get right. Because I could get four out of the five things right, and if number five is not right, I've got to do the whole thing all over again. So we were making complicated for ourselves that way to make it more complicated. There was not a cameraman in the world who could

do what we wanted him to do. There were, there were skydiving videographers, but they were not cinema camera operators who could jump out of a plane with twenty pounds of camera equipment strapped to the top of their head. So we had to train a guy forwards and backwards. Yes, everything Ginger Rogers did um. So we had to train a guy in narrative storytelling. We had to train him how to shoot a warner and and understanding where to direct the eye. What what What these guys are used

to doing is image capturing. They get a watch and they shoot all the action. They don't zoom in on somebody and follow their island and not doing visual stories. And they're not doing visual story to And that is a that's a skill that I've honed over twenty years and been able to communicate in a shorthand. It's it's it's something. If you watch the four firms I've directed, you can see it mutate from movie one to to

the most recent. So reminding somebody whose job it is to keep the action in the center of the frame that no, Tom Cruise is not the center of the frame. Tom Cruise's point of view is the center of the frame. So that when Tom, when the camera's on Tom's oh, you know, on his left side, and Tom looks to his right so that the back of his head is to him, you want the camera to actually pan slightly left and open up the deep background. That's not his instinct.

And so time and again he'd be jumping out of the plane and shooting Tom and you'd say, no, you've got to shoot empty space. You have to shoot where he's looking. And he's like, yeah, but there's nothing there, and we're saying that's exactly right. You're saying there's nothing there. That's really antithetical to him, and he had to learn

a whole new set of skills. To make it more complicated, we decided that this was a nighttime sequence, which meant we had to shoot at at dusk so that it could be dark enough that it looked like nighttime, but not so dark that you lost all of the detail in Tom's clothing, he's wearing black and Henry's wearing dark green.

You had to shoot it just this razor edge between night and day, and you had three minutes of available light every day, So we had to be in the plane at a specific time, and that plane had to be over the drop zone and where it and it's relative position to the drop zone changed every night based on where the wind was. So there's an enormous amount of calculation that went into when does the plane take off, when it where is it over the drop zone? When

does it have to be there? When can Tom jump out? And if he was thirty seconds too early or thirty seconds too late, the shot was screwed. And you know, we could we could tie it down a little if it was too bright, but the problem was you saw atmosphere and haze and you and the other problem was if it was too bright, there was ambient light on Tom. It just ends. So when you try to make it look like night, it wouldn't look like night. It would

look like bad day for night photography. So it was incredibly um unforgiven the light conditions and making that more complicated the focus issues at that This is insane level of light were incredibly intolerant. Tom had to be three ft basically from where I'm sitting from you to me

right now, and they would measure that. Uh. Tom would lay on the table so like he would lay like he was falling in space, and the cameraman would walk around the table and the guy with the tape measure would show all the measurements, and he would practice with the focus. But he's not looking through the camera. He can't.

He's just got a little crosshair over one eye, cameras on top of his head, so not he has to remember not to look at Tom, but actually look eight inches below Tom, so that the cameras actually doing the look.

And it's essentially like filming a move be through a periscope and not being able to look through the periscope and and having to remember from sense memory in a room not much bigger than the one we're in now, what three feet feels like, and then pre create that distance at ft at in different light conditions while falling anywhere from a hundred and sixty to two hundred miles

an hour towards the Earth. And Tom had to then jump out after the cameraman whose job it is to go faster than Tom to get away from him and then allow Tom to catch up to him. And as Tom and Tom has to stop himself, and there's no he can't brace himself against anything. He has to he has to slow his ascent so that stopping is actually not stopping. It's just coming in perfect sync with the camera operators. So you're falling at the same speed, exactly

three ft away from each other. And if he was three inches too deep or three inches too far back, he's out of focus. Because the camera parador knew the best he could do is bury the focus aperture. I guess that's completely It's this little device he had in his hand. He just buried the focus to minimum and then let Tom fall into He couldn't then adjust back. If Tom he could, he couldn't gauge it. And the

first two times we did it, Tom was out of focus. Um, and we were struggling with well, whose fault is this? You know? Tom was saying, I was three ft from that camera. I said, is it possible that your depth perception is a little bit skewed because we measured it in a in a ten by ten room, and now you're twenty ft in the air. Is it possible you could be a couple inches off on your mark? And he said, man, I'm telling you I was three ft

