Speaker 1: M M. You're listening to Playback a Variety I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio podcast. I'm your host, Variety Awards Editor Chris Tapley.
Speaker 1: This week, we have director Christopher mcquarie stopping by to
Speaker 1: discuss his new film. You might have heard of this
Speaker 1: one mission Impossible Fallout. We talked about all of the
Speaker 1: death defying action he and Madman Tom Cruise captured on camera,
Speaker 1: and a whole lot more. So Sit tight. This is playback.
Speaker 1: I saw your tweet. I think it was yesterday. You
Speaker 1: were tweeting out the places that are protecting on film. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I'm from North Carolina. Oh wow. And then one
Speaker 1: of them, Tarboro, North Carolina, Yah, which is like I
Speaker 1: was stunned. Of all the places, it's just out close
Speaker 1: to the coast. Somebody, uh, somebody sent me a photograph
Speaker 1: of one of the theaters that I had that I
Speaker 1: had a right take care. Um, it's just it was
Speaker 1: very They sent me just this picture of a dilapidated,
Speaker 1: broken down and run down both inside and outside, and
Speaker 1: they were like, really, is this where you're sending us
Speaker 1: And I didn't have a chance to respond to them,
Speaker 1: but it was like that's where I grew up. I
Speaker 1: grew up watching movies and theaters like that. Same. Thanks,
Speaker 1: what movies are all? Right? What we're recording? Okay, jump
Speaker 1: in thirty minute conversation. Relax, you're back from the tour. Yes,
Speaker 1: we're here with Christopher mcquarie everyone, the writer and director
Speaker 1: of Mission Impossible Fallout. Uh. You're gonna run out of
Speaker 1: subtitles after a while, you know. We had a we
Speaker 1: had a subtitle generator. Oh yeah. The studio put it
Speaker 1: together because coming up with the title is is always
Speaker 1: a bit of a of a production in and of itself.
Speaker 1: And they put together a list of It was almost
Speaker 1: like the Knocklist. It was a list of different kind
Speaker 1: of spy words and you could pick one off of
Speaker 1: each each column. There were two columns, and they were
Speaker 1: the worst titles you could have ever possibly there were,
Speaker 1: there were, there was no good company. You gotta hear some.
Speaker 1: I can't really remember them. I wish I had the
Speaker 1: rest here, but it was. It was quite awful. Do
Speaker 1: a parody version of the film with one of those. Uh,
Speaker 1: first of all, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I saw the movie a few weeks ago. I was
Speaker 1: blown away. As I was telling you earlier, I was
Speaker 1: just very much dausted afterwards and like the best of ways. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, watching Tom cruise to his thing and just
Speaker 1: that this movie sends you out on the biggest high
Speaker 1: because of the finale you guys constructed. But we'll get
Speaker 1: into that. Uh. I want to start just to go
Speaker 1: back a little bit whenever you first came onto the
Speaker 1: franchise and uh Rogue Nation on the last film, Uh
Speaker 1: coming into it, what kind of like aesthetic ideas did
Speaker 1: you have. I mean I kind of felt like, you know,
Speaker 1: JJ revitalized the series, uh twelve years ago now, which
Speaker 1: is crazy. I had Brad bird On recently talking about
Speaker 1: incredible stupid We talked to him. I felt what Brad
Speaker 1: did really sent things heading in the direction that you
Speaker 1: guys have been shipping away out lately. And so when
Speaker 1: you came in, I just want to know what you
Speaker 1: wanted to do to really put your stamp on it
Speaker 1: on on Rogue. What I decided to do was something
Speaker 1: of the greatest hits. I was going to bring back. Ah.
Speaker 1: I was going to bring back the members of the
Speaker 1: team that that it felt like people had responded most
Speaker 1: to which were vague, and that Simon um And and
Speaker 1: I wanted to I wanted to tip my hat to
Speaker 1: the to the four previous movies. It was a little
Speaker 1: bit of an anniversary thing. It was just shy of
Speaker 1: twenty years when the movie came out. Um and I
Speaker 1: also knew what I do is I take all the movies,
Speaker 1: on the last movie and again on this movie. I
Speaker 1: laid them all on top of each other and see
Speaker 1: what haven't the film's done? What's what's something that's missing
Speaker 1: from all of those movies, um and I and what
Speaker 1: I wanted in Rogue Nation was a villain who was
Speaker 1: a physical threat to Ethan and kind a really strong
Speaker 1: woman who wasn't a member of the team. And we
Speaker 1: ended up with one of those two things. Um Sean Harris,
Speaker 1: who I had seen in Harry Brown. It became much
Speaker 1: more of an intellectual threat. He was more of a
Speaker 1: moriarity to Ethan's Holmes uh than he was, you know,
Speaker 1: a physically dangerous presence. The danger you feel around Sean
Speaker 1: is what is his unpredictability as opposed to his physical mass.
Speaker 1: Um And so that was it. That was the really
Speaker 1: nice holdover. I was glad we didn't do that because
Speaker 1: that allowed for Henry cavill in this movie, you can
Speaker 1: play with it. Now, how about visually? Um, you know
Speaker 1: that there is an aesthetic I think even connected all
Speaker 1: the way back to Di Palma. I think it was
Speaker 1: consistent in a way. But changing that up when you
Speaker 1: came in, was there anything that you wanted to do?
Speaker 1: Was there any were there any touchstones, like any kind
Speaker 1: of reference points that you had had an idea for
Speaker 1: the look of the film than for Rogue or for
Speaker 1: this one for Rogue and then we'll go and then
Speaker 1: this one. Yeah, when you came in, Yeah, for Rogue,
Speaker 1: Tom and I watched a lot of north By, Northwest
Speaker 1: and Notorious. We talked a lot about Hitchcock, and and
Speaker 1: of course to Paluma is a is a huge disciple
Speaker 1: of of Hitchcock. Um, I am less so I definitely
Speaker 1: am a huge admirer of h Hitchcock's work. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the the opera sequence, which a lot of people look
Speaker 1: at as an homage to the Man who Knew Too Much,
Speaker 1: was actually more inspired by the Key to Reservo, which
Speaker 1: was which was sort of a send up of Hitchcock
Speaker 1: that Martin Scorsese did, And while I wasn't trying to
Speaker 1: recreate that, I used that as an example of how
Speaker 1: you could take opera or in this case, a concert,
Speaker 1: which because I think Tom's concerned. When I first presented
Speaker 1: the idea of an opera to him, he was worried
Speaker 1: that it was going to be this boring opera scene. Um,
Speaker 1: and I said, no, no no, no, no no, it's going to
Speaker 1: be more like this here. Look look at it, look
Speaker 1: at this, Look at this little nine minute thing. Um.
Speaker 1: So visually it's really interesting. I I did not think
Speaker 1: in terms of locations as much as I thought in
Speaker 1: terms of uh environments that invite an action. And in
Speaker 1: every one of those instances in Rogue Nation, where the
Speaker 1: the action scenes were dictated by something that was brought
Speaker 1: to me, um and when and in the third act,
Speaker 1: we we did really have the third act, and my
Speaker 1: my team was very frustrated because they needed to know
Speaker 1: what they were prepping. And I said, I don't know
Speaker 1: what we're prepping because I don't have the location yet.
