Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning Q&A - Christopher McQuarrie - Erik Jendresen

Look, the mission wasn't impossible, but getting Chris McCrory to stay in one place to interview him and co-writer Eric Genderson in one place at one time when you are also traveling at the same time through three different time zones where we could all meet, it wasn't impossible. It was just kind of difficult sometimes. Howdy, I'm Jeff Goldsmith and this is the Q&A. My agenda is simple. Each week I plan to bring you in-depth insight into the creative process of storytelling. And folks, yes, it was kind of difficult, but we did it and it took weeks to be honest because I had a family trip planned, Chris was traveling the world on his press tour and then taking some time off. And just with a lot of coordination and our good friend Zoom, we finally made it happen and I'm really glad we did because there's a lot of interesting insights into Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning in today's episode. Without a doubt, there was a lot of ground to cover and writer-director Christopher McCrory and his co-writer Eric Genderson were very generous with their time and were very forthcoming about their creative process and what it took to get this challenging film made. So I know you'll dig this episode. And speaking of things to dig, I hope you check out Backstory Magazine over at Backstory.net. We turned 13 this year and we couldn't have done it without you. It's also my 20th year of podcasting. I couldn't have done that without you. So look, it would really mean a lot to me for my podcast listeners in Apple Podcasts and my YouTube watchers of the Backstory Magazine YouTube page, which is where you could watch these Zoomcasts so you could see the backgrounds change behind McCrory as we piece together this interview over a series of weeks. It would really mean a lot to me to have you check out our free issue. And if you are so inclined, subscribe to Backstory Magazine because your support of independent entertainment journalism means everything. So thanks for considering becoming a subscriber. But now, without any further ado, let's jump right into our interview with writer-director Christopher McCrory, a.k.a. McHugh, and co-writer Eric Genderson about their latest film, Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. All right, so we're here with McHugh and Eric Genderson. How's it going, you guys? Good to see you. It's good. Good to see you. How you been? It's good. Good to be here. I'm liking your Fire Walk With Me theme going on in the background there. I mean, sometimes you get trapped in the Black Lodge and you don't get out for 27 years and Sometimes you need your Garmin Bosia. That's what it comes down to. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. I mean, the truth is, Chris and I have known each other for almost 30 years. I'm scared to say that out loud. And I've been trapped in the Black Lodge for 27 of them. So that's just how it works. You are the William Donlo of the Black Lodge. Yes. I think a good place to start, because we all know who McHugh is, Eric, I just want to give people a quick baseline on you. You came onto everybody's radar through Band of Brothers. What about writing has always appealed to you? Just about everything about it, I think. It's the luckiest job in the world. You feel like you're waking up every morning and getting away with something. It's a responsibility and a real blessing to be able to make a living as a storyteller. And I made that choice many years ago now when there was a fork in the road between marine biology and writing. And I chose to follow my heart instead of my head. It's about as simple as that. I mean, Chris, we've talked about your writing habits many times, and you've been up and down like a roller coaster so many different times in your career. What about writing still appeals to you at this point in your career? I love telling a story. I love problem solving. I love entertaining an audience. I've often been asked, when did I know I wanted to make films? When did I know I wanted to create stories? It just was, I have no earliest memory of either of those things. They're just, they always were. Movies always were. Stories always were. Storytelling. I remember the first time I was asked about my writing, when my attention was drawn to my interest in it. But before that, it was just something I did. To my knowledge, you two met at the Sundance Lab. Is that right? Yes. Right. Over 20 years ago. We're still trying to figure out when. We have to ask Victoria. We were there the same year as Victoria Mahoney. She was there as a fellow, and she would be able to tell us. And was Carrie there that year too? Was that- Carrie Fukunaga was there as a fellow. Yeah. There's a lot going on in that lab photo. Chris, you've always kind of been a lone wolf, but I thought it was a really good idea when you brought Eric on for this pair of films as a co-writer. I think it's good to have somebody in the kind of home office because you're such a globetrotting director. We've been part of each other's work since we met. Whatever project he's working on, he's calling me about. Whatever project I'm working on, I'm calling him about. So he was very much there during the development of Rogue Nation, during the development of Fallout. And we just decided, what are we doing? Why don't we just make this official on this movie and come on board? Because I knew it was going to be overwhelming. I knew it was going to be enormous. And there were also areas in this script that were particularly veering very hard into Eric's wheelhouse. All the military stuff, all the nautical stuff, all the heavy research-intensive stuff, the things around the protocols involving rather nuclear command and control. The briefcase, the biscuit, all of those things. That's all Eric's world. Everything that's happening in Mount Weather, all of that stuff is very painstakingly researched by Eric. So Eric, would you say that you guys were collaborating ever in person or were you over Zoom? Most of it was by phone and always has been. But when I came on board, I took off for Abu Dhabi and showed up when we were shooting in the desert for Dead Reckoning and shooting at the desert and the airport. That was the beginning of my direct mission experience, was there in Abu Dhabi. And then subsequently at the Long Cross when we were shooting some of the Sebastopol material for Dead Reckoning and shooting all of Mount Weather at the same time for Final Reckoning. There was a phase during Dead Reckoning where Eric threw his back out and was fully incapacitated and was living on the deck of my apartment. He was riding on his back with a laptop on his lap and my dog, my daughter's dog. By the way, Eric, guess who's here? Ah, there we go. He's here to say hello to you. She is a toy Schnauzer, belongs to my daughter. We're all packing right now. So the dog is like extremely anxious because she knows there's a lot of luggage and she's not going and she's super clingy right now. I love Schnauzers. Oh, they're the best. Eric was essentially paralyzed. Tom came over at one point, was standing over Eric on the deck and he looked at me and he goes, we got him right where we want him. Yeah, never forget that. And those were some of the more productive weeks on the movie when you were fully incapacitated. Lesson learned. Just throw out your back, you're going to get a lot of writing done. Yep. Actually, throw out your writing partner's back and you'll get a lot of writing done and you won't throw your back out. I mean, Chris, you know, as a director, one of the most important things to do is to work with your crew heads and to check in each time. Eric essentially became a writing crew head for you, a task that you used to do by yourself and allowed you the freedom to sometimes go off and do other things and have scenes evolve that you could then check back into, rework as you needed to. Did you find that liberating? Did you find that freeing? Oh God, yeah. To know that you didn't have to worry about that, to know there were just days when, look, a lot of this movie was rewritten in the car, on planes, at one point on a snowmobile. You're constantly challenging and attacking and, you know, this is something we talked about. The reputation we have gained, partly because of some of my more cavalier comments, is that we are making this up as we go along. This is not how we choose to make these movies. This is a consequence of how big budget movies get made. If you wait for a screenplay, you'll never make your release date. And these things are predicated by release dates, release calendars. So when we set out to make these movies, we were supposed to start in February of 2020, very auspicious date. We were in Venice