from that camera. And he said, look at my hands in the front, Look at where my hands are on the edge of the frame. And I know and I know Tom very well. He knows lens is well enough that he understands where the edge of frames. I've seen him do it times and sure enough it matched our rehearsals. So I looked at Craig O'Brien, the camera operator, and I said, Craig, what are you doing? He goes, man, look at the look at the thing. And he showed

me how the focused thing works. You couldn't make a mistake. You just you pinned. You just pinned it all the way to the left. And I said, well, what's wrong. It's it's either Tom or it's Craig. And maybe Craig slow getting to the focus. We couldn't figure it out, and eventually Tom would come into focus, but it was very slow to get there. And on the third night Craig went home. We were very frustrating because you can't

move on to the next shot. And Craig went home and had this epiphany, and he came back to work that night. We had a second focus poller on the plane because the shots on the plane required much more radical focus moves that this little wand that Craig had couldn't do. So we had actually two focus pollers, one who had a radio remote. Um and Craig came to work and he said, it's you. He said, when we jump out of the plane, you gotta shut off your remote.

The camera is still connected to your remote and they're fighting with each other and he goes, that's not possible. We lost picture right away. And he said, I'm telling you that's what it is. And he goes, you guys are falling at a hundred sixty miles an hour. We're traveling at a hundred and sixty miles an hour. This thing's got a range of like a couple hundred feet max. And he just said, just when I jump out the plane,

turn off the focus. And he goes, you understand, if I shut off the focus and your focus doesn't kick in, you're not going to get the shot. And we jumped out of the plane and sure enough, he just as soon as they went out of the plane, he shut the focus off and there's a delay of several seconds before the focus comes in and it just caught right. Tom fell into the camera and we got the shot. Where are you doing all of this? Are you done

on the ground? I am? Alternately, It would depend. There were times I was on the round, There's times I'm on the plane. And the truth of the matter is beyond my directing the cameraman after he shot the shop, after he's all we can do is look at the shot, study it, and say here's how you do it better

next time. It didn't matter where I was. I could have been in my hotel, because there was I So I was on the ground in a trailer which the editor Eddie Hamilton's had brought the movie out, and we were cutting in the trailer while they were rehearsing all day, and they were rehearsing these jump spot to seven times

a day, waiting for the light to be right. He only had one take a day, so I would be in my trailer cutting and they would periodically come and get me as Tom and Craig landed, and I'd get in the van with them and drive back to the airstrip and we'd review the footage. I'd give them notes and then I'd go back to the editing room and they go back up in an airplane. Sometimes I went up and um. And when we went to FET the first time I went up, I was like, I wanted

to if I want to experience that UM. And that involved a twenty minute breathe up. So you're on the plane huffing oxygen for twenty minutes that you don't get the bends. And I just after I did that a few times, I just said, there's I love being here, and I love being supported, but there's that's there's better use of my time. We were we were so desperately late on editing the movie. Uh, and this sequence was

going on longer and longer and longer. Uh. And there's and there is something slightly surreal about standing in an airplane calling action and then watching your entire crew just jump out of a plane and leave you standing there. Uh. And you and you have to go back and wonder who made it. You're flying back to see okay, is everybody all right? I was much more comfortable waiting on the ground. I kind of just picture you, like on a chaise lounge with a monitor being fed grapes, what things.

I would love that if only it were that. Um, by the way, how does all this kind of stuff weigh on? Like like, what do the conversation is with the insurance company? Which, fortunately, that's it. That's a Jake Meyer's question, our producer, Jake, You've got to ask him. I ask it, and I always get very technical answers that I that are completely unmemorable. Um, it's a. It's a it's a simple matter of you know, whether we're risking Tom's life or that of a stunt man, it's

it's the same. It's the same relative risk. The only difference being that if anything happens to Tom, we that's severe. We don't finish the movie, whereas in the event of a stuntman you can, you can keep going. But it's they've been doing it so long, and the and the and the the The calculated risk is very very carefully thought out. When you're watching a stunt with Tom, We've eliminated as many variables as we can. And what what I try to do is create the stunt so that

Tom is the only variable. Tom or the stuntman around him, So while he's driving through Paris, he's in control of that bike, and all the cars around him are being driven by stunt drivers. They're all professionals. So while it looks crazy and chaotic, it's actually it's it's very carefully planned and control. The variable is there's a language barrier. A lot of the guys, we're a lot of the stunt guys working in Paris are local guys. They're French.