Speaker 1: And they said, well, we can't give you a location
Speaker 1: until we know what the scene is. And I said,
Speaker 1: I could write the scene, and then we'll be killing
Speaker 1: ourselves trying to find a location. And the real breakthrough
Speaker 1: I had late in that process was the insistence that
Speaker 1: we start with location. UM, My visual sense did not
Speaker 1: really kick in until midway through that movie, because I
Speaker 1: was so busy working on the screenplay and trying to
Speaker 1: execute that, and so busy trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: motorcycle chase and the underwater sequence that I really didn't
Speaker 1: have the confidence to push back on my cinematographer or
Speaker 1: to trust my instincts about lighting until I started editing
Speaker 1: the movie over the Christmas break I had about two
Speaker 1: weeks UM, and as I was putting it together, I
Speaker 1: was like, well, why does certain things work for me?
Speaker 1: And why does certain things not? Why do I like
Speaker 1: the photography in this scene and not like the photography
Speaker 1: in that scene? And what is it about my writing
Speaker 1: or my style of directing that is dictating the good
Speaker 1: and the bad in what I'm doing? I was? I was.
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time analyzing what had gone
Speaker 1: right as well as what had gone wrong. So when
Speaker 1: I came back from the Christmas break, I was much
Speaker 1: more confident to to start to mandate certain things about
Speaker 1: lighting and photography that I was not comfortable with before.
Speaker 1: And I applied all of that too. I applied all
Speaker 1: of that too, fall up from the very beginning. The
Speaker 1: thing you mentioned earlier about the opera, and Tom was
Speaker 1: worried that maybe it wouldn't be slower or something. I'm
Speaker 1: curious if that's is that a consistent hurdle? Is he
Speaker 1: is he like always trying to like, like thinking that
Speaker 1: something might not be as amped up as he wants
Speaker 1: it to be, or anything quite the eposit What Tom
Speaker 1: really wants is he wants things to breathe, and he
Speaker 1: wants he likes the word he uses all the time,
Speaker 1: it is elegant. And you know, he loves he loves Hitchcock,
Speaker 1: he loves the classic UH Studio system style movies. And
Speaker 1: we find ourselves constantly trying to do that and being
Speaker 1: thwarted by an audience that's just not buying it. They
Speaker 1: don't they don't have the patients, they don't have the
Speaker 1: they don't have the conditioning to just sit there and enjoy.
Speaker 1: You have to be constantly engaging them. And so we
Speaker 1: were very pleasantly surprised with this movie that, um, the
Speaker 1: only time we didn't have a problem with the test
Speaker 1: audiences were those were those scenes that we thought were
Speaker 1: going to be the first things to go. All the
Speaker 1: character stuff and you know that the scene where Ilsa
Speaker 1: is following Ethan through the through Paris, that is the
Speaker 1: definition of shoe leather. That's a that's a moment that
Speaker 1: gets cut out of the movie after the first test
Speaker 1: scre name and I kept waiting for people to come
Speaker 1: for it, and they never did. And meanwhile we found
Speaker 1: ourselves getting notes on this movie that there was too
Speaker 1: much action, the car chase was too long, the helicopter
Speaker 1: chase was too long, and that stuff we know how
Speaker 1: to fix. We have sinse. Yeah, well what you saw
Speaker 1: is definitely the pair down version of it. But you'd
Speaker 1: be surprised. There's it doesn't take much. Sometimes it takes
Speaker 1: us as few as as too sometimes even one shot
Speaker 1: where if there there was a moment when Ethan and
Speaker 1: the motorcycle drive away from us and we let them
Speaker 1: get away from us before jumping back in the car.
Speaker 1: And when we took that shot out, all the notes
Speaker 1: about the car chase went away because you just tweet
Speaker 1: little things. Well, it's just because the car chase kept going,
Speaker 1: but you were left behind and you had to catch
Speaker 1: back up with it. Uh And and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a classic Hitchcock technique of filmmaking, which is
Speaker 1: you grabbed the audience by the throat and you never
Speaker 1: let go. And this movie was engineered to do that.
Speaker 1: It was also engineered to start quietly and get bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger as it as it went on,
Speaker 1: we didn't understand how big. We really had no grasp
Speaker 1: of it. Interesting. Uh, these kinds of movies often you'll
Speaker 1: have like a cadre of writers on them. You know,
Speaker 1: you you're the writer, director, single vision. Um, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about on the page. Uh, you know, how
Speaker 1: do action set pieces come to you? How do you
Speaker 1: how do you find yourself writing them in ways that
Speaker 1: are different than maybe you were taught to right screenplays? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, because there's such you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll give you two examples. The foot Chase. I knew
Speaker 1: what it was before I wrote it, described its story
Speaker 1: boarded it, and simply did not have the time to
Speaker 1: generate the pages. So I brought in a friend of
Speaker 1: mine who's a screenwriter, and I said, here's all my nights.
Speaker 1: Would you just please write this in script form because
Speaker 1: it's it was twelve or thirteen pages, and I was
Speaker 1: working on other stuff and I write very specific action.
Speaker 1: I write. What I do with writing action is I
Speaker 1: write everything I want you to see in the order
Speaker 1: I want you to see it. So it my action
Speaker 1: sequences tend to be long in their description and incredibly
Speaker 1: boring to read. There's nothing more boring than reading a
Speaker 1: car chase. But you write that out because you want
Speaker 1: to communicate to your crew. It's not really am meant
Speaker 1: for anybody else to read. It's a it's a very
Speaker 1: dry technical document. The helicopter chase was another instance where
Speaker 1: this the the The script form of the helicopter chase
Speaker 1: was an afterthought to figuring out what exactly is the
Speaker 1: helicopter chase um and how that all came together. I'll
Speaker 1: give you the very short version. Tom said, I want
Speaker 1: to do a helicopter chase. I'm gonna learn how to fly,
Speaker 1: figure out a sequence that I can fly in. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the first thing you have to ask is, well, where
Speaker 1: are we actually shooting this sequence? Doesn't matter where I
Speaker 1: think it should be some something. The production is going
Speaker 1: to dictate where I can go. And very few countries
Speaker 1: were comfortable letting Tom cruise with six weeks of training,
Speaker 1: come and fly aerobatics over their country, and of those
Speaker 1: countries there was there were very We were looking at
Speaker 1: the most photographically interesting one, what's going to have the
Speaker 1: most vibrant color, what's going to be And these were
Speaker 1: things I was not thinking about when I was doing
Speaker 1: rog Nation Rognation. I was just trying to execute the story. Uh,
Speaker 1: And we very quickly settled on New Zealand. New Zealand
Speaker 1: is not a hotbed of political intrigue. It's it's a
Speaker 1: far flung corner of the world and it's sent the
Speaker 1: country as national parks. There's no terrorism plot that's going
Speaker 1: to that's going to kick off in New Zealand and plausibly.
Speaker 1: So we said, well, what does New Zealand look like?
Speaker 1: And then that became Kashmir. So Kashmir suddenly entered into
Speaker 1: the story and I had to come up with reasons
Speaker 1: for why was this ending in Kashmir. Then I had
Speaker 1: to decide, well, if Ethan is flying in the helicopter,
Speaker 1: what's the rest of the team doing. If this is
Speaker 1: an in sequence, I don't have to answer that. The
Speaker 1: team can just you can just introduce them doing a
Speaker 1: little bit of banter. If it's the climax of the movie,
Speaker 1: they all have to have a vital role in stopping
Speaker 1: whatever the ticking clock is. We didn't even know what
Speaker 1: the ticking clock was at that point, but I knew
Speaker 1: from Rogue Nation how once you add the scene, once
Speaker 1: you add the team to the scene, the scene becomes
Speaker 1: exponentially larger and more complex. We had tried to to
Speaker 1: develop the A four hundred as a team sequence instead
Speaker 1: of just a stunt, and the movie really came together
Speaker 1: when I just let that go, that that is the
Speaker 1: pebble that starts rolling down the hill that ultimately creates
Speaker 1: an avalanche. And and so I had a helicopter chase.