at ground zero for the global pandemic, two days before we were supposed to start shooting. They originally wanted these movies for summer of 22 and summer of 23. So when they gave us that release date, I said, well, then I got to start scouting tomorrow. The time it's going to take to put these movies on and post them, there's no time. That's why you're constantly in a state of catch-up. Then add a pandemic, then add strikes. And you think those things buy you time, and it's quite the contrary. They cost you time in other ways. And until you can really start editing the movie, you can't really know. And I don't care what movie you're making. We always like to say prep is the movie you want to make, and production is the movie you think you're making, and post is the movie you actually made. We just don't have illusions about that. We know that while we're shooting the movie, no matter how steady it is in stone, you're going to edit the thing together, and you're going to find out, well, this didn't work, and I'm not feeling that, and I need a little bit more here. Every movie I've ever worked on has needed some level of pickups and massaging and things like that. It should be added, too, that it's endemic to this particular process. I mean, at one point, there was a complete script for Dead Reckoning when we were shooting it, and there was certainly for Final Reckoning. But the process of interrogating what we have put on paper is unending. It's absolutely constant. We're constantly looking at what we've written. Sure, it works on paper. It'll work. Everybody is in agreement about it, but it doesn't stop us from interrogating it. We never sit back and say, okay, we're just going to shoot this exactly the way it's written, because there's always something that you can find and discover, and you need to be ready to pivot and come up with new pages on the day. So it's not like you're making a movie without a screenplay. You're just constantly searching for some kind of perfection. Here's a hard reality in my experience. Screenplays are as good or as bad as they need to be on the day you hand them in. If there is a desperate need for a script, and there is a start date, and money is being spent, when you hand in a 120-page document that fits within the margins and is relatively coherent, everybody loves that script. It's great. When there's no start date, you can hand them Casablanca, and they're going to have notes. They're going to have concerns. They're going to have doubts. The pressure cooker of the release date and having to make the movie, it immediately eliminates a lot of doubt and hesitation and risk mitigation, but at the same time, you then have to know filmmaking is a process of acceptance, and making movies requires lots and lots of denial and self-delusion. It's just like, yeah, this is great, it's awesome, and then you get there on the day and you're shooting it, you have to be able to look at it objectively and say, I know what I want this to mean, but is it really communicating that? Is it really coming across? That's where a lot of the working and reworking comes from. It's also why other movies of this scale, they end up going through production, and then they have three, sometimes four months of reshoots. We typically have three days. We just don't do big, giant reshoots on these movies because we have been attacking the movie throughout. We've been doing a lot of that post-production work while we've been making the film. Just to catch our listeners up, because we've been talking about this, Chris, for both Rogue Nation and Fallout, and Eric, you could chime in too. The one thing that people are always astounded by, but I think is so funny, you're making these Mission Impossible movies where everybody's rushing just in the nick of time, and that has also been your screenwriting process because you were handed these very unreachable release dates that were going to take an extreme amount of work and rework while you're shooting. You're building the car as you're driving it, as they say. It's caused this chicken- You are sowing the parachute as you are hurtling earthward. It's caused this chicken versus the egg thing in which the best I've been able to quantify it with you in the past is, yes, of course, you have an outline. The thing that you love to do is location scouting to get a sense of your geography. Once you have the sense of your geography, you're able to build set pieces that are connected throughout your narrative, and you're able to visualize it, you as an artist, you as a director. Then from there, you're able to get sets built, costumes made, props made, and you're still writing in the process. People are always like, how could you make this expensive movie without having a completed script for every crew department? The truth is, you get those things done early so people know what they're building. They know what needs to be there. You're also writing the whole time. As asset management, what someone from the outside does not understand, what somebody who's not on the set making the movie doesn't understand, but it took two and a half years to build the submarine for Final Reckoning, which means you had to start building that while you were making Dead Reckoning, which means you had to build certain sets that were featured in Dead Reckoning, and then you had to sit on those sets for two and a half years while they were building the gimbal into which those sets would be inserted. Those sets also had to be built for above water and for underwater. There's a lot of complicated engineering and a lot of long-term planning that goes into that. As such, no one was excited about us having a submarine sequence in this movie for the simple reason that to call something that far in advance, to put something that far into the books and know that you're having to hold on to stage space for those, there's material costs attached with all of that, which is very, very daunting, especially when they're looking at it and they don't have an understanding of the movie to understand what is even the purpose of this submarine. Ethan Hunt is not in it in the first movie. All of it was the Sevastopol in part one is a microcosm of everything that was going to happen in part two. You were seeing the entity on a smaller scale before it became something global. What's most important about that is what's happening in the set is actually not nearly as relevant as the construction and design of the set. Because until the set is a location, you actually don't know what you can physically do in there. We had a previous team pre-visualize the aerial, they pre-visualize the submarine sequence. None of those things worked when you actually got in the set and tried to do them or got on the wing and tried to do them because you couldn't predict the physics of it because there was no model that previously existed. Now with everything we know from the A400, the F-18, helicopters, and Ospreys, and biplanes, P-51s, the number of aircraft we have shot on, the platforms we have shot on, the camera rigs we have built, the designed and built technology we created, now I'm turning to other directors who are calling me about aerial stuff and I'm just saying, I'll be your second unit director on this. We built the team and there's so much experience, it was like, yeah, I'll come in and I'll sit down and talk to you about what you're going to encounter. But at the same time, I'm just like, underwater stuff too. I'm looking guys and saying, if you have anything you want to do underwater, if you don't want to get your feet wet, call me and I'll come in and I'll be your second unit director and I'd love doing it. I think that's great because it gives you a chance to come onto somebody else's set, not your responsibility. Almost like a filmmaking vacation. Take the expertise that you've learned by trial by fire and apply it for good purposes for someone else. Apply it to that poor kid who made a little independent film and now they're being handed a Marvel movie or a Star Wars movie and they're just getting thrown into the meat grinder. Imagine what it would be like to then have somebody standing there going, okay, here's all your resources. Here's what you can realistically achieve. That's all we're doing with those big assets. When we went to Rome, we knew we have these street closures. We have these vehicles. If you write an action sequence without scouting the location first, it's just busy work. It's not going to happen. You're going to end up going looking for a location to come, oh, I came up with this great gag. Now you're chasing a location and looking for it. As opposed to just going to the location and going, what's the coolest, most aesthetically awesome looking location here? What action does it invite? That's where