“We don’t ever start with ambitions of big and crazy, we start with practical solutions to storytelling problems. For us, it’s never been about spectacle. Spectacle naturally follows but spectacle, frankly, is meaningless if there’s no story, says director Christopher McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning with Erik Jendresen.
Mission: Impossible (film series)
Read more about Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Part One
“In The Final Reckoning, alongside our beloved returning heroes and villains are a host of acclaimed and fascinating fresh faces, “ says McQuarrie. A key line from the film that speaks to both its core theme and the manifesto of those who have made it is this: “Everything you were, everything you’ve done, has come to this.” And that sense of culmination is something that everyone associated with The Final Reckoning has felt acutely over the course of the heroic journey – again both literal and figurative – to bring it to the screen.
The drive for this constant expansion has always been an integral part of the Mission: Impossible DNA. To the point that on each of the now four Mission movies that Tom Cruise and McQuarrie have made together, these distinctive partners have always begun with the same approach. Lighting the creative fuse before a single typewriter key has been touched – before, in fact, they have even decided whether to choose to accept a new Mission – Cruise and McQuarrie always ask themselves a question.
“Every time, we ask each other at the very start what we want to achieve with any new story,” McQuarrie reveals. “This time, when Tom asked me what I wanted to do, I said, ‘I want to make a truly global Mission movie.”
Filming on this latest installment even commenced while the cameras were still rolling on the previous one, the two films shooting concurrently until Dead Reckoning was finally completed in April 2023.
“When it was first announced that we were doing two movies, I was asked how I was feeling about that. And I said, ‘I’m terrified. This is a tall order. If you say that you’re making a two-part movie, you’d better tell a story that swallows the franchise whole,’” the director remembers. “And that truly became the mandate, as you will see with this. The Final Reckoning is telling a story that encompasses the entire franchise, going back to the very first film.”
What powers this chapter of that story is the team’s fight to find their way back to each other, against all the odds. “That’s the engine that drives this film,” McQuarrie says. “It’s very much a journey, quite Homeric. Most importantly, it is very, very internal because Ethan is away from the team for so much of the movie. He is alone in ways that we haven’t seen him in these films before. At the same time, it could never stop being a story about the entire team. That presented a unique challenge which, in turn, produced some unique solutions.”
As Cruise has it, The Final Reckoning will show audiences Ethan Hunt through a completely new lens. “Because it’s a culmination of all of Mission: Impossible, you’re going to see Ethan from the very beginning and understand him in a whole different way,” he says.
On set, the filmmaking process, as is always the way on a Mission movie, proved to be an ever-changing beast to tame, Cruise and McQuarrie’s tendency to think on their feet and listen to the movie – “to where it wants to take us,” McQuarrie says – meaning a plot constantly in flux, expanding and focusing in on itself along the way.
That, says Cruise, is just the nature of things on Mission: Impossible. “That’s Mission and that’s movies,” he smiles. “That’s being a pilot. That’s living life. You can prepare for everything, and the better prepared you are, the better you’re equipped for the obstacles that could potentially make things go off the rails. But you also need to have the confidence to deviate from the plan. It’s not stuff that ever bothers me. You just go, ‘Okay, how do I make this an opportunity? How do we work within this to make everything work and find the story?’”
“I don’t want to tell the audience how to feel, what they’re going to walk away with [after watching this]. Even I, as an audience member, like to experience things for myself. For me, as a storyteller, that communication with the audience is critically important,” Cruise says. “I want them to have their experience. My films are on the whole films you have to participate with, cinema that I want the audience engaged in, not just sitting back. One of our favorite lines on these movies is always when someone says to us, ‘I bought the whole seat, and I only used the edge.’ That is what I want. That’s how I feel as an audience member when I’m engaged in a story. And on this one, we have achieved that.”
To properly appreciate why this Mission means so much to its makers means going back to the very beginning. By the mid-‘90s, with everything from Top Gun to Rain Man, A Few Good Men and Born on the Fourth of July already under his belt, Cruise was by most metrics enjoying a ludicrously successful
career.
But he hadn’t just been acting. Cruise had spent the best part of the past 15 years studying every aspect of the filmmaking process, from its foundations up, observing up close directors like Francis Ford Coppola (on The Outsiders), Ridley Scott (on Legend) and Martin Scorsese (on The Color of Money) as well as a whole host of celebrated cinematographers including the iconic Owen Roizman, who Cruise worked with on Taps but who had already shot no less than the likes of The French Connection, The Exorcist and Network.
Having made it his mission to understand how each head of department achieved innovative excellence, how producers like Stanley Jaffe and Jerry Bruckheimer, for instance, marshalled mammoth productions with a cohesive creative vision, Cruise now felt it was time to pour everything he’d learned into producing a movie of his own.