And every now and again somebody didn't quite get the message and their car was not where Tom expected it to be. That's the scary stuff. But I know that if Tom, if Tom has the slightest concern uh about being able to control the bike, whether it's the cobblestones are cold or they're wet, or they're slick because they're they've been there for however many decades or centuries, he'll he'll just he'll back off. He'll he'll just say, you know,

we can't do this. It's not say uh, he's not He's not some lunatic who's so determined to get the shot he's going to kill himselves. Did very careful. I wanted to talk, just go back a bit, you know, between uh the way of the gun and Jack reach or that's twelve years and you know you were writing and doing plenty of that time. But were you itching to get back to the director's chair. Um, yeah, I was.

I was. Uh. It's funny. I I didn't start out with the ambitions of being a director, and my ambitions to become a director were all born from wanting to do one movie. I wanted to make a film about Alexander the Great. I saw it so vividly that I wanted to do it, and and everything about directing was in pursuit of that. And when and we I developed a script, I couldn't get it made. I sold it to Graham King g K Films, who attached Martin Scorsese

and Leonardo DiCaprio. And it was a big moment for me of letting go of a dream project because I hold onto those things very very tightly. Um. And I was developing that project for seven years. Many people had asked me to give it up. Many people had asked me to attach actors that I didn't want, And Graham King was the first guy to sit me down and say here's the deal, Like, here's how here's how it works.

You need a star to get the movie made. My all, the foreign distribute Distribution has said, you need Leonardo DiCaprio. I happen to work with Leo. I underwrite his production company's deal. And I showed him the script. He wants to do it. Is it great? And he said, Now, Leo has got a very short list of directors he wants to work with, and respectfully, your name is not on it, he said. And he said, one of the names on his list is Martin Scorsese. I know Martin

very well. I underwrite his production company. I showed him the script and he wants to do it. And the only thing left to discuss is your feet. And after seven years of holding on tightly to this thing and rejecting any sort of abstract offer to let us attach another director or let us attach another actor, it took me a split second to make the calculation of you're not going to get a better company. Martin Scorsese ney later on DiCaprio. So when he said what's your fee?

I said, the record? What's the record? What's the most anybody's ever paid for screenplay? Because I've now developed a spec script that Marty Leo want so fair, What are you gonna pay me? For it. And by the way, I have two partners, so make it divisible by three. Um that what was the record? By the way, well, I will just I will just say it stands it remains. Um. So I managed to sell I sold the script. That helped too. That was one of the things that kept

me alive during all that time. Uh and may and it made my my my It took care of my partners as well. Uh and But I also learned a very valuable lesson through that and through things like Valkyrie, which were no one wanted to give me an opportunity as a director on the things that I wanted to direct. And then in order to direct the things that I wanted to direct, in order to direct Valkyrie, um, I had to make X Men. They were happy to do

it with Brian. They didn't even need to read the script when Brian Singer decided he wanted to do it. And so that was the moment where I decided to quit the film business. I just realized, I'm i'm I'm in the business of making other people's dreams have More importantly, I'm in the business of trying to get movies made. I'm not making the movies I want to make. And this is said with all gratitude, I still haven't. I've I've you know, I've made movies that other people have

wanted me to make. I've had the the the great fortune to be able to make them my way with with an enormous amount of freedom. I mean, you make a movie with Tom Cruise, the only person you have to answer to is Tom. And you know Tom has final cut in his movies, and uh and and and a track record to back it up. And Tom is somebody who's very trusting of his collaborators, who wants to learn from them, so, you know, and we get along very well, we see eye to eye and a lot

of things. So suddenly I went from a guy who couldn't make movies too, I'm making these big, giant movies and I have I have relatively wide birth, I have a lot of creative freedom. Uh. So much so that you're making a movie without even really a screenplay. Mum, that's the guest says, I want to be in the