the clarity and geography of these action sequences come from. It's because we're not trying to jam them into a location. We go to the location and you just let the location tell you what it wants. If Paris had not said car chase, there wouldn't have been a car chase in Fallout. There was only a car chase in Fallout because walking around Paris, you're like, oh my God, look at this. London was a foot chase. London's not a great car chase location as compared to what it was for a foot chase location. We also know that on your Paris scout, you found the canals underneath for the boat and that was a great part of the movie. Well, that was the ending. Once I had the punchline of the opera, the rest of the sequence was elementary. It doesn't mean it's easy, but you have a governing principle that everything is going toward. So when we know the ending, when Eric and I know the ending of something, the script we're working on right now, we've just been going in circles forever because I don't really know how it ends. And when you know where you come up with a lot of good ideas, but until you know how it ends, you don't really have a target. Usual suspects, I came up with the ending first. Once you knew what the ending was, everything else was dictated. What's the name of the script you guys are working on now? We can't say. It's out there. If you do your detective work, you'll know exactly what we're working on. Well, I mean, I know that there's two scripts that you've mentioned to me before. Saint X is a script of Eric's that you've always liked. Oh yeah. Saint X is in the pile of movies I want to make, not the pile. There's a pile of movies I get to make and the pile of movies I want to make. My career is defined by movies I got to make. And the pile of movies I want to make are in a drawer. Booth is there. The Last Mission is there. Saint-Ex is there. The Broadsword Descriptive, some word of which has leaked. That's a dream project of mine and Eric's. And Broadsword's actually the closest to getting made. It's just when to make it and what you need in terms of prepping it. That is a movie that has to be made very, very differently than we're accustomed to making movies simply because there's a casting component in it that's very time sensitive. What could you tell us about Broadsword or Saint-Ex? What do you want to... I can tell you a lot about Saint-Ex. Broadsword, the less the better. Broadsword is the gnarly movie. It's very different for us, very much outside of our wheelhouse, very little dialogue in the movie. And in fact, I'm now headed into my... With the end of Mission Impossible comes the end of lots and lots and lots of complex exposition that is all a consequence of plot. What we're focused on now is stuff that's much more naturalistic, not so plot driven. Saint-Ex is about the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I'm going to let Eric tell you because it's Eric's script. It's one he brought to me. It's the first script he ever brought to me when we were working together. Saint-Ex takes a slice out of the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery from 1929 to 1931, I believe. Two or three year slice that sort of encapsulates the man. And he was flying for Aeropostale, delivering mail in North Africa, and then ultimately opening up all of South America for air mail delivery in 1929, 1930, flying with these amazing Aeropostale pilots. And the script is not only sort of an adventure tale, but it really is the story of a man who was inspired to write The Little Prince and how and why he wrote it and the origins of that sort of immortal tale. It's an unusual film. It feels like a David Lean movie. It's on a very grand scale, grand canvas, but it's really about something very, very intimate. There's a very unique humor to it. You walk into a studio and say, I want to make a movie about a mailman. They're not excited. Kevin Costner tried. Kevin Costner tried. By the way, excellent limited series. That book has a great central concept. I think tonally, I think the movie suffered because I think just a choice of tone. There's a funnier, lighter story about the end of the world in that book. I remember reading that book and wanting to make it. So with Saint-Ex, Eric came to me at the writer's lab and said, I've got the script and I would really love you to direct it. And this was at the height of my time in director's jail. And I said, you do not want me to be attached to this as a director. I will get it nowhere. And so far I've been right. Well, that was 20 years ago, so I've got to make fun. In truth, it's a tricky movie to get made. You have to have just the right star playing that role. There have been right people at specific windows. There's moments where you feel like, now we could do this. And the timing has just never been right. But that's on the top of a pile of scripts where essentially everything I do after this is coming off of the want to make, not get to make pile. Look, my favorite script on the want to make pile is The Last Mission. Publish act one of it in Backstory magazine and everybody that read it loved it. And I've read the entire script. I think it's amazing. There's just so many cool details in there. Is that moving forward at all? You had mentioned to me recently that you and Nathan are doing right. I wrote that script with Nathan, I wouldn't say 20 years ago, but around, yeah, almost 20 years ago, around the same time that we wrote Valkyrie. We wrote those at the same time. Valkyrie would be a very different movie if I wrote it now. It would be a very different movie if I directed it. The Last Mission, what I've since learned from making all these movies, I mean, mission has taught me a lot. It's what I like to say about the four missions I've made is that was my warm up act. That was me kind of playing with all the toys. You've never seen a movie I would have directed directed by me. Valkyrie is the closest thing to it. But if I would have written that script differently, and I went back and looked at The Last Mission and realized, here's everything I can apply to it, how I can better set the movie up. And also, what is the why now? Eric and I post Fallout, everything we look at when we're looking at movies is why now? Why make this movie now? What need does it fulfill for an audience? What need does it fulfill for distributors, studios? I've never understood how they define their needs. I surf alongside those. And then of course, it's how do you make the movie scalable? How do you make the movie so that it's big enough that it justifies being a big screen movie, but manageable enough that it's not suffocating under the weight of everything that it has to make back? That's the new gold standard. How big can I make it? But it must then be the kind of movie that makes that back. The medium budget movies, the Jack Reachers of the world and things like that, they're all going to streaming now. They don't really get their day. If they do get their day in theatrical, it's a token release and it's for your consideration. It's a great script. I knew I was reading something special in which they're doing a long range bombing run. And they basically were calculating their fuel in The Last Mission and realized they needed to take the bathroom out of these bombers or not even have a bathroom. But these were like such long missions. And I'll just never forget that there's just a page where somebody goes over the railing and they just lean back to go to the bathroom on top of the bombs because that's the reality of being on a 17-hour mission. Yes. You have a very interesting memory of it. Here's the reality. In order to get to the bathroom in the plane, what they did take out was the guns. They took away all the armor. They took away all the guns except the tail gun because that meant they could carry more fuel and more bombs. They did not take out the bathroom. The bathroom in the B-29 was in the scanner section, which is essentially in the tail of the plane. In order to get to the scanner section, you had to climb in a tube that went over along the spine of the B-29, just inside the spine and over top of the bomb bay. And this is a 33. It was basically like the torpedo tube in our movie. If you were in the torpedo tube and the plane should depressurize suddenly, which was prone to happen, you would essentially become a bullet in a gun because all the air from the front section of the plane would go back and you'd be shot like a bullet and into the tail section of the plane you'd be killed. So no one ever wanted to go into the bathroom on the B-29 because you were taking your life in your own hands. So they would bring cardboard boxes and they all had dysentery because they'd all been living on Guam and eating with utensils that were not sterilized. They all had dysentery