With multiple options open to him, the film Cruise settled on for his first as a producer seems now like a sure thing. Back then, that was far from the case. To date, Cruise’s big screen adaptation of Mission: Impossible has generated nearly $5 billion in box office. But in the early ‘90s, it was a concept that many felt had largely run out of steam.
The original TV series, launched by Bruce Geller in September 1966, played out on CBS over 171 hour-long episodes, across seven seasons, and concluded in March 1973. A sequel series, released to less fanfare, ran for just two years, from 1988 to 1990. It looked like its spy-centric, mask-shifting escapades might be a product of the past.
“I brought Mission to the studio [Paramount Pictures] when Sherry Lansing [who produced seminal late ‘80s and early ‘90s talking-point pictures like Fatal Attraction, The Accused and Indecent Proposal] and Stanley Jaffe [who produced Fatal Attraction and The Accused with Lansing, as well as Cruise’s Taps, and the Best Picture-winning Kramer vs. Kramer] said to me, ‘Please produce movies,’” Cruise says now. “I was like, ‘Okay, my first one for you is going to be Mission: Impossible.’”
Cruise knew that here was a film that could be the start of something special, a story with the potential to evolve alongside him. Others in the industry were a little less certain. “People laughed, like, ‘You’re doing a TV series?’” Cruise remembers. “I was like, ‘Yeah. I got some ideas about it.’”
One of the key things he has learned from the many talented people he has worked with over his career – to add to the list of directors above, Cruise also namechecks both Sydney Pollack, who directed him in The Firm, and Brian De Palma, from his first Mission: Impossible – is this: ultimately, every element on a movie must come down to both character and story. Anything else is redundant.
“Motion informs character and story. Set design informs character and story. Lighting and the skills you learn inform character and story,” Cruise says. “Whatever it is you’re learning to do, whether it’s riding a motorcycle, driving a car, dancing, singing, studying thrillers, whatever it is, it’s always then about applying it. ‘What story can we tell with this? What challenges are ahead of us?’”
For The Final Reckoning, Cruise took that ethos and married it to the same excellence in execution he implemented on another of his landmark sequels – Top Gun: Maverick, that Cruise starred in, McQuarrie co-wrote (Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer were also screenplay writers, with a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks), and they both produced with Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison.
“On this movie, we’ve taken everything we learned from the level of storytelling on Top Gun: Maverick and applied it to a new film that is the culmination of eight films. The idea behind them both was the same. We always wanted the audience to be seated in the lore of the franchise in a way that they have never seen before, to give them throughlines that genuinely resonate,” McQuarrie says.
It is impossible to overstate how seismically significant the filmmaking partnership between Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie has been on the direction the Mission: Impossible franchise has taken since they first joined forces on it. Or how uniquely potent it is. The Final Reckoning marks their 11th movie together – and their greatest achievement.
In McQuarrie, Cruise has discovered what he calls his “creative brother”, a collaborator with whom he feels he can make the impossible possible. “For me, to have that partnership with McQ is a dream come true,” Cruise says. “I always wanted that, always wanted someone who is just as passionate about movies as I am. I’m impressed by McQ every day. We share a passion for the language of movies.”
“On the last movie, Tom wanted to jump a motorcycle off a cliff, I wanted to wreck a train. That’s how that movie started. And that’s what we did,” McQuarrie says. “With this one, Tom wanted to walk on the wing of a plane, and I wanted to shoot a submarine sequence, so that’s what we’ve done.”
McQuarrie’s love for submarine movies stretches back to his childhood obsession with Ice Station Zebra, John Sturges’ North Pole-set thriller starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine, and his continued fascination with seeing these metallic hulks on screen, most notably in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. And it’s not like Cruise, who has long been fascinated with the underwater explorations of Jacques Cousteau, was ever arguing.
“Submarines are one of the most amazingly cinematic environments,” McQuarrie says. “I just love the language of them. The culture on a submarine is a very specific world with very specific jargon, and even when you can’t understand a word the people on them are saying [in movies], it’s very, very gripping and involving. Take Crimson Tide. I don’t know what ‘zero degrees down bubble’ means, but it sounds really cool.”
Besides, McQuarrie suggests, as environments go, is there any other than could be more thematically pertinent? “I mean, look, the essence of Mission: Impossible is pressure,” the writer and director notes. “A submarine is the manifestation of a high-pressure environment. It’s basically perfect for the tone we’re trying to hit.”
“Things always start on these movies as a pebble rolling down a hill that turns into an avalanche. It always starts with a pebble: ‘Hey, I want to do a submarine sequence.’ Then it gets complicated,” McQuarrie smiles.