Helicopter Chason. Then off you go to write. Yeah, you go off and you well, but more importantly, because the time is so compressed, you don't even have time to write it, You sit down with previous guys, you start building models, and you start you start working out, well, how would I actually physically do all the stuff that's around the helicopter chase part will worry about writing in a script form later. Um, that's very liberal and and

it's and it's. But at the same time, all of those dream projects that I spent all that time developing in those in between the two movies I directed, in the twelve years between my directing gigs, in the seven years between making The Way the Gun in Valkyrie, I've never made one of them. Valkyrie is the only one that's ever been made periodically. With each with each new success, someone comes around and says, what do you want to do? And I bring one of these things out and I

get the same answer. They just they don't want to do them. Still still know they don't want to do them. Here's what, here's why, And I'll tell you why. Unless I make a film that makes a billion dollars, nobody's ever going to want to make what I want to make just because I want to make it. Let's not say they won't make my movie, but I gotta get a big star attached. I got a big you know there, I'm not at a level of I'm not the director at which for whom the studio is coming and saying,

we'll do whatever you want to do. Okay, So when are you making your Marvel movie then? Because obviously the I P s are the things that but if I made a Marvel movie that made a billion dollars, it's a Marvel movie, That's what I mean. I mean, it's like Marvel guys are not going to walk away and be able to make whatever they want. They're going to

be able to make whatever Marvel movie there. Chris Nolan made The Dark Knight outside of that whole thing, and he really what he did with The Dark Knight was Chris Nolan. It wasn't Marvel telling Chris Nolan or d C telling Chris Nolan what to do. And then he part laid that into Insection and he part laid that into you Dunkirk, which now now the guy has proven not only can I make money off of comic book I P. I can make money off of World War Two? And nobody makes money off of World War two, or

at least that's a conventional wisdom. World War two movies make money all the time, but the studios to have a memory of race book that allows them to deny that that's true. The reason why no one wants to make World War two movies is because World War two movies apply appeal to older men, and nobody wants to make a one demographic movie. It's very hard to get kids to go see a War were two movies. It's

Captain America, yes, exactly, exactly. So, so I find that I find the ways to do the things I want to do in the movies that I've given. I go through the door that opens and and sure enough, after Rogue Nation, the movie did well, and and certain people came to me and said, we love this movie. What do you want to do? And I just said, watch of a script. And they either never called back, or they called back with why they couldn't do it, or uh,

you know, and it's it's they just in truth. I don't have the I don't have that financial cloud that blindfolds people to whatever it is under doing. The Nolan makes movies, makes money off of his name at this point is a brand. Nolan is the brand. There. We gotta make Christopher mcquarie a brand. Know what we're talking about. But let me tell you something. I would imagine that most of the people, even people listening to this podcast, um movie nerds, would would struggle to name ten or

twenty directors. The average person at the checkout line at your supermarket. I'll bet you they could nake two directors. They could name Spielberg and one other guy you know, and and none of them would all name the same. Second guy you might meant Michael Bay might be a contemporary guy. The directors don't really not. Most of them don't get movies made. They're essential to making a movie. Screenplays don't get movies made. And that's what I was told.

I was taught you write a good screenplay and you'll be delivered. I wrote a bunch of them. They're all still sitting in a drawer. So does that make them not good or well, no, it just means that they're not They're not things that people, they're not things that immediately scream, hey, this is gonna make a lot of money. Cabin had a hard time get an avatar made. By the way, there's another guy whose name you know, people know, that's like a household name, and Cameron is is strangely

an industry in and of himself. He exists in a completely different firmament than just about anybody. He's a he's a director that I look at that I can't put in a class with any with any others. Um So you the at the screenplay is an afterthought to the decision to make a movie. The studio decides to make a movie for different reasons a lot of times, and a lot of times they lose sight of what the agenda was and it just becomes a movie that they

have to make. And so oddly enough, I will find myself being offered World War two movies, but they're not my World War two movie. It's some other unmakeable World War two movie. And I'm going, well, well, why is this World War two movie okay? And that World War two movies not? And I remember one World War two movie was offered to me because an actress wanted to be in it because she liked the clothes, you know, and she was what made the movie go. It's that

sort of thing. There's not you can't think about it logically. If you if you apply logic to the movie this is, you'll go completely insane. You just have to look at it and say, you know, circumstances are such that one day I've got the script sitting in a drawer, and one day the right actor who's the right age and is excited about that idea, is going to want to be in that movie. Maybe I'll get to make it then, and I just don't worry about it. You just you

keep going, You just keep going. So then what do you want to do next? I mean, do you do you want I read something recently you would like to get back into the independent sector a little more? Is

