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.