on a 17-hour mission. So they would go in these cardboard boxes and then throw them into the bomb bay and seal the bomb bay, which became just this horrible place. But there was just a realism to it that I remember reading on the page. It was just like, that's, I've never... It's the Das Boot of it all. It's like life on a submarine. It's life in a B-29. All the detail we had because we spoke to guys who actually flew on these things. And obviously the shitting in a cardboard box is not my big pitch to the studio. What happened on this last mission, and it was the longest continuous mission of World War II, and how it affected world history and how these guys flying the mission didn't even know it for 60 years, is to me what makes the story fascinating. It's what makes the movie fun. And the why now has to do with all of this transpired five days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What people don't understand is that the atomic bombs, which have always been credited with ending the war, did not. There were other things that happened in those five days. The war was anything but over. It was anything but decided. And we were facing the mainland invasion of Imperial Japan, which would have meant millions dead on both sides. Those were the stakes of this story when they flew this mission. It's an incredible story. But what I've since learned from Valkyrie and from other historical dramas, you have to look beyond these are amazing things that happened, and you have to find a way to make it about character and story and make it about first person point of view. That's a real challenge in a movie that's taking place in the air, 10,000 feet above Japan, and on the ground in Japan all at the same time. There were three amazing narratives happening at the same time. What was happening in the emperors, the high command in Japan, struggling to end the war and trapped in this terrible mindset, this ideological trap they could not get out of. These guys flying this bombing mission who thought why are we even doing this? The war is over. And then these people on the ground who were trying to stop the war from ending. They wanted the invasion, and they saw the invasion as the only way that they could save their culture. Why now? Look at the world we're in. I really hope that a studio steps forward so that you could finally make it, because I want other people to see what I've seen in my mind all these years, which is a hell of a script, my man. Now, jumping around in time, it is interesting. You had made a comment to me the other day. Basically, as you were filming Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, that you had to kind of wrap out Angela Bassett and Ving Rhames, and you were shooting the Mount Weather stuff while you were shooting Dead Reckoning, which is technically the end of Final Reckoning. So again, going back to the chicken versus the egg, you definitely had those scenes, the kind of seven days in May feel that were intact. So you were at least writing into your endings. Was that difficult for you to be kind of getting those final clicks of the movie shot, even though they're so far out of order and a full film away from even making as much relevant sense? Difficult is where we start. I mean, it's really where the fun is, because we really were challenged by the schedule, and we knew way ahead of time that we had to come up with the entire drama that takes place on this vast set with these amazing actors. We had a tiny window, and we had to write to that and get it done and shoot it all anticipating what the rest of the movie was going to be. And you had to strike the set. You could never go back to that set. And we could never go back to the set. So we had to get it right, not knowing how it was going to be intercut with the rest of the film. But ultimately what we did, I think, was just, we treated it very organically and very realistically and let the reality of the situation that they were in dictate what these scenes were about. And we never re-shot any of it. We trimmed some stuff from it. But I mean, essentially, what we shot and what's on the screen is exactly what we wrote. We shot eight beats and used six and a half. It worked perfectly. And just again, to talk about these sets that were being scrapped, because Mount Weather was scrapped, it is crazy. And I just want to highlight again, it is crazy that a studio, that the submarine set that has a gimbal that is very complicated, that is just sitting there unused on a soundstage because you don't want to partially strike it because it came together so well. It's crazy that I could see the beam counters at a studio going out of their minds. Like, what are you talking about? There's an empty set that we are jamming up an entire soundstage. But the submarine sequence in Final Reckoning is just incredible. And it had to be incredible. If you're going to put that kind of time and effort and expense into it, it better be fucking good. And you can't add time. You had to basically allow yourself so much time to shoot it based on your previous experiences of having shot underwater, what your estimation of effort was, not knowing what the action would actually be until Tom Cruise put on his soaking wet 125-pound costume with a mask that was, it looks good, but it's not a great breathing apparatus. And he can't see because of the lights inside the helmet. So Tom is blind, hypoxic, and weighs 125 extra pounds climbing around inside that set. You didn't know where cameras could go. We did a lot of models. We did a lot. We animated a lot of stuff and said, if I put the cameras here, what will happen? If I put this much water in the set, what will happen? None of it, and I mean miles of this research, none of it added to an ounce of prediction of what would happen when we got in there. And as soon as we turned it on, we knew, okay, that was the plan yesterday. Time for a new plan. You're not allowed to have any more time. The first shot that we did in the submarine, one of the more complicated ones, took the first five days of shooting. In that time, we were learning the environment. We were becoming experts in how to shoot in this environment so that by the end of the day, at the end of the sequence, things that would have taken us days were taking hours. There was an acceleration. And by virtue of the fact that I was in the tank and not outside, that added a level of acceleration. And because we had done other underwater sequences and we knew what that was, you just weren't losing your nerve. You just didn't look at the clock the same way, but you also understood we asked for this. So it's got to work and it's got to work and it's got to work on time. And that was the anxiety. We were so numb to it. We simply didn't believe it was that effective a sequence. We were really, really nervous about it. And it wasn't until people came in midway through what I would consider to be the end sequence and people were sweating and fidgeting. And I was like, that's when I realized I was like, oh, maybe this actually works. Top Gun came out and it made just shy of $1.5 billion at the box office worldwide. Did that give you some extra breathing room with the studio? The give and take is always the same. You're talking about a massive investment in a completely uncertain market. So the same hills and valleys that we go through, they go through. They're excited in the end when it all works. And at which point everybody says, let's do it again. We're all excited that then you start doing it again and the bills add up and the problems add up and the days stretch on and everybody forgets how we started in the first place. It's a little bit like I understand childbirth today. I remember what it was like two weeks before our child was born and two weeks after our child was born. That's very much the same thing when you're making movies. I'm curious about kind of the concept of retconning. And everybody just loves the idea of bringing back William Donnello from the first Mission Impossible movie. And I'm curious of your process when that came about. Eric, I think you had told me that that was kind of like it was an in the air moment between you and Chris. It certainly was. It was utterly bizarre. I was here in North Carolina. And for some reason, there was a need to very early on to come up with a sort of just not a beat sheet or an outline, a basic treatment, a couple pages of what the story is. And I was working on that. And I got to the point where it was about arriving at the Sosa station on St. Matthew Island, all of which is stuff that we researched extensively. And it was about, well, who do they encounter there? Who's running the station? And it hit me. Oh, my God, I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska, send him his clothes from