Speaker 1: I knew, I knew that it was taking place in
Speaker 1: New Zealand. I knew that the team had to be involved.
Speaker 1: I knew uh and and and and ideally they were
Speaker 1: split up. So I started to have an understanding of, well,
Speaker 1: whatever they're working on there, there at least in there's
Speaker 1: at least two bits of parallel action going on on
Speaker 1: the ground. Three is probably too many. And how is
Speaker 1: the helicopter chase going to begin? And how's it going
Speaker 1: to end? It's really boring to get in a helicopter
Speaker 1: throw on all the switches. So I had to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to get Ethan in the helicopter, and
Speaker 1: then I had to figure out a way to get
Speaker 1: him out and have a fight with the villain, because
Speaker 1: this chase is going to be really boring if it
Speaker 1: just if it just ends with the chase. So I
Speaker 1: knew I was going to have spoiler alert a mid
Speaker 1: air collision, and and now I'm thinking plausibly in my mind,
Speaker 1: we'll have two helicopters collide. They're not gonna land together.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be extremely it's gonna go from chaos to
Speaker 1: extreme chaos. And I went to my production designer and
Speaker 1: my visual effects guys um and said, what I need
Speaker 1: you to do is I need you to create a
Speaker 1: bathroom sink. So if I dropped two marbles in a
Speaker 1: bathroom sink, no matter where I dropped them, they're going
Speaker 1: to meet at the drain, and I want both marbles
Speaker 1: to go down the drain and bill out onto this
Speaker 1: cliff side somewhere and we'll have this climactic fight on
Speaker 1: a on a cliff's edge. Um. And the problem is
Speaker 1: that in New Zealand, there is no mountain like that.
Speaker 1: And the problem with New Zealand is very beautiful that's
Speaker 1: not a problem with New Zealand. Is the unique feature
Speaker 1: of New Zealand is that there's very little in the
Speaker 1: way of precipitous drops. It's mostly sloping cliffs, um or
Speaker 1: and and places that did have a precipitous drop didn't
Speaker 1: have any sort of plateau. Uh. And so I put
Speaker 1: that to my um my location guy. And in fact,
Speaker 1: it was the only thing the entire movie that I
Speaker 1: specifically asked for from my locations. Everything else was I
Speaker 1: mandated to them. Go find me stuff that looks cool
Speaker 1: and I'll tell you what's happening there. This was the
Speaker 1: one time where I said I need this and he
Speaker 1: brought me a picture of Pulpit Rock and Norway. So
Speaker 1: right then I knew my helicopter chase starting in New
Speaker 1: Zealand would have a lot of transitional elements in England
Speaker 1: and it would end in Norway. And in fact, that
Speaker 1: helicopter impacted probably about thirty seconds of screen time. You're
Speaker 1: you you travel through three countries. That's crazy movie magic, right, Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, your your Twitter feed is a wealth of information.
Speaker 1: It was a nice uh made for nice prep for today.
Speaker 1: One thing you were talking about yesterday that blew my
Speaker 1: mind was just the focus pulling on the halo jump,
Speaker 1: which just walk people through this. I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: first of all, I want to ask, what was the
Speaker 1: drive to do it this way when it's something that
Speaker 1: you could probably just do in a wind tunnel or whatever.
Speaker 1: Uh talk Really, I mean, we any any of the
Speaker 1: stuff that you see in Mission Impossible, we could very
Speaker 1: easily do on a stage somewhere. It will not give
Speaker 1: you the same visceral energy that you're experiencing when you
Speaker 1: watch your start doing it. And I'm able to shoot
Speaker 1: things in a way that I couldn't otherwise. Be honestly,
Speaker 1: how much is that him also just wanting to have
Speaker 1: that experience. Um, there's no doubt that there's a large
Speaker 1: element of him having a great time doing it. But
Speaker 1: for Tom, it's not about hey, look at me, it's
Speaker 1: look at Ethan. It's putting it what it enables me
Speaker 1: to do. And I had read somewhere today somebody uh
Speaker 1: somebody sent an email to my wife who had watched
Speaker 1: the film, and they completely nailed what my intention, which
Speaker 1: is often very rare, um that he felt like he
Speaker 1: was a spectator in those sequences. He felt like he
Speaker 1: was there, which is very much why I placed the
Speaker 1: camera where I do. I shoot everything in a somewhat
Speaker 1: voyeuristic point of view, but not a voyor ap peering
Speaker 1: into the room from the doorway. You're right over Henry
Speaker 1: Cavill's shoulder, You're right over Tom's shoulder. Um. And so
Speaker 1: Tom and I work together to create that sort of
Speaker 1: immersive experience so that you're with Ethan and you feel
Speaker 1: what's what's happening, You're just that much more invested. That's
Speaker 1: really what we're after. UM. So when Tom said he
Speaker 1: wanted to do a halo sequence, I knew right away
Speaker 1: first order of business is I had to pull him
Speaker 1: out as opposed to push him out, that the camera
Speaker 1: had to be looking at Ethan and going backwards off
Speaker 1: the back of the plane. And I knew right away
Speaker 1: I needed to play bigger than the A four hundred
Speaker 1: C seventeen was the only plane to do it. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of it said. There were attempts to
Speaker 1: discourage us from that and to use the C one thirty.
Speaker 1: I knew the C one thirty was not going to
Speaker 1: be as big. It just wasn't going to be as
Speaker 1: there's almost a spaceship quality to the C seventeen. It's
Speaker 1: got kind of a weird interior environment that looks a
Speaker 1: little bit surreal, especially when it's empty. Um and that
Speaker 1: was again me pushing the visual palette in a way
Speaker 1: that I had uh So we then had to figure out, well,
Speaker 1: what kind of cameras it going to be. Is going
Speaker 1: to be steadicam? Is it going to be handheld? We
Speaker 1: then decided that we were going to do as much
Speaker 1: of the scene in the plane before Tom went out,
Speaker 1: so that you you and once I decided that. Once
Speaker 1: we decided that, I said, well, if we're gonna have
Speaker 1: a warner inside the plane, we might as well keep
Speaker 1: going and just do the whole thing as a warner.
Speaker 1: And we devised it originally as five pieces that could
Speaker 1: be stitched together, and we masked those stitches. The lightning
Speaker 1: strike hides one of the stitches. His collision with Henry
Speaker 1: hides one of those stitches. They're originally five shots, and
Speaker 1: we distilled them down to three. But of course in
Speaker 1: doing that, you're adding more action to each of those
Speaker 1: three segments, and they become exponentially more complicated to get right.
Speaker 1: Because I could get four out of the five things right,
Speaker 1: and if number five is not right, I've got to
Speaker 1: do the whole thing all over again. So we were
Speaker 1: making complicated for ourselves that way to make it more complicated.
Speaker 1: There was not a cameraman in the world who could
Speaker 1: do what we wanted him to do. There were, there
Speaker 1: were skydiving videographers, but they were not cinema camera operators
Speaker 1: who could jump out of a plane with twenty pounds
Speaker 1: of camera equipment strapped to the top of their head.