that true? I? Well, I definitely what everything that, everything that I have learned has culminated in Fallout and I had I if you, if you could say anything about the movies I've made you you you, They've evolved from a writer turned writer director to a director who relies more visuals, an emotional storytelling, then dialogue and intellectual storytelling. Um usual Suspects is an intellectual magic trick as opposed to an emotional belated congratulations for the Oscar by the way,

thank you, yes, and and it's the movie. It's the thank you. It's the life draft that kept me alive during all those during all those wilderness years. Um. So yeah, I'm excited to take everything that I've learned and everything that I've seen pay off in this movie. This is the first time I've made a movie where I was able to say, this is what we're going to set out to do, and we did it. You know this, This is the feeling I want the audience to have. This is the shape of the movie I want. This

is the look of the movie I want. It's the first time I've made a movie that looks like a movie to me, from beginning to end. There aren't scenes where I go it looks more like a TV show than a movie. Um. And so I'm I'm very keen to apply that to something other than the PG thirteen blockbustery realm. I'm I'm constantly railing against the fact that we are we are chasing after a demographic that doesn't want to come to the movies. Kids don't want to

come to movies, not because they don't like movies. That the industry I think has misread it. The industry looks at it and says, well, they have a short attention span, they're all focused on their phones and blah blah blah blah, well, no, that's not true. They have an infinite attention span. They're watching thirteen hours of television in a sitting um. They like long, complicated narratives and with graphic, adult complicated situations, none of which we're giving them, none of which the

the this, this PG. Thirteen mechanism can give them. I promise you, Marvel movies are overwhelmingly their audiences are overwhelmingly adult. The kids that are going are coming with their parents, and they're and the the demographic is not nearly as rich as the as the over mission impossible, as young under twenty five demographic has dissolved from mission to all

steadily all the way to this one. I'll be very interested to see what the numbers are in this movie, if we've managed to grow it for the first time since John woo Um. That's what's what's happening is they don't have an emotional connection to the act of going to the movies. That's just not how they were raised. You and I were raised going to the movies. That was a thing you did, and it was the way

that you saw films. And and for them, the film that they love narrative, but it's coming to them through other devices that they're accustomed to seeing things on. It's always freaky to me when I see somebody on a plane watching a movie on their phone. IM portrait, right, They're not even in landscape, and I want to reach over and turn the phone sideways, let alone watching it on a big screen. Um. You you we've lost that

portion of the audience. There's no winning them back. I'm encouraged to see that this year, you know, you you've felt some growth. We see, we see the market expanding. But we didn't condition them, we didn't train them. We we in our attempt to chase after them, we were consistently hammering them with the things that they didn't want.

We misread it. Uh. And and that's that's gone. They're not coming back, maybe the next generation, but I don't think they're They're not coming back in numbers significant enough to make a difference. Right. Well, let's not end on that note. Let me just end on this. Uh. Do you have another one of these? And you do you want to go back to the mission I Possible World? And I'm also curious do you have any idea from Tom how long he wants to keep playing at Ethan

Hunt in these things. Tom will be in an iron lung being shot out of a you know, a shot out of out of the International Space Station and re entering the Earth's orbit in his nineties. He will do this until he's never gonna stop, and he'll he'll make movies right up until the moment he dies. Not interested in retirement, vacation. There's no there is no exit strategy for Tom Cruise other than, you know, other than making movies until he's he's he's got you know, Tyrone Power

died during the sword fight. That's you know. Um. I don't see another scenario for Tom. I also don't see anybody else doing Mission impossible. Uh not because they're not willing to do it. Because the discipline and the sheer amount of life long training, dedication and focus that allows him to be in the position to learn how to fly a helicopter in six weeks. You got to start really young and be building on those skills every single day of your life to get there. I don't see

an actor out there who's even started. That's not to say somebody won't come along. Somebody it. With the exception of Jackie Chan, there was a lot of time between Buster Keaton and Tom Cruise. And that's that's really the analogy. It's Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin. Um, do I have another one in me? I When he asked me to do five, I had just seen Brad Bird do four and thought, I never want to do that job. It's really hard and it's really exhausting and terrifying and uncertain.

When I finished five, I said, I feel sorry for the son of a bit she directs this next one, because I don't know what's left. And then the joke was on me. I was the guy. Um. And I know, now, with the reception of this movie, how do you top that? How do you top the not only the the audience reaction, but the critical reception to this movie. The concept of facing that again is so overwhelming it's too much to contemplate.