Mission One. It's Bill Donnello. And I typed William Donnello. And I got a text on my phone at the exact same moment. And it was Chris in London. And I believe the text said, you know, who's manning the Sosa station? And then we got on the phone and it's like, wait a minute, I just typed William Donnello. And we had the exact same idea at the exact same moment, three thousand, five thousand miles apart. It was surreal. It's such a great idea. And you also gave it a positive spin because, you know, even in his dialogue, he really just demystifies very quickly that he's not out for revenge. And this concept of him collaborating with them and having this this life that he's very happy with because of meeting his wife and living up there. I thought that was a really interesting way to go. Did you ever have him on your kind of antagonist possibility or was he always going to be a new bit of juice for the team? The fixation with his environment, his set, the cottage on St. Matthew Island, I was very specific with Gary Freeman right from the beginning that you had to want to be in that place. You had to it had to feel peaceful. It had to feel inviting because if William Donnello had been there for those 30 years feeling anything but peace, it would have been Ethan's fault. It would have been the team's fault. It would have created emotional drag. The whole idea was that it sneaks up on the audience that they perceive this to be a fake worse than death. And in reality, Donnello summarizes it, I'd probably still be there and I probably still think I was happy. Donnello is in a lot of ways, he represents a big part of what the movie is saying about what really is important. And so he comes to represent something philosophically in the movie as opposed to just a gag. That's why Donnello didn't come back sooner. It's why Henry Cerny didn't come back sooner. We didn't want to bring characters back just to dangle them in front of the audience and say, oh, look, if we're going to bring them back, we wanted to give them an arc and we wanted it to have something to do with the story. That's where a lot of these applications don't work. That's why you've heard me talk about fan service a million times. You can dismiss what we've done in the movie as fan service, but none of it was. Everything was taking a previous dissatisfaction or perceived injustice from the franchise and making something of it. We just took opportunities and used them well. It basically is a scene that's a combo of Ice Station Zebra and the scene where we meet Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it's just a great little sequence. And I thought it worked really well and it kept the story moving. The other thing that was so interesting was the way that you retconned the concept of the rabbit's foot from Mission Impossible 3, J.J. Abrams' movie. It is interesting because they were doing it as a MacGuffin. They weren't entirely defining. finding what it was, which left you an opening to say maybe it wasn't what they thought it was. Well, I don't look at any of this as retconning. To me, retconning is you're taking something from a previous movie, you're explaining it in a different way. Nobody told you what the rabbit's foot was. It was open season. They told you Don Lowe's fate. They said, I want a Manning a radar station in Alaska by the end of the day. That just seemed perfectly natural. We didn't have to go out of our way and do it. It was like, oh, he should, he should be there. Let's come back to the story. The harder thing to do was to then say, well, why are all these things happening in the same movie? Why are these threads coming back together again? And that was a very delicate thing. How subtle or overt did we want to be in terms of this villain from his past and the son of another villain from his past and this guy coming and the rabbit's foot and all these threads coming together? There are a lot of ways that you can interpret that. And we have our own interpretation of it. We also knew that the more we tried to explain it, the more you were calling attention to it. So by not explaining it, going into the first test of this movie, I said to my wife, this is not a test of the movie. It's a test of the audience. Are they going to buy this ending? Are they going to buy this story? Are they going to take this structure of a movie? Are they going to embrace it? Are they going to tear it apart? And they embraced it. It worked for them. The biggest thing for me, the biggest affirmation for me was that they accepted the ending. If they had not accepted the ending, we would have cut it out. I don't know what I would have put in its place. We would have thought of something, but that was the ending I wanted the movie to be and didn't believe for a second that it would survive. I really didn't think that ending would survive the first test screening. I'm so surprised though. Steal from the greats and you stole from the great Chris McCrory. In my opinion, usual suspects, you kind of have the characters acknowledging each other without any dialogue. I know you did that again with this team and Ghost Protocol, but I mean, basically it seemed like, you know, for a movie where they kept saying, I'm all in the exact place that I need to be. They're all in the exact place that they need to be by the end. I just didn't know if the audience would say, ah, the ending's too long. What's with everybody standing around looking at each other? And in the first screening, there were definitely people going, why are they just standing around? Why didn't they go talk to each other? And I was like, man, am I going to listen to that now? You understand what the movie is saying or you don't. And the interesting thing about that is we shot Trafalgar before we shot much of Tom and Haley's relationship. So Trafalgar informed what their relationship was. It wasn't until she handed him the drive. That was all Haley and Tom just improvising their performance. We didn't know what the resolution of the story was yet, enough to trust it. So they just gave me a million options and we had a coda that was going to follow it. So the movie wasn't leaning on that scene. It was going to be something much shorter and it was going to be something that just showed you, oh, and then they all get together and they give Ethan the drive. And then what does Ethan do next? That's what Trafalgar was. It turned into something when Eddie started to edit it to the music that Max and Alfie and Cecile had created for us. They created a suite of music with no particular place to put it. That's how it all came together. So when I then looked at the scene, I went, oh, look at their behavior. Now I just need to write a story that to which this behavior is the punchline. When we have an ending, we're good to go. Is there anything you want to tell us about what the coda might've been since it wasn't used? I mean, it just linked the thing we thought we needed to do because that's what movies do. And Mission keeps telling us, no, you don't have to do that. It was Ethan confronting the Entity. Well, he'd already done, he's already confronted the Entity in the coffin. We didn't have that scene yet, so we didn't feel that confrontation. Guillermo del Toro, he said, I want to feel the Entity scream. We tried to put that in the moment when Grace grabs the drive. It didn't give you the satisfaction you wanted and it interrupted the emotional flow of the movie. This movie, we tested the emotions of this film six ways from Sunday before settling on what we did at the end of the story. So when I showed Tom this scene halfway through shooting Final Reckoning, I said, I don't think we need to shoot the coda anymore, but you'll tell me. And I hit play and he watched it and he said, this is the end of our movie. And it's an ending we've wanted for a long time. We've tried to get an ending like that in the end of every film and it's just never quite worked. It's cool because it goes back to the concept of the general public walking around, living their safe lives, should be grateful to this team that has saved them, but the concept of Mission Impossible is they don't even know that their lives were saved. They don't even know. They don't entirely know. In this case, there's a worldwide situation, so they did know that they were in some sort of danger. I don't know that they even perceived that there was danger. The scene doesn't work without the setup in Trafalgar. That was the first time we ever had time to design a setup to the payoff that we were looking for. That's the first time we ever had to be able to bake it into the movie. It was funny because you were telling me something that really, it's so weird the way that I remembered it. I was convinced, and I just think this is funny to bring up. I was convinced that