Speaker 1: So we had to train a guy forwards and backwards. Yes,
Speaker 1: everything Ginger Rogers did um. So we had to train
Speaker 1: a guy in narrative storytelling. We had to train him
Speaker 1: how to shoot a warner and and understanding where to
Speaker 1: direct the eye. What what What these guys are used
Speaker 1: to doing is image capturing. They get a watch and
Speaker 1: they shoot all the action. They don't zoom in on
Speaker 1: somebody and follow their island and not doing visual stories.
Speaker 1: And they're not doing visual story to And that is
Speaker 1: a that's a skill that I've honed over twenty years
Speaker 1: and been able to communicate in a shorthand. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's something. If you watch the four firms I've directed,
Speaker 1: you can see it mutate from movie one to to
Speaker 1: the most recent. So reminding somebody whose job it is
Speaker 1: to keep the action in the center of the frame
Speaker 1: that no, Tom Cruise is not the center of the frame.
Speaker 1: Tom Cruise's point of view is the center of the frame.
Speaker 1: So that when Tom, when the camera's on Tom's oh,
Speaker 1: you know, on his left side, and Tom looks to
Speaker 1: his right so that the back of his head is
Speaker 1: to him, you want the camera to actually pan slightly
Speaker 1: left and open up the deep background. That's not his instinct.
Speaker 1: And so time and again he'd be jumping out of
Speaker 1: the plane and shooting Tom and you'd say, no, you've
Speaker 1: got to shoot empty space. You have to shoot where
Speaker 1: he's looking. And he's like, yeah, but there's nothing there,
Speaker 1: and we're saying that's exactly right. You're saying there's nothing there.
Speaker 1: That's really antithetical to him, and he had to learn
Speaker 1: a whole new set of skills. To make it more complicated,
Speaker 1: we decided that this was a nighttime sequence, which meant
Speaker 1: we had to shoot at at dusk so that it
Speaker 1: could be dark enough that it looked like nighttime, but
Speaker 1: not so dark that you lost all of the detail
Speaker 1: in Tom's clothing, he's wearing black and Henry's wearing dark green.
Speaker 1: You had to shoot it just this razor edge between
Speaker 1: night and day, and you had three minutes of available
Speaker 1: light every day, So we had to be in the
Speaker 1: plane at a specific time, and that plane had to
Speaker 1: be over the drop zone and where it and it's
Speaker 1: relative position to the drop zone changed every night based
Speaker 1: on where the wind was. So there's an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of calculation that went into when does the plane take off,
Speaker 1: when it where is it over the drop zone? When
Speaker 1: does it have to be there? When can Tom jump out?
Speaker 1: And if he was thirty seconds too early or thirty
Speaker 1: seconds too late, the shot was screwed. And you know,
Speaker 1: we could we could tie it down a little if
Speaker 1: it was too bright, but the problem was you saw
Speaker 1: atmosphere and haze and you and the other problem was
Speaker 1: if it was too bright, there was ambient light on Tom.
Speaker 1: It just ends. So when you try to make it
Speaker 1: look like night, it wouldn't look like night. It would
Speaker 1: look like bad day for night photography. So it was
Speaker 1: incredibly um unforgiven the light conditions and making that more
Speaker 1: complicated the focus issues at that This is insane level
Speaker 1: of light were incredibly intolerant. Tom had to be three
Speaker 1: ft basically from where I'm sitting from you to me
Speaker 1: right now, and they would measure that. Uh. Tom would
Speaker 1: lay on the table so like he would lay like
Speaker 1: he was falling in space, and the cameraman would walk
Speaker 1: around the table and the guy with the tape measure
Speaker 1: would show all the measurements, and he would practice with
Speaker 1: the focus. But he's not looking through the camera. He can't.
Speaker 1: He's just got a little crosshair over one eye, cameras
Speaker 1: on top of his head, so not he has to
Speaker 1: remember not to look at Tom, but actually look eight
Speaker 1: inches below Tom, so that the cameras actually doing the look.
Speaker 1: And it's essentially like filming a move be through a
Speaker 1: periscope and not being able to look through the periscope
Speaker 1: and and having to remember from sense memory in a
Speaker 1: room not much bigger than the one we're in now,
Speaker 1: what three feet feels like, and then pre create that
Speaker 1: distance at ft at in different light conditions while falling
Speaker 1: anywhere from a hundred and sixty to two hundred miles
Speaker 1: an hour towards the Earth. And Tom had to then
Speaker 1: jump out after the cameraman whose job it is to
Speaker 1: go faster than Tom to get away from him and
Speaker 1: then allow Tom to catch up to him. And as
Speaker 1: Tom and Tom has to stop himself, and there's no
Speaker 1: he can't brace himself against anything. He has to he
Speaker 1: has to slow his ascent so that stopping is actually
Speaker 1: not stopping. It's just coming in perfect sync with the
Speaker 1: camera operators. So you're falling at the same speed, exactly
Speaker 1: three ft away from each other. And if he was
Speaker 1: three inches too deep or three inches too far back,
Speaker 1: he's out of focus. Because the camera parador knew the
Speaker 1: best he could do is bury the focus aperture. I
Speaker 1: guess that's completely It's this little device he had in
Speaker 1: his hand. He just buried the focus to minimum and
Speaker 1: then let Tom fall into He couldn't then adjust back.
Speaker 1: If Tom he could, he couldn't gauge it. And the
Speaker 1: first two times we did it, Tom was out of focus. Um,
Speaker 1: and we were struggling with well, whose fault is this?
Speaker 1: You know? Tom was saying, I was three ft from
Speaker 1: that camera. I said, is it possible that your depth
Speaker 1: perception is a little bit skewed because we measured it
Speaker 1: in a in a ten by ten room, and now
Speaker 1: you're twenty ft in the air. Is it possible you
Speaker 1: could be a couple inches off on your mark? And
Speaker 1: he said, man, I'm telling you I was three ft
Speaker 1: from that camera. And he said, look at my hands
Speaker 1: in the front, Look at where my hands are on
Speaker 1: the edge of the frame. And I know and I
Speaker 1: know Tom very well. He knows lens is well enough
Speaker 1: that he understands where the edge of frames. I've seen
Speaker 1: him do it times and sure enough it matched our rehearsals.
Speaker 1: So I looked at Craig O'Brien, the camera operator, and
Speaker 1: I said, Craig, what are you doing? He goes, man,
Speaker 1: look at the look at the thing. And he showed
Speaker 1: me how the focused thing works. You couldn't make a mistake.
Speaker 1: You just you pinned. You just pinned it all the
Speaker 1: way to the left. And I said, well, what's wrong.
Speaker 1: It's it's either Tom or it's Craig. And maybe Craig
Speaker 1: slow getting to the focus. We couldn't figure it out,
Speaker 1: and eventually Tom would come into focus, but it was
Speaker 1: very slow to get there. And on the third night
Speaker 1: Craig went home. We were very frustrating because you can't
Speaker 1: move on to the next shot. And Craig went home
Speaker 1: and had this epiphany, and he came back to work
Speaker 1: that night. We had a second focus poller on the
Speaker 1: plane because the shots on the plane required much more
Speaker 1: radical focus moves that this little wand that Craig had
Speaker 1: couldn't do. So we had actually two focus pollers, one
Speaker 1: who had a radio remote. Um and Craig came to
Speaker 1: work and he said, it's you. He said, when we
Speaker 1: jump out of the plane, you gotta shut off your remote.