At the same time, now, having been working with Tom for twelve years us on this this and and feeling the momentum steadily gaining with everything that we've learned and applied, I know it's possible. I know it's I know, I know, I know this movie, which seems untoppable, can be topped, and somebody will top it. Whether I can survive being the one who tries to is another question, um, and one that's just it's just too Dante to contemplate. Yeah,

probably not. They ask a question to ask right this second. Yeah, I will tell you this when the when the movie ended, when Tom and I sat down to watch the movie at the premier in Paris, was the first time we saw it together and the credits rolled and he nudged me and he said, yeah, we can do better. He was he was ready to go. And we got on the plane to fly to to Korea to keep promoting the movie, and he was already talking about the next sequence. He was like, this is what I want to do next.

He's got he's got a half full of ideas. And look here's the thing I have learned from Tom. There is no such thing as personal limitations. And if you had told me ten years ago, if you've shown me this movie and said, yeah, you directed that like bullshit, there's just no way. There's no way I would. I would I would have the imagination or the technical knowledge. I just I can't do and I look at stuff that other people do and go I could never do that. Um, Tom.

Tom was always there to just to say, here's what we need to do. It's not Hey, he's not like cheer cheerleader Rob Rob. He's like, this is what we gotta do. And he asks for something really really difficult to do with a very specific set of practical parameters that you understand. It's the unwritten law of mission impossible. I gotta do it for real. So when he says something outrageous you your first thought is other people's first thought as oh, we could do that on green screen

and do it very easily. We did it in and the list five movies and it's like, yeah, well we're not those five movies or mission impossible, so we got to do it for real. Puts you in a place now where I'm so conditioned. I'm so there's there's you don't even ask the question anymore, and you don't concern yourself what can we do it or not. It's like I gotta get done. It's not even let's figure it out. It's like the work we will be doing this um and so yeah, I know, I definitely know it can

be done. It's the concept of it is so extremely daunting. I remember on Edge of Tomorrow when he came to me with Edge of Tomorrow and said, you know, this is gonna be This is gonna be a really funny movie. He said, it is a funny movie. I said, no, it's not reading the script and it's not funny. He goes, no, but it's gonna be. It's gonna be an He had a real vision for what that movie was. Um, I never would have thought. I never would have thought it

turned out the way that it did. Ever, so now I just don't even I don't even think about it. What I do know, for absolutely, for absolute certain, is whatever I do next with the success of this movie, I'm going to get crushed. I'm gonna get kicked to the teeth. It's just you can't. You can't. You can't go on that sort of ride and not have the pendulum swing back the other way. There's just and there's no more room for the pengu pendulum to swing. It's

whatever whatever I do will be a disappointment. It'll be it'll be devastaying. Well, I don't want to end on that note either, but I guess that's let me tell you that's a good note, tenda, Because it's really important to understand think there is no success without failure, you don't learn anything. I'm not learning anything from this experience. This we we got off lucky, we got you know,

this is great. It all turned out. You're There will be no brooding, There will be no knee sitting at home saying what I did on the Way of the Gun, which is what happened? What went wrong? What could you've done? I've done better. All you're asking now is how can I do better than that? That's not the right question to be asking. The question you want to ask is how can I improve? Not how do I top myself.

That's not a healthy place to come from. I didn't come into this trying to a better movie that goes protocol. I didn't come to fall Out trying to make a better movie than Roade Nation. I just kept my head down and said, just do the best you can and the the the most important lessons I've learned in my career have been those lessons that I learned when I got flattened after directing The Way of the Gun, that that time's coming, and it's just the pain you feel

is your own show breaking. You have to do that. That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to the you know, uh to the deep tissue massage that that will be, but you just have to breathe into it. It's it's a it's a it's a technics shop. It's gonna hurt. It's good for you, but you gotta get it. That doesn't mean you get it, you get in line for the Yeah, here's to failure next time. For now, though, this is high level Madman, just amazing filmmaking, So thank you,

hats off. Everybody goes see Admission Impossible, fallout comes out tomorrow or tonight as you just tonight. Yes, that's like great, go see a bunch of times you'll want to trust me and Christopher Quarry. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, thank you, great questions. Thank you,