I had seen Ethan steal the rabbit's foot in Mission 3, but he didn't. You shot it and you didn't even use de-aging technology. Just tell us briefly what you did because I guess we only saw it from the outside and you smartly decided to show him even just for a flash of a moment. Well, you never see him steal it. It's as simple as that. Again, Mission 3, the gift that keeps on giving. The rabbit's foot, Julia, and in Mission 3, they shot a sequence in which the heist was not the heist. It was the escape. How he gets in and how he gets out, not what he does in the building. They kind of inverted that whole sequence. It left us with nothing to cut to when Ethan physically takes the rabbit's foot. There are just shots of it rolling in the street, etc., etc. We thought this would be fun if you did the reverse of what you didn't see in the movie and how much of a sequence do we want to make of it? Ultimately, we distilled it down to that handful of shots that you saw. That was it. We shot it all on film. We built a set. We extended it digitally, but there was a physical set that we built. Tom is wearing the same costume he wore in Mission 3. It's actually a little big on him. He's actually slimmed down since Mission 3. You said that you basically had a little bit of steam and a little bit of soft focus. Yeah. We had Atmos. When I designed the shot, I knew, first of all, I wanted to say that it had to be kept in something cold, which it would have to be if it was that kind of technology from back then. That was a realistic expectation. I knew I'd have steam and I knew I'd be focused on the object. As long as I didn't throw focus to Tom, it wasn't going to be a big deal. Then it was simply a matter of we just did a little clean up. We didn't have to do any kind of major de-aging thing. It helps that it's Tom Cruise. He takes very good care of us. We did have to make a wig. We had to make a Mission 3 wig for Tom because he had long Mission 8 Final Reckoning hair, so we had to make a Mission 3 wig. That was it. You know, something that was really a challenge here is your antagonist of the entity does not have a personality. It's a computer. It's AI. There's a long range of films, starting with the HAL 9000 in 2001, and then the Turner Classic Movies Fest here just did a beautiful restoration screening of Colossus, the Forbidden Project, which I think I'd never seen on the big screen and it was just gorgeous. Then of course there's the Whopper from War Games, a little bit of Terminators in the way that they talk. Skynet. Skynet, for sure. What were the challenges here in which you really did decide, because I was wondering between these two movies when I walked into Final Reckoning, were we going to see more of the AI? Was it going to have more of a personality? It could have been cheesy because there could have been barbs being traded back and forth, which leaves the human aspect of Gabriel as a quote-unquote disciple of the AI. Tell us about the challenges of that, and I guess you saved yourself a lot of time and space by really not attempting a personality for it and letting the movie be more present tense knowing the dangers at hand, which really is Colossus, the Forbidden Project. Yeah. The more human the AI became, the more mundane it became, and its power to me was a lot more intimidating when it was more of an unknown. Everything that's happening in that coffin when Ethan confronts the Entity is everything I said could never be in the scene, and nothing Tom Cruise said had to be in the scene. Neither of us got what we wanted out of that sequence in the end. We got what the movie wanted. We got what the movie needed. It was very, very late in the process where I went, just fuck it, the AI's just got to say it. It's just got to lay it out. It's too confusing, and it's too intellectual. That's the challenge in these movies is if you want the audience globally to know something, you have to say it. You can't throw it to them and hope they suss it out because for everybody that does, there's a wide swath of the audience that won't. You just can't be too clever by half, and we were throughout the entire evolution of the Entity. We were just resisting everything that to us made it less mysterious. The one thing I've learned from making many of these movies is with the rabbit's foot, with the knock list, the more mysterious and the more opaque things are, the more they just become questions that never go away. Audiences are still asking Tom about the knock list. They're still asking him about the rabbit's foot, or at least they were up until this movie and then all those questions, all those questions went away. It's interesting though. You had told me, and I was really kind of fascinated with this, that you did at one point experiment with a human manifestation of the AI. We had Marie as the avatar for the Entity. When he got in there, it was in a very different environment. You saw not only that he was strapped in the coffin, but you saw that he was in virtual space and it added a layer of confusion to the story and it kept you at arm's distance from the Entity. The movie just kept going, it's time for the wizard to step out from behind the curtain and here it is, and he's just got to have a confrontation with it. The movie's very unusual in its shape in that way because the Entity shows up at the beginning of the movie and you glimpse it again, but you don't really have any interaction with it again. Gabriel shows up in the first act of the movie and the third act of the movie, he's gone for about the middle two hours of the film. In between are the Acolytes. So the Entity is an infectious presence and an ideological destabilizer throughout the entire movie, but you don't have, and we knew that, we knew when Ethan was making his journey to the submarine, we knew what the middle act was going to be. We were like, we're going to lose the villain for a middle act of the movie. This was not something we didn't see coming. What we didn't know was, because we had tried a nonlinear version of this movie as well as a linear version, we didn't know what would happen with Luther. We played with different ideas of what happens to Luther and where, and realized only when we put the movie together the way it went together organically, Luther's in the movie the whole time. He's in the movie throughout and his story is nonlinear. That all came by sense of feel. We designed it another way. We designed it so that it would be shorter, it would be tighter, it would be leaner, and it made no sense. It just didn't, it didn't have any emotional gravity to it when you got to the end. I mean, even with the Marie concept, like this is, she was introduced for the first time in the series in Final Reckoning. So you would have to again, do some heavy lifting to even explain who she is. And that's not the place where you want to be re-explaining things. So I understand it. We realized that the more we tried to do that, the more burdensome it was and the more it created other confusions, other emotional, not plot confusions, but emotional confusions. People just didn't know where to put their feelings. They couldn't decide what Ethan was feeling and it was getting in the way of his relationship with Grace. And it ultimately had to go. We had great ambitions for the character. They got in the way of other things the story needed. And we were so far away from Dead Reckoning by the time Final Reckoning came out. A lot of those things didn't need to be revisited. It's really interesting to see people reacting to the movie because there are people who are very grateful for all the setup, that you don't have to leave the movie. You don't have to think about another film. And then there are people really frustrated with all the setup. They seem to be people who've retained everything from the last movie and are thinking they don't need it. And the reality is you do. You know, I love to work things out in my mind as I'm watching them. And when Ethan gets out of the coffin with the entity, the first thing he says is, are you real? Is this real? And it made me wonder, ooh, are they going to go into a either false reality problem for Ethan where he's not sure for the rest of the movie, kind of, is he in some sort of a Matrix-like situation? Or even is he going to end up in a Manchurian candidate situation, slightly brainwashed because Paris tells him, you know, be careful when you go in there, it'll change you. And so I was wondering if that was ever on your table for handling your antagonist of complicating things for him, or is that just silly me watching the movie? Is this real? Had other implications. They ultimately didn't pan out and didn't matter. And we debated putting that line in, taking that line out. It really didn't land for us until we made the