Speaker 1: The camera is still connected to your remote and they're
Speaker 1: fighting with each other and he goes, that's not possible.
Speaker 1: We lost picture right away. And he said, I'm telling
Speaker 1: you that's what it is. And he goes, you guys
Speaker 1: are falling at a hundred sixty miles an hour. We're
Speaker 1: traveling at a hundred and sixty miles an hour. This
Speaker 1: thing's got a range of like a couple hundred feet max.
Speaker 1: And he just said, just when I jump out the plane,
Speaker 1: turn off the focus. And he goes, you understand, if
Speaker 1: I shut off the focus and your focus doesn't kick in,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get the shot. And we jumped
Speaker 1: out of the plane and sure enough, he just as
Speaker 1: soon as they went out of the plane, he shut
Speaker 1: the focus off and there's a delay of several seconds
Speaker 1: before the focus comes in and it just caught right.
Speaker 1: Tom fell into the camera and we got the shot.
Speaker 1: Where are you doing all of this? Are you done
Speaker 1: on the ground? I am? Alternately, It would depend. There
Speaker 1: were times I was on the round, There's times I'm
Speaker 1: on the plane. And the truth of the matter is
Speaker 1: beyond my directing the cameraman after he shot the shop,
Speaker 1: after he's all we can do is look at the shot,
Speaker 1: study it, and say here's how you do it better
Speaker 1: next time. It didn't matter where I was. I could
Speaker 1: have been in my hotel, because there was I So
Speaker 1: I was on the ground in a trailer which the
Speaker 1: editor Eddie Hamilton's had brought the movie out, and we
Speaker 1: were cutting in the trailer while they were rehearsing all day,
Speaker 1: and they were rehearsing these jump spot to seven times
Speaker 1: a day, waiting for the light to be right. He
Speaker 1: only had one take a day, so I would be
Speaker 1: in my trailer cutting and they would periodically come and
Speaker 1: get me as Tom and Craig landed, and I'd get
Speaker 1: in the van with them and drive back to the
Speaker 1: airstrip and we'd review the footage. I'd give them notes
Speaker 1: and then I'd go back to the editing room and
Speaker 1: they go back up in an airplane. Sometimes I went
Speaker 1: up and um. And when we went to FET the
Speaker 1: first time I went up, I was like, I wanted
Speaker 1: to if I want to experience that UM. And that
Speaker 1: involved a twenty minute breathe up. So you're on the
Speaker 1: plane huffing oxygen for twenty minutes that you don't get
Speaker 1: the bends. And I just after I did that a
Speaker 1: few times, I just said, there's I love being here,
Speaker 1: and I love being supported, but there's that's there's better
Speaker 1: use of my time. We were we were so desperately
Speaker 1: late on editing the movie. Uh, and this sequence was
Speaker 1: going on longer and longer and longer. Uh. And there's
Speaker 1: and there is something slightly surreal about standing in an
Speaker 1: airplane calling action and then watching your entire crew just
Speaker 1: jump out of a plane and leave you standing there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you and you have to go back and wonder
Speaker 1: who made it. You're flying back to see okay, is
Speaker 1: everybody all right? I was much more comfortable waiting on
Speaker 1: the ground. I kind of just picture you, like on
Speaker 1: a chaise lounge with a monitor being fed grapes, what things.
Speaker 1: I would love that if only it were that. Um,
Speaker 1: by the way, how does all this kind of stuff
Speaker 1: weigh on? Like like, what do the conversation is with
Speaker 1: the insurance company? Which, fortunately, that's it. That's a Jake
Speaker 1: Meyer's question, our producer, Jake, You've got to ask him.
Speaker 1: I ask it, and I always get very technical answers
Speaker 1: that I that are completely unmemorable. Um, it's a. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a simple matter of you know, whether we're
Speaker 1: risking Tom's life or that of a stunt man, it's
Speaker 1: it's the same. It's the same relative risk. The only
Speaker 1: difference being that if anything happens to Tom, we that's severe.
Speaker 1: We don't finish the movie, whereas in the event of
Speaker 1: a stuntman you can, you can keep going. But it's
Speaker 1: they've been doing it so long, and the and the
Speaker 1: and the the The calculated risk is very very carefully
Speaker 1: thought out. When you're watching a stunt with Tom, We've
Speaker 1: eliminated as many variables as we can. And what what
Speaker 1: I try to do is create the stunt so that
Speaker 1: Tom is the only variable. Tom or the stuntman around him,
Speaker 1: So while he's driving through Paris, he's in control of
Speaker 1: that bike, and all the cars around him are being
Speaker 1: driven by stunt drivers. They're all professionals. So while it
Speaker 1: looks crazy and chaotic, it's actually it's it's very carefully
Speaker 1: planned and control. The variable is there's a language barrier.
Speaker 1: A lot of the guys, we're a lot of the
Speaker 1: stunt guys working in Paris are local guys. They're French.
Speaker 1: And every now and again somebody didn't quite get the
Speaker 1: message and their car was not where Tom expected it
Speaker 1: to be. That's the scary stuff. But I know that
Speaker 1: if Tom, if Tom has the slightest concern uh about
Speaker 1: being able to control the bike, whether it's the cobblestones
Speaker 1: are cold or they're wet, or they're slick because they're
Speaker 1: they've been there for however many decades or centuries, he'll
Speaker 1: he'll just he'll back off. He'll he'll just say, you know,
Speaker 1: we can't do this. It's not say uh, he's not
Speaker 1: He's not some lunatic who's so determined to get the
Speaker 1: shot he's going to kill himselves. Did very careful. I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk, just go back a bit, you know,
Speaker 1: between uh the way of the gun and Jack reach
Speaker 1: or that's twelve years and you know you were writing
Speaker 1: and doing plenty of that time. But were you itching
Speaker 1: to get back to the director's chair. Um, yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was. Uh. It's funny. I I didn't start out
Speaker 1: with the ambitions of being a director, and my ambitions
Speaker 1: to become a director were all born from wanting to
Speaker 1: do one movie. I wanted to make a film about
Speaker 1: Alexander the Great. I saw it so vividly that I
Speaker 1: wanted to do it, and and everything about directing was
Speaker 1: in pursuit of that. And when and we I developed
Speaker 1: a script, I couldn't get it made. I sold it
Speaker 1: to Graham King g K Films, who attached Martin Scorsese
Speaker 1: and Leonardo DiCaprio. And it was a big moment for
Speaker 1: me of letting go of a dream project because I
Speaker 1: hold onto those things very very tightly. Um. And I
Speaker 1: was developing that project for seven years. Many people had
Speaker 1: asked me to give it up. Many people had asked
Speaker 1: me to attach actors that I didn't want, And Graham
Speaker 1: King was the first guy to sit me down and
Speaker 1: say here's the deal, Like, here's how here's how it works.
Speaker 1: You need a star to get the movie made. My all,
Speaker 1: the foreign distribute Distribution has said, you need Leonardo DiCaprio.
