For the first time in the Mission: Impossible franchise, the same director will be at the helm for back to back films. Despite Rogue Nation being well-received, Director Christopher McQuarrie isn’t looking to rest on his morals and repeat the same film. He spoke with Collider, and talked about taking the series in a more serious direction:
“You know, you worry all the time. Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because [Ghost Protocol director] Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely.
At the beginning of this I said to Tom, ‘I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still’. And we did But now we find ourselves going, you know, are we going where Bond went where Bond became–serious. It’s another kind of tone. But we can’t go there.
We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. And we’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying well how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place”.
McQuarrie teased a “very different” Ethan Hunt, and a film that would explore his character deeper than ever before, with far less globe-trotting than previous incarnations and a larger focus on character.
“I was determined, unlike the last movie, to spend more time in one location, I went back and I looked at the first movie, which started in Prague, and realised that they’re in Prague for the first half of the movie. So, I sort of pulled back a little bit on the globe-trotting. I think in Rogue Nation I think we might have been in six countries in the first ten minutes of the movie”.
McQuarrie also talked about how the inevitable genre trappings that come with a film in the Mission: Impossible franchise sometimes make his vision for a deeper, emotional story have to work around the action set pieces:
“The problem with something like Mission, the action is dictating the narrative. And I was determined to change that on this movie. And I started with that. I started with more of an emotional story for this character and more of a character arc within it.
It’s definitely more of an emotional journey for Ethan Hunt in that movie. But then the action comes in. And the ambitions of that action, so there’s a sequence at the end of the movie which is fabulous.
It’s never been done. It’s all photo real. It’s going to be incredible. You then have to create the contrivances for that sequence to happen. And then there’s only a few locations in the world where you can shoot that sequence. So suddenly you find yourself going, well, I have this resource and that resource, and I have to put them in my movie. Why are they in my movie? And now I’ve got to explain that”.
The film is currently in the middle of filming, and as with any blockbuster, there’s plenty of time for it to evolve and gestate into something larger. McQuarrie faced script issues in Rogue Nation, and though he’s become known as somewhat of a ‘fixer’ for blockbusters, he’d much prefer a calmer, less hectic process this time around.
If he can create a film like Rogue Nation with all those issues, let’s hope we get to witness what he can do without those problems.
#Peace.Love.MissionImpossible