entity's vision work. When the entity was showing the future, that became a line that was like, you know, it was responding to how vivid that was and what was Ethan's, how did Ethan feel about it? That's really what it came down to. The idea that the entity had planted many, many, many futures in Ethan's head, that the entity had showed Ethan all these different possible outcomes in order to instill doubt in Ethan was an early idea we were playing with. It's just too intellectual an idea. And so we just didn't pursue it. There were things like that in the story that we debated, do we leave this in or not? Because now it speaks to something different. And in some of the things that it speaks to, they went from being overt meanings to being much more hidden meanings that the more you watch the movie, the more they'll hopefully make sense. Exposition is the enemy of all writers, speaking of antagonists, and universally there's no writer that loves it. You guys had some interesting battles here and you had an interesting arsenal in which for a lot of your explanation, you were able to use all these years of footage to explain things from these other great films. But at the same time, there was a lot of reminding needed to be done between Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning. What were some of the challenges you faced with Exposition and were there any tricks that you think got you there that you might use moving forward? Yes. Give Eric the toughest question. Eric, it's all yours. Yeah. I really appreciate this, guys. Tricks? No. Always trying to find the most organic way to remind an audience of something. There's another element that plays in to this franchise or any big tentpole movie that is intended to be and will be seen globally, and a lot of people don't think about, and that is that the vast majority of the audience will be actually seeing the movie. They don't speak English and are either seeing it dubbed or they're reading subtitles. The responsibility that we have as the storytellers of that kind of a film is to make sure to inscribe clarity for the sake of the audience so that they really understand. It's being kind, thoughtful, considerate of the audience, never taking really anything for granted and needing to sometimes write in sort of in crayon to make sure that everybody gets it. Yes, it's very difficult as a purist and as a storyteller who's trying to avoid exposition at all costs and make exposition an emotional experience rather than just an information dump. In this film, we were able to use multiple styles of exposition using flashbacks, putting information into other people's mouths, like Gabriel's mouth as he's taunting Ethan, and endless quests to organize the information in the right way and then to disseminate it in the right way. It's always tricky. It's never really satisfying, but nevertheless critical and especially crucial for a film of this sort. You want them in the mindset of your character here and sometimes people will use unreliable narrators to confuse other tricks, but that's not what was the mission here. So it's funny, I went the other night and I re-saw it at one of the biggest IMAX screens here in LA at Universal. The one thing that I noticed that was honestly a good piece of exposition because it was just helping people with geography and their understanding was when Ethan is in the submarine, you know, there's just no dialogue obviously for so long. There's just this one moment where like you see him looking at the room and there's like a line that's clearly ADR and he just says, torpedo tube. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. Like he's explaining to people how he's going, where he's going. There were too many hatches in the room and it needed to be clear. You know, we wanted it to be this sequence with no dialogue. Visual clarity trumps that every time he has to say it. It took that burden off the audience. That's the thing we contend with quite a lot. It's just how to unburden the audience. How do you make it so the audience can just experience the movie? So obviously the bins are a real condition that divers can get. You did a great job with your exposition of explaining how the nitrogen all throughout your body is exploding. If you're going from, you know, the bottom of the ocean up to the surface too fast. And in the movie, they have a solution for that, a scientific solution for that on the surface. And they also are using a experimental bit of technology while they're underwater that Ethan's going to wear. And they go into explaining generally enough how the technology works. They then, you know, say that it's classified. And the most they could tell him is that there's certain gases that will enter his bloodstream as equalizers. It's fascinating because, you know, the Abyss did this with this crazy suit where you have to, you know, inhale this fluid so that your lungs could handle it. that the deep pressure, and you know, that was long ago in Cameron's Abyss. Here after this great setup, you piece by piece have this high piece of technology disappear. The curiosity is, because there's a danger in this, in which you did such a good job of explaining what the bends are. We do see Ethan kind of battle nature and what we know about diving in a moment that could only be explained as movie magic, in which he loses his suit. And I'm kind of curious how, in your minds, you quantified that. Is it kind of movie magic? We changed the depth multiple times. We added the lines of dialogue in the DC3 when she says, what if he drowns and we get there. We went through that. Which was a great line, and they say he's going to drown. That's what we need to have. Yeah. In all likelihood, he will. Yes. And the truth of the matter is that Simon Pegg isn't even saying those words. We took other lines of dialogue and slipped ADR into his mouth. So it looks like he's saying that, but the reality is he was saying something entirely different. Because when you're writing exposition scenes, you know you're going to be rewriting them. That's constantly what we end up doing. So we massaged that over and over and over again. And you never quite know where to put it. We shot lots of stuff of the 4Con team explaining to Ethan what he was going to go through. It either didn't work there or it was more information than you needed. It's not that we don't know how to write the scenes. It's just because I say it doesn't mean you're going to feel it. Who says it, when they say it, in what context it is said, are all critical things. You can only do that by sense of feel. Emotional writing is an interesting thing that you did there in which, you know, for as we see beat by beat when Benji has a medical situation towards the end of the film, that we see all clearly. But it is emotional writing for Ethan's resuscitation in which it's done kind of as a montage. It has more of an emotional feel rather than a practical medical feel. So I get what you're saying there. Look, how much will they believe? Where you put dissolves versus cuts, that difference is so impactful. It has such a big impact and it doesn't feel like it would. So the test audience was asking us questions about Ethan's ascent, Ethan's descent. They were listening to every little thing, every word. They understood all of it. When you change those things, the notes went away. No movie exists without the careful application of bullshit. It's how much they need versus how much they don't. That's what this process is. It's finding ways to take these outrageous situations and make them believable. I'm not interested in reality. Reality's fucking boring. We all live in reality. We go to movies to get away from reality. You want realism. You want it to feel real enough that you can still have this outrageous experience. There's a level of forgiveness that they're offering you when they sit down to take your money. How far can I push that? It's what any action reviews. That's what all actions say. Oh, hey, I'm jumping in really quick to remind you to check out Backstory magazine. We just published our new issue. It's our summer issue. It's our Emmy contenders issue. It's issue 56, darn it. And it's our 13th year of publishing and I couldn't have done it without you. Heck, it's my 20th year of podcasts and I certainly couldn't have done that without you. So thanks a lot for all your support. If you've never read Backstory before, you could test drive us by reading us on a desktop or laptop at backstory.net or you could read us in our iPad app, Backstory. There's a free issue to be found on both. So look, it would really mean a lot to me to have my podcast listeners, an Apple podcast, a Spotify and my YouTube watchers of the Backstory magazine YouTube page, which is where you could see all these Zoomcasts. That's