Speaker 1: I happen to work with Leo. I underwrite his production
Speaker 1: company's deal. And I showed him the script. He wants
Speaker 1: to do it. Is it great? And he said, Now,
Speaker 1: Leo has got a very short list of directors he
Speaker 1: wants to work with, and respectfully, your name is not
Speaker 1: on it, he said. And he said, one of the
Speaker 1: names on his list is Martin Scorsese. I know Martin
Speaker 1: very well. I underwrite his production company. I showed him
Speaker 1: the script and he wants to do it. And the
Speaker 1: only thing left to discuss is your feet. And after
Speaker 1: seven years of holding on tightly to this thing and
Speaker 1: rejecting any sort of abstract offer to let us attach
Speaker 1: another director or let us attach another actor, it took
Speaker 1: me a split second to make the calculation of you're
Speaker 1: not going to get a better company. Martin Scorsese ney
Speaker 1: later on DiCaprio. So when he said what's your fee?
Speaker 1: I said, the record? What's the record? What's the most
Speaker 1: anybody's ever paid for screenplay? Because I've now developed a
Speaker 1: spec script that Marty Leo want so fair, What are
Speaker 1: you gonna pay me? For it. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I have two partners, so make it divisible by three.
Speaker 1: Um that what was the record? By the way, well,
Speaker 1: I will just I will just say it stands it remains. Um.
Speaker 1: So I managed to sell I sold the script. That
Speaker 1: helped too. That was one of the things that kept
Speaker 1: me alive during all that time. Uh and may and
Speaker 1: it made my my my It took care of my
Speaker 1: partners as well. Uh and But I also learned a
Speaker 1: very valuable lesson through that and through things like Valkyrie,
Speaker 1: which were no one wanted to give me an opportunity
Speaker 1: as a director on the things that I wanted to direct.
Speaker 1: And then in order to direct the things that I
Speaker 1: wanted to direct, in order to direct Valkyrie, um, I
Speaker 1: had to make X Men. They were happy to do
Speaker 1: it with Brian. They didn't even need to read the
Speaker 1: script when Brian Singer decided he wanted to do it.
Speaker 1: And so that was the moment where I decided to
Speaker 1: quit the film business. I just realized, I'm i'm I'm
Speaker 1: in the business of making other people's dreams have More importantly,
Speaker 1: I'm in the business of trying to get movies made.
Speaker 1: I'm not making the movies I want to make. And
Speaker 1: this is said with all gratitude, I still haven't. I've
Speaker 1: I've you know, I've made movies that other people have
Speaker 1: wanted me to make. I've had the the the great
Speaker 1: fortune to be able to make them my way with
Speaker 1: with an enormous amount of freedom. I mean, you make
Speaker 1: a movie with Tom Cruise, the only person you have
Speaker 1: to answer to is Tom. And you know Tom has
Speaker 1: final cut in his movies, and uh and and and
Speaker 1: a track record to back it up. And Tom is
Speaker 1: somebody who's very trusting of his collaborators, who wants to
Speaker 1: learn from them, so, you know, and we get along
Speaker 1: very well, we see eye to eye and a lot
Speaker 1: of things. So suddenly I went from a guy who
Speaker 1: couldn't make movies too, I'm making these big, giant movies
Speaker 1: and I have I have relatively wide birth, I have
Speaker 1: a lot of creative freedom. Uh. So much so that
Speaker 1: you're making a movie without even really a screenplay. Mum,
Speaker 1: that's the guest says, I want to be in the
Speaker 1: Helicopter Chason. Then off you go to write. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: go off and you well, but more importantly, because the
Speaker 1: time is so compressed, you don't even have time to
Speaker 1: write it, You sit down with previous guys, you start
Speaker 1: building models, and you start you start working out, well,
Speaker 1: how would I actually physically do all the stuff that's
Speaker 1: around the helicopter chase part will worry about writing in
Speaker 1: a script form later. Um, that's very liberal and and
Speaker 1: it's and it's. But at the same time, all of
Speaker 1: those dream projects that I spent all that time developing
Speaker 1: in those in between the two movies I directed, in
Speaker 1: the twelve years between my directing gigs, in the seven
Speaker 1: years between making The Way the Gun in Valkyrie, I've
Speaker 1: never made one of them. Valkyrie is the only one
Speaker 1: that's ever been made periodically. With each with each new success,
Speaker 1: someone comes around and says, what do you want to do?
Speaker 1: And I bring one of these things out and I
Speaker 1: get the same answer. They just they don't want to
Speaker 1: do them. Still still know they don't want to do them.
Speaker 1: Here's what, here's why, And I'll tell you why. Unless
Speaker 1: I make a film that makes a billion dollars, nobody's
Speaker 1: ever going to want to make what I want to
Speaker 1: make just because I want to make it. Let's not
Speaker 1: say they won't make my movie, but I gotta get
Speaker 1: a big star attached. I got a big you know there,
Speaker 1: I'm not at a level of I'm not the director
Speaker 1: at which for whom the studio is coming and saying,
Speaker 1: we'll do whatever you want to do. Okay, So when
Speaker 1: are you making your Marvel movie then? Because obviously the
Speaker 1: I P s are the things that but if I
Speaker 1: made a Marvel movie that made a billion dollars, it's
Speaker 1: a Marvel movie, That's what I mean. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: like Marvel guys are not going to walk away and
Speaker 1: be able to make whatever they want. They're going to
Speaker 1: be able to make whatever Marvel movie there. Chris Nolan
Speaker 1: made The Dark Knight outside of that whole thing, and
Speaker 1: he really what he did with The Dark Knight was
Speaker 1: Chris Nolan. It wasn't Marvel telling Chris Nolan or d
Speaker 1: C telling Chris Nolan what to do. And then he
Speaker 1: part laid that into Insection and he part laid that
Speaker 1: into you Dunkirk, which now now the guy has proven
Speaker 1: not only can I make money off of comic book
Speaker 1: I P. I can make money off of World War Two?
Speaker 1: And nobody makes money off of World War two, or
Speaker 1: at least that's a conventional wisdom. World War two movies
Speaker 1: make money all the time, but the studios to have
Speaker 1: a memory of race book that allows them to deny
Speaker 1: that that's true. The reason why no one wants to
Speaker 1: make World War two movies is because World War two
Speaker 1: movies apply appeal to older men, and nobody wants to
Speaker 1: make a one demographic movie. It's very hard to get
Speaker 1: kids to go see a War were two movies. It's
Speaker 1: Captain America, yes, exactly, exactly. So, so I find that
Speaker 1: I find the ways to do the things I want
Speaker 1: to do in the movies that I've given. I go
Speaker 1: through the door that opens and and sure enough, after
Speaker 1: Rogue Nation, the movie did well, and and certain people
Speaker 1: came to me and said, we love this movie. What
Speaker 1: do you want to do? And I just said, watch
Speaker 1: of a script. And they either never called back, or
Speaker 1: they called back with why they couldn't do it, or uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's it's they just in truth. I
Speaker 1: don't have the I don't have that financial cloud that
Speaker 1: blindfolds people to whatever it is under doing. The Nolan
Speaker 1: makes movies, makes money off of his name at this
Speaker 1: point is a brand. Nolan is the brand. There. We
Speaker 1: gotta make Christopher mcquarie a brand. Know what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: But let me tell you something. I would imagine that
Speaker 1: most of the people, even people listening to this podcast,
Speaker 1: um movie nerds, would would struggle to name ten or
Speaker 1: twenty directors. The average person at the checkout line at
Speaker 1: your supermarket. I'll bet you they could nake two directors.
Speaker 1: They could name Spielberg and one other guy you know,
Speaker 1: and and none of them would all name the same.
