ILLUSTRATION BY RAJ DHUNNA
The first thing you should know about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is that it’s finished filming. Finally. “Today was the last day of principal photography on Mission: Impossible 7,” smiles writer-director Christopher McQuarrie as he catches up with Empire on Zoom. It’s 29 October 2022 when we speak. Shooting began just over two years earlier, when Tom Cruise rode a motorbike off a cliff. Since then, McQuarrie’s had to juggle both pandemic interruptions and filming on Part Two, but now he’s been able to finish what he started. “It seems as though the movie, singular, has been shooting forever, but in fact the movies, plural, have been shooting forever,” he laughs.
The second thing you should know is that — with Ethan Hunt’s return still some way off — McQuarrie is keeping mum on plot details for now. Suffice it to say that, “There are many things emerging from Ethan’s past. ‘Dead reckoning’ is a navigational term. It means you’re picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters.”
He does, though, promise “a more emotionally charged movie, rather than a plot-charged action movie”. Which is not to say that the Cruise/ McQuarrie team that brought you such favourites as Clinging To A Plane, Falling Out Of Another Plane and Going To The Toilet With Henry Cavill will skimp on the adrenaline rushes. There’s a breakneck car chase through Rome featuring a Fiat 500 (“I would not choose to get in that car again,” laughs McQuarrie. “It’s much scarier than flying over a glacier in New Zealand in a helicopter”); the aforementioned, and frankly insane, motorcycle/parachute jump; an intense foot chase and fight sequence through the streets of Venice; a major fight on top of a moving train; and a desert-set sequence which McQuarrie has wanted to do forever. “The first thing we knew was that if it’s gonna be a big two-part adventure, it’s got to be epic,” he says. “It’s going to have to be the instalment that swallows the rest of the franchise whole. There’s just not another way to do it.” We’re gonna need a bigger fuse.