ON MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING PART ONE, TOM CRUISE AND DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER Mc QUARRIE FOUND THEMSELVES BATTLING ALL SORTS OF ELEMENTS, RESPONDING BY MAKING THINGS UP AS THEY WENT. THIS, THEY TELL EMPIRE, WAS THEIR MOST INSANE PRODUCTION YET. STRAP IN… 

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

Christopher McQuarrie had a problem. He was well into production on Mission:

Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One when the news came through. Berlin was no longer going to let him use an under-construction airport he had earmarked. “We were going to shoot this airport sequence and a foot chase there,” he says. “And then Berlin said, ‘No, we’re too close to the opening of the airport.’” Suddenly, the foot chase was off. The airport sequence was out. Another punch to roll with, on a production packed with them.

“Then Abu Dhabi said, ‘Well, we have an airport,’” recalls McQuarrie. “And we said, ‘Great — instead of a foot chase, let’s do something in the desert.’” Which is how McQuarrie, his star/ producer/creative partner Tom Cruise, and the cast and crew of Dead Reckoning wound up in Abu Dhabi, making what McQuarrie calls “the hardest, hardest sequence I have ever had to work out. Now, it’s a sequence of which we are immensely, immensely proud. But it’s like everything else on Mission — if I’d known going in, I would never have done it.”

Welcome to the McQuarrie/Cruise method of making movies, honed over the course of their decade-and-change working relationship, through the likes of Valkyrie (co-written by McQuarrie), Jack Reacher (which he wrote and directed) and Top Gun: Maverick (which he co-wrote and produced), plus a whole host of Mission: Impossibles. It is loose, it is improvisational (except for the big stunts, which are planned with military precision), it is not for studios that are faint of heart or shallow of pocket. It is, says Tom Cruise, “never boring”, the star unleashing that laugh. “Never boring. It’s constantly evolving. You have to be pretty unrelenting, and honest with yourself about stories and structure and what’s working and what’s not. I don’t want to stop until it’s right.”

Which pretty much sums up the experience of making Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, aka Mission: Impossible 7, aka the first part of a two-part epic that sees Cruise’s Ethan Hunt face his greatest challenge yet. It is both the apotheosis of that method, and the duo’s greatest challenge: a sprawling, constantly shifting, Covid-affected juggernaut that, only now, is finally slowing down. Its shoot has become the stuff of legend, with McQuarrie and Cruise and their cast and crew ploughing on through the pandemic and its prohibitive protocols, enduring numerous shutdowns (most brief, one lengthy), moving from country to country to get the best available locations. And from the first shot until the last, some two-and-a-half years elapsed. “We were in the middle of it,” recalls Cruise, “and I kept looking at McQ [McQuarrie’s nickname] going, ‘Remember, this was your idea!’”