Speaker 1: Second guy you might meant Michael Bay might be a
Speaker 1: contemporary guy. The directors don't really not. Most of them
Speaker 1: don't get movies made. They're essential to making a movie.
Speaker 1: Screenplays don't get movies made. And that's what I was told.
Speaker 1: I was taught you write a good screenplay and you'll
Speaker 1: be delivered. I wrote a bunch of them. They're all
Speaker 1: still sitting in a drawer. So does that make them
Speaker 1: not good or well, no, it just means that they're
Speaker 1: not They're not things that people, they're not things that
Speaker 1: immediately scream, hey, this is gonna make a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Cabin had a hard time get an avatar made. By
Speaker 1: the way, there's another guy whose name you know, people know,
Speaker 1: that's like a household name, and Cameron is is strangely
Speaker 1: an industry in and of himself. He exists in a
Speaker 1: completely different firmament than just about anybody. He's a he's
Speaker 1: a director that I look at that I can't put
Speaker 1: in a class with any with any others. Um So
Speaker 1: you the at the screenplay is an afterthought to the
Speaker 1: decision to make a movie. The studio decides to make
Speaker 1: a movie for different reasons a lot of times, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times they lose sight of what the
Speaker 1: agenda was and it just becomes a movie that they
Speaker 1: have to make. And so oddly enough, I will find
Speaker 1: myself being offered World War two movies, but they're not
Speaker 1: my World War two movie. It's some other unmakeable World
Speaker 1: War two movie. And I'm going, well, well, why is
Speaker 1: this World War two movie okay? And that World War
Speaker 1: two movies not? And I remember one World War two
Speaker 1: movie was offered to me because an actress wanted to
Speaker 1: be in it because she liked the clothes, you know,
Speaker 1: and she was what made the movie go. It's that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. There's not you can't think about it logically.
Speaker 1: If you if you apply logic to the movie this is,
Speaker 1: you'll go completely insane. You just have to look at
Speaker 1: it and say, you know, circumstances are such that one
Speaker 1: day I've got the script sitting in a drawer, and
Speaker 1: one day the right actor who's the right age and
Speaker 1: is excited about that idea, is going to want to
Speaker 1: be in that movie. Maybe I'll get to make it then,
Speaker 1: and I just don't worry about it. You just you
Speaker 1: keep going, You just keep going. So then what do
Speaker 1: you want to do next? I mean, do you do
Speaker 1: you want I read something recently you would like to
Speaker 1: get back into the independent sector a little more? Is
Speaker 1: that true? I? Well, I definitely what everything that, everything
Speaker 1: that I have learned has culminated in Fallout and I
Speaker 1: had I if you, if you could say anything about
Speaker 1: the movies I've made you you you, They've evolved from
Speaker 1: a writer turned writer director to a director who relies
Speaker 1: more visuals, an emotional storytelling, then dialogue and intellectual storytelling.
Speaker 1: Um usual Suspects is an intellectual magic trick as opposed
Speaker 1: to an emotional belated congratulations for the Oscar by the way,
Speaker 1: thank you, yes, and and it's the movie. It's the
Speaker 1: thank you. It's the life draft that kept me alive
Speaker 1: during all those during all those wilderness years. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm excited to take everything that I've learned and everything
Speaker 1: that I've seen pay off in this movie. This is
Speaker 1: the first time I've made a movie where I was
Speaker 1: able to say, this is what we're going to set
Speaker 1: out to do, and we did it. You know this,
Speaker 1: This is the feeling I want the audience to have.
Speaker 1: This is the shape of the movie I want. This
Speaker 1: is the look of the movie I want. It's the
Speaker 1: first time I've made a movie that looks like a
Speaker 1: movie to me, from beginning to end. There aren't scenes
Speaker 1: where I go it looks more like a TV show
Speaker 1: than a movie. Um. And so I'm I'm very keen
Speaker 1: to apply that to something other than the PG thirteen
Speaker 1: blockbustery realm. I'm I'm constantly railing against the fact that
Speaker 1: we are we are chasing after a demographic that doesn't
Speaker 1: want to come to the movies. Kids don't want to
Speaker 1: come to movies, not because they don't like movies. That
Speaker 1: the industry I think has misread it. The industry looks
Speaker 1: at it and says, well, they have a short attention span,
Speaker 1: they're all focused on their phones and blah blah blah blah, well, no,
Speaker 1: that's not true. They have an infinite attention span. They're
Speaker 1: watching thirteen hours of television in a sitting um. They
Speaker 1: like long, complicated narratives and with graphic, adult complicated situations,
Speaker 1: none of which we're giving them, none of which the
Speaker 1: the this, this PG. Thirteen mechanism can give them. I
Speaker 1: promise you, Marvel movies are overwhelmingly their audiences are overwhelmingly adult.
Speaker 1: The kids that are going are coming with their parents,
Speaker 1: and they're and the the demographic is not nearly as
Speaker 1: rich as the as the over mission impossible, as young
Speaker 1: under twenty five demographic has dissolved from mission to all
Speaker 1: steadily all the way to this one. I'll be very
Speaker 1: interested to see what the numbers are in this movie,
Speaker 1: if we've managed to grow it for the first time
Speaker 1: since John woo Um. That's what's what's happening is they
Speaker 1: don't have an emotional connection to the act of going
Speaker 1: to the movies. That's just not how they were raised.
Speaker 1: You and I were raised going to the movies. That
Speaker 1: was a thing you did, and it was the way
Speaker 1: that you saw films. And and for them, the film
Speaker 1: that they love narrative, but it's coming to them through
Speaker 1: other devices that they're accustomed to seeing things on. It's
Speaker 1: always freaky to me when I see somebody on a
Speaker 1: plane watching a movie on their phone. IM portrait, right,
Speaker 1: They're not even in landscape, and I want to reach
Speaker 1: over and turn the phone sideways, let alone watching it
Speaker 1: on a big screen. Um. You you we've lost that
Speaker 1: portion of the audience. There's no winning them back. I'm
Speaker 1: encouraged to see that this year, you know, you you've
Speaker 1: felt some growth. We see, we see the market expanding.
Speaker 1: But we didn't condition them, we didn't train them. We
Speaker 1: we in our attempt to chase after them, we were
Speaker 1: consistently hammering them with the things that they didn't want.
Speaker 1: We misread it. Uh. And and that's that's gone. They're
Speaker 1: not coming back, maybe the next generation, but I don't
Speaker 1: think they're They're not coming back in numbers significant enough
Speaker 1: to make a difference. Right. Well, let's not end on
Speaker 1: that note. Let me just end on this. Uh. Do
Speaker 1: you have another one of these? And you do you
Speaker 1: want to go back to the mission I Possible World?