If you ask McQuarrie for a metaphor to describe how Mission movies are constructed, he will offer up this one: “The development of these stories is like trying to build a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces face down. You’re trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together. But you don’t know what the picture is until you flip it over. That’s what these screenplays are like. We try to remain very free and fast and loose.”
It was around 4:00am one day in early 2013, in a hotel somewhere off the south coast of England, when Christopher McQuarrie first realized that he was going to wind up directing a Mission: Impossible movie. The memory still burns bright, a full 12 years later. “My blood ran cold,” he says.
He and Tom Cruise were in the middle of making Edge of Tomorrow at the time, with Cruise starring and McQuarrie writing, and everyone else had gone to bed. “They’d probably collapsed,” McQuarrie suspects.
“That was a very challenging movie, a very challenging screenplay,” he continues of the time loop sci-fi. “It was constantly banging us in the head. Tom and I were still up, relentlessly pursuing this script problem we were at. And as we were talking, I could see that something was occurring to him. Suddenly he just said, ‘You know, you should direct the next Mission: Impossible.’ The first thing that flashed through my mind was exhaustion.”
It was around 4:00am one day in early 2013, in a hotel somewhere off the south coast of England, when Christopher McQuarrie first realized that he was going to wind up directing a Mission: Impossible movie. The memory still burns bright, a full 12 years later. “My blood ran cold,” he says. He and Tom Cruise were in the middle of making Edge of Tomorrow at the time, with Cruise starring and McQuarrie writing, and everyone else had gone to bed. “They’d probably collapsed,” McQuarrie suspects.
“That was a very challenging movie, a very challenging screenplay,” he continues of the time loop sci-fi. “It was constantly banging us in the head. Tom and I were still up, relentlessly pursuing this script problem we were at. And as we were talking, I could see that something was occurring to him. Suddenly he just said, ‘You know, you should direct the next Mission: Impossible.’ The first thing that flashed through my mind was exhaustion.”
Cruise and McQuarrie say the process of making a Mission is in some ways a process of letting the Mission tell you how it wants to be made. To approach it with a detailed plan and the courage to be prepared to abandon that plan altogether. To listen to your instincts, and the movie itself.
“It really is like that,” Cruise says. “These stories come together in a way where you think, ‘Here’s where it’s going to go, and it’s definitely going to go that way.’ Then you look at it, and it’s just not going that way. There is a certain point that the story is going to tell you what it needs, what the tone is. Until you get that lens on it, until I’m able to play around and show the progression of what this thing can do, you just don’t know. When I start doing it, that’s when we know.”
By the end of eighth film in this legendary action franchise, for both its audience and for its makers, what shines through maybe most of all when it comes to the latter is not just how they have changed Mission: Impossible, but how Mission: Impossible has changed them.
Cruise says that by now he and McQuarrie have come to know each other so well that, sometimes on set I just don’t look because I know what he’s thinking, know the lens, know what he’s doing. It all just comes naturally.”
But McQuarrie maintains that the filmmaker he is now and the filmmaker he was at the start of his Mission adventure are two very different people. That making these movies has altered him personally and profoundly.
“It is very important that you understand that I am not, by nature, an outdoor guy,” McQuarrie smiles. “My wife calls me ‘The Great Indoorsman’. I have an Irish complexion. I get sunburned very, very easily. My happy place is at my desk, shielded from the sun.”
Before working on Mission: Impossible, McQuarrie says, he wouldn’t have ever – “and to be clear, by ever, I mean ever,” he stresses – dared to get himself into any of the treacherous situations he now has.
“However, I discovered over the course of Dead Reckoning that I am in fact addicted to doing so. When I was shooting the sandstorm in the desert in Dead Reckoning, I realized, ‘God, the harder something is to shoot because of these environmental elements, the more inherently dramatic those things are.’ I realized midway through that movie that I had become addicted to a style of storytelling that meant I was going to be very, very uncomfortable for the rest of my career,” he grins. “When I’m shooting these movies, I’m constantly astonished. I am, daily, looking at what I’m doing and saying, ‘How did you get here?’ I’d describe my experience on these films as being the frog in the pan of water. I just am not aware that the water is slowly heating up until suddenly there I am, in boiling water.”
Cruise has always been passionate about all the movies he makes. But there’s something exclusively personal to him about Mission: Impossible. Perhaps that comes down to the fact that the original was his first film as a producer. Perhaps because in Ethan Hunt he has found and crafted a character who has grown wiser and braver as he has. But as he prepares to film the very final scene of The Final Reckoning, there’s a sense of sheer and sincere satisfaction to the sound of his voice.
“I always get emotional about movies. I don’t make them just to make them,” Cruise says. “When I first started out, when suddenly I realized that I was doing Taps [his first major role, in 1981], I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is happening. This is really happening.’ I remember thinking, ‘I’m never going to take this for granted. Ever.’ And I can honestly say that I haven’t, not a moment of it. It might sound insincere but that’s the damn truth.”