Speaker 1: And I'm also curious do you have any idea from
Speaker 1: Tom how long he wants to keep playing at Ethan
Speaker 1: Hunt in these things. Tom will be in an iron
Speaker 1: lung being shot out of a you know, a shot
Speaker 1: out of out of the International Space Station and re
Speaker 1: entering the Earth's orbit in his nineties. He will do
Speaker 1: this until he's never gonna stop, and he'll he'll make
Speaker 1: movies right up until the moment he dies. Not interested
Speaker 1: in retirement, vacation. There's no there is no exit strategy
Speaker 1: for Tom Cruise other than, you know, other than making
Speaker 1: movies until he's he's he's got you know, Tyrone Power
Speaker 1: died during the sword fight. That's you know. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't see another scenario for Tom. I also don't see
Speaker 1: anybody else doing Mission impossible. Uh not because they're not
Speaker 1: willing to do it. Because the discipline and the sheer
Speaker 1: amount of life long training, dedication and focus that allows
Speaker 1: him to be in the position to learn how to
Speaker 1: fly a helicopter in six weeks. You got to start
Speaker 1: really young and be building on those skills every single
Speaker 1: day of your life to get there. I don't see
Speaker 1: an actor out there who's even started. That's not to
Speaker 1: say somebody won't come along. Somebody it. With the exception
Speaker 1: of Jackie Chan, there was a lot of time between
Speaker 1: Buster Keaton and Tom Cruise. And that's that's really the analogy.
Speaker 1: It's Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin. Um, do I
Speaker 1: have another one in me? I When he asked me
Speaker 1: to do five, I had just seen Brad Bird do
Speaker 1: four and thought, I never want to do that job.
Speaker 1: It's really hard and it's really exhausting and terrifying and uncertain.
Speaker 1: When I finished five, I said, I feel sorry for
Speaker 1: the son of a bit she directs this next one,
Speaker 1: because I don't know what's left. And then the joke
Speaker 1: was on me. I was the guy. Um. And I know, now,
Speaker 1: with the reception of this movie, how do you top that?
Speaker 1: How do you top the not only the the audience reaction,
Speaker 1: but the critical reception to this movie. The concept of
Speaker 1: facing that again is so overwhelming it's too much to contemplate.
Speaker 1: At the same time, now, having been working with Tom
Speaker 1: for twelve years us on this this and and feeling
Speaker 1: the momentum steadily gaining with everything that we've learned and applied,
Speaker 1: I know it's possible. I know it's I know, I know,
Speaker 1: I know this movie, which seems untoppable, can be topped,
Speaker 1: and somebody will top it. Whether I can survive being
Speaker 1: the one who tries to is another question, um, and
Speaker 1: one that's just it's just too Dante to contemplate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably not. They ask a question to ask right this second. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I will tell you this when the when the movie ended,
Speaker 1: when Tom and I sat down to watch the movie
Speaker 1: at the premier in Paris, was the first time we
Speaker 1: saw it together and the credits rolled and he nudged
Speaker 1: me and he said, yeah, we can do better. He
Speaker 1: was he was ready to go. And we got on
Speaker 1: the plane to fly to to Korea to keep promoting
Speaker 1: the movie, and he was already talking about the next sequence.
Speaker 1: He was like, this is what I want to do next.
Speaker 1: He's got he's got a half full of ideas. And
Speaker 1: look here's the thing I have learned from Tom. There
Speaker 1: is no such thing as personal limitations. And if you
Speaker 1: had told me ten years ago, if you've shown me
Speaker 1: this movie and said, yeah, you directed that like bullshit,
Speaker 1: there's just no way. There's no way I would. I
Speaker 1: would I would have the imagination or the technical knowledge.
Speaker 1: I just I can't do and I look at stuff
Speaker 1: that other people do and go I could never do that. Um, Tom.
Speaker 1: Tom was always there to just to say, here's what
Speaker 1: we need to do. It's not Hey, he's not like
Speaker 1: cheer cheerleader Rob Rob. He's like, this is what we
Speaker 1: gotta do. And he asks for something really really difficult
Speaker 1: to do with a very specific set of practical parameters
Speaker 1: that you understand. It's the unwritten law of mission impossible.
Speaker 1: I gotta do it for real. So when he says
Speaker 1: something outrageous you your first thought is other people's first
Speaker 1: thought as oh, we could do that on green screen
Speaker 1: and do it very easily. We did it in and
Speaker 1: the list five movies and it's like, yeah, well we're
Speaker 1: not those five movies or mission impossible, so we got
Speaker 1: to do it for real. Puts you in a place
Speaker 1: now where I'm so conditioned. I'm so there's there's you
Speaker 1: don't even ask the question anymore, and you don't concern
Speaker 1: yourself what can we do it or not. It's like
Speaker 1: I gotta get done. It's not even let's figure it out.
Speaker 1: It's like the work we will be doing this um
Speaker 1: and so yeah, I know, I definitely know it can
Speaker 1: be done. It's the concept of it is so extremely daunting.
Speaker 1: I remember on Edge of Tomorrow when he came to
Speaker 1: me with Edge of Tomorrow and said, you know, this
Speaker 1: is gonna be This is gonna be a really funny movie.
Speaker 1: He said, it is a funny movie. I said, no,
Speaker 1: it's not reading the script and it's not funny. He goes, no,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna be. It's gonna be an He had
Speaker 1: a real vision for what that movie was. Um, I
Speaker 1: never would have thought. I never would have thought it
Speaker 1: turned out the way that it did. Ever, so now
Speaker 1: I just don't even I don't even think about it.
Speaker 1: What I do know, for absolutely, for absolute certain, is
Speaker 1: whatever I do next with the success of this movie,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get crushed. I'm gonna get kicked to
Speaker 1: the teeth. It's just you can't. You can't. You can't
Speaker 1: go on that sort of ride and not have the
Speaker 1: pendulum swing back the other way. There's just and there's
Speaker 1: no more room for the pengu pendulum to swing. It's
Speaker 1: whatever whatever I do will be a disappointment. It'll be
Speaker 1: it'll be devastaying. Well, I don't want to end on
Speaker 1: that note either, but I guess that's let me tell
Speaker 1: you that's a good note, tenda, Because it's really important
Speaker 1: to understand think there is no success without failure, you
Speaker 1: don't learn anything. I'm not learning anything from this experience.
Speaker 1: This we we got off lucky, we got you know,
Speaker 1: this is great. It all turned out. You're There will
Speaker 1: be no brooding, There will be no knee sitting at
Speaker 1: home saying what I did on the Way of the Gun,
Speaker 1: which is what happened? What went wrong? What could you've done?
Speaker 1: I've done better. All you're asking now is how can
Speaker 1: I do better than that? That's not the right question
Speaker 1: to be asking. The question you want to ask is
Speaker 1: how can I improve? Not how do I top myself.
Speaker 1: That's not a healthy place to come from. I didn't
Speaker 1: come into this trying to a better movie that goes protocol.
Speaker 1: I didn't come to fall Out trying to make a
Speaker 1: better movie than Roade Nation. I just kept my head
Speaker 1: down and said, just do the best you can and
Speaker 1: the the the most important lessons I've learned in my
Speaker 1: career have been those lessons that I learned when I
Speaker 1: got flattened after directing The Way of the Gun, that
Speaker 1: that time's coming, and it's just the pain you feel
Speaker 1: is your own show breaking. You have to do that.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to the you know,
Speaker 1: uh to the deep tissue massage that that will be,
Speaker 1: but you just have to breathe into it. It's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a it's a technics shop. It's gonna hurt.
Speaker 1: It's good for you, but you gotta get it. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you get it, you get in line for
Speaker 1: the Yeah, here's to failure next time. For now, though,
Speaker 1: this is high level Madman, just amazing filmmaking, So thank you,
Speaker 1: hats off. Everybody goes see Admission Impossible, fallout comes out
Speaker 1: tomorrow or tonight as you just tonight. Yes, that's like great,
Speaker 1: go see a bunch of times you'll want to trust
Speaker 1: me and Christopher Quarry. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you, great questions. Thank you,