Whatever the movie, Cruise’s approach remains the same, to take everything he has learned to that point and put it into it, improving the film and himself in the process.
“For me, the core was, is and always will be: ‘What’s the challenge? What am I going to learn? What can I do better?’” he says. But never has that been more evident and acute than in Mission: Impossible, the series of movies that has seen him push himself to the limit and then beyond eight consecutive times.
“The complexity that has come out of the process of making The Final Reckoning is the detail and richness of the storytelling,” Cruise says. “When you’re trying to make a movie of this scale, in this era, you have many challenges. You have to face them head on and push past them. I’m fortunate, I know I am. To have that ability to build a submarine, to do what we did with the airplanes and to thrill an audience in a way that has a very authentic quality to it, I know that’s a privilege.”
Cruise pauses, proud to now be close to finishing a film that he believes is the best Mission he has ever made. “Since I was a child, I was always thinking of stories and characters and looking at houses and people and admiring their abilities, being interested in their lives, and then wanting to reflect that in cinema. In Hollywood, they used to train you to do the things you couldn’t. I just went and did it on my own,” he says. “My life has been living in rented houses and on soundstages. I just feel privileged to be able to do this and entertain an audience. That is the core and the simplicity of who I am.”
Given everything they’ve achieved over their 18 years of working together, and the past five years on this movie especially, the evening of the world premiere for The Final Reckoning will be a particularly poignant affair. But this one, says McQuarrie, will also be unique.
“After you’ve made a number of Mission: Impossibles, you learn not to trust that movie is finished until you’re watching it at the premiere because, to us, we are never done. The movie is never finished. We never, ever stop,” McQuarrie says. “That’s why, every time we have watched one of these movies at its premiere, there’s that space between the movie ending and the music starting and the credits rolling. And in that space, every time, Tom will invariably turn to me and say, ‘We can do better.’”
This time, though, will be different. “At this premiere I’ll be thinking about the premiere of the last movie, because we had shot pieces of The Final Reckoning before we had finished Dead Reckoning,” McQuarrie smiles. “At the Dead Reckoning premiere, as the credits started to roll, I knew what was coming. Tom turned to me to say it, and before he could, I turned to him. I said, ‘Tom, we already did.”
CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE (Directed, Written and Produced by) is an acclaimed director, producer, and screenwriter. His 1995 screenplay for The Usual Suspects was named by the Writer’s Guild of America as one of the greatest screenplays of all time. In addition to his credited work, McQuarrie is known throughout the industry for his uncredited contributions as a writer, editor, and production consultant.
In 2008, he co-wrote and produced Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise – a film which would lead to many more McQuarrie/Cruise collaborations. They re-teamed in 2012 for McQuarrie’s sophomore directorial effort, Jack Reacher. Within hours of completing the film, he was at work with Cruise again, this time re-writing the script for Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow. It was while working together on the sci-fi action film that Cruise suggested McQuarrie write and direct what would become Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.
In 2017, McQuarrie and Cruise re-teamed again for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the most successful installment of the franchise to date and the highest grossing film of their respective careers until their subsequent collaboration on Top Gun: Maverick, which McQuarrie co-wrote and produced.
When the release of Top Gun: Maverick was delayed by the outbreak of COVID 19, Cruise and McQuarrie recognized both the film industry and big screen exhibition were facing unprecedented challenges and they committed themselves fully to the preservation of both. What followed was the simultaneous production of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and Mission:Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Even before factoring in the obstacles presented by a global pandemic and two industry strikes during its production, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning represents an unprecedented physical and technical achievement, pushing the outermost boundaries of big screen practical action.
As co-creator, lead writer, and supervising producer of “Band of Brothers” for HBO in 2001, ERIK JENDRESEN (Written by) was one of the recipients of that year’s Golden Globe and Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries.
His friendship with Christopher McQuarrie dates back 20 years when they met as fellow advisors at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and they have been working together ever since. In addition to their collaboration on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Jendresen and McQuarrie have seven feature film projects in the development pipeline, and one limited series. Jendresen is also writing/producing a film about the French Foreign Legion to be directed by Dimitri Rassam; and Aloft (based on the book, On the Wing by Alan Tennant) to be directed by Ramin Bahrani.
He is the author of two books about South American shamanism, The Dance of the Four Winds and Island of the Sun; two children’s books, The First Story Ever Told and Hanuman; and a play, The Killing of Michael Malloy.
He divides his time between a 120-year-old Dutch former-naval vessel (a veteran of Dunkirk) in Sausalito, California; and a home on the Catawba River in North Carolina with his wife, psychotherapist Venus Bobis.
He is a member of the Television Academy and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and still advises at Sundance whenever he can.