right. You could see us talking. It would really mean a lot to me to have you support my passion project and support independent entertainment journalism. So thanks for considering becoming a subscriber. But now without any further ado, let's jump right into our interview with co-writer director McHugh and co-writer Eric Genderson about their latest film, Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. McHugh, Eric, welcome back. Time has passed, but we're going to be editing this probably non-linearly, so who knows? And you're in a car and I just want people to know that you're not actually driving the car. That's something only Ethan would be doing, driving and zooming at the same time. I am in the backseat. I'm not on autopilot. You're not on autopilot. That's good. That's good. You know, I want to go back for a second here. You've written these, these movies and I just want to know if you could track, and it might be impossible, what has changed about your writing process specifically for the Mission Impossible franchise? Because you've talked about it being a lot of pickups, a lot of go with the flow, but is there anything you could quantify about your writing process that's changed? I would say my writing process has changed. Part two of this interview is what we're now talking in July after the movie has come out. And I've had some time to reflect on the movie. Eric and I both have. We've been working on other stuff since then. With some distance, you know, having worked on this franchise for so long and on so many of these back-to-back, Mission is problem solving. It's a disproportionately about problem solving because you're, you know, from the very beginning, you're trying to reconcile whatever your story ambitions are and whatever your directing ambitions are with whatever the requirements of the franchise are. So it's different creative muscle that you're exercising. And so having come full circle from that and going back to original material, which I haven't, everything I've been working on for the last several years has been either an adaptation or a sequel or something historical based on previous material. It's been a long time since I've just worked with a pure, you know, from whole cloth with a purely original idea. Also I've gone back, project you and I have talked about before, The Last Mission, I've gone back to The Last Mission, applying everything I learned from making these movies, not just writing them, but then writing them, then directing them, editing them, making several of them and, you know, stitching those together. And it's taught me a lot about efficiency. It's taught me a lot about really what's necessary and how to better set yourself up. But also, you know, the thing I talk about all the time, that these movies are very plot driven and we've made emotion the priority. We've pushed really hard to make it more emotional. And from this, I've learned how to do this, do that a lot more efficiently. I've talked to a lot of writers who have said that sometimes they do an emotional tracking pass on their scripts. Eric, do you agree with that? That sometimes, you know, you've got your plot in place, but you realize it's a good time to make sure your emotional tracking is correct for your characters? I kind of think that that's something that Chris and I both do in the moment as we go. It's never a matter of doing like a watercolor wash of emotion across what you've already written. If you're not writing it from an emotional place and a character based place to begin with, then you're making a mistake. I have a question to ask for everybody. I'll start with you, Jeff. How do you define plot? Because I hear people talk about plot all the time. There's two ways that people define it. It's through action or character. And so the perfect version is them braided together to move the story forward from a beginning to a middle to an end. That's the most basic thing. Goes back to Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces. The humans, you know, concept of storytelling is the day they wake up, they do some stuff, they go to sleep. That's their story of a day. So I mean, that's my basic version. That's story. When I think about plot is I hear people talk all the time about plot and what they think is plot or that a story is filled with plot or that it is light on plot. Plot to me is just why things happen. Story to me is what then happens. But the plot is why. So when we talk about specifically about mission, when we're getting into the motives, the things that make the story go forward, that's what we think of as plot. Ethan Hunt getting the mission at the beginning of the movie, which gives him a set of instructions and creates some sort of a, an objective for Ethan, James Bond, whatever, whatever James Bond and M talk about what then happens as a result of him having to carry out those orders or resolve that issue. That's story. That would be a big thing that I learned while making these movies is kind of separating and really defining and having an agreement as to what plot is. And you'll, and you'll see in mission impossible in each one, the more, what I consider dialogue to be is a consequence of plot. All this stuff that they talk about in the mission, in mission impossible is just the stakes of the movie. There's very, very little time dwelling on backstory. There's very little time dealing on characters, interrelations, other than what they're doing related to story. And a lot is a consequence of having to make all of these different sequences fit together in the same movie. So that's, that's kind of, that's where all of that comes together. That's why Eric and I, the script that we've been working on between these movies, the next movie we've been talking about doing with Tom, I think he's got fewer than 750 in the entire movie. I don't know if we've talked about this before, that between him and his co-star, they have fewer than a thousand. Bob in Top Gun has fewer than 60 words in the entire movie. Those are all things that I learned from making these movies and making characters and character dynamics, character relationships, composition. For lack of a better word, there's no ball busting on the team in these movies. Ball busting to me is right next to sarcasm as like the lowest form of writing there is in terms of creating relationships between characters. And I think it's all a consequence of where it's done well. It's really done well and done quite sparingly in James Cameron's Aliens, the way they create a culture. In Top Gun, the first Top Gun, the way there's a little bit of, there's, there's a little bit of ball busting, but that's also a rivalry. The characters who are actually going after each other are deliberately antagonizing one another. And it's part of the culture. How we watch movies, when you put a team dynamic together, the default is characters by insulting one another and making fun of one another, they're building, or at least communicating a relationship and a friendship. To me, it's much more interesting in terms of character. Look how little the characters in Final Reckoning actually speak to one another, except in very specific scenes when they're all sitting around planning the plot. And yet look at how much you feel the relationships between those characters. It's like a relationship in crisis mode. And one of the things that I was thinking about was that, you know, after the death of Elsa, it could have been tempting to have Grace as a new love interest. But actually what you did was you kept Ethan calibrated the way that he's kind of always been in which like a superhero, his only weakness is his love for his team. I never considered Ilsa to be a love interest. People wanted Ilsa to be a love interest. Certain people, a very small group of people were really quite vocal about that. It's not what mission was ever, except for mission three, which was his relationship with Julia, which of course is a whole movie about how this guy can't have a relationship. Exactly. That's what the movie was. To me, Ilsa and Grace and Julia all, all representing a thing that Ethan can't have, which is a normal life. He could, he could just never have that normal life. It's why the, you know, why the whole notion of Ethan retiring never worked. What was he going to, what was he going to do when he retired? If he was in any physical shape, what was Ethan going to do when he was watching the news at night, knowing what was really happening and knowing that he wasn't out there doing something about it? We've, we've talked at length about Ethan and the team that once they know what they know, they can never go back. They can never have a normal life because they know they're equipped to do something about all the bad things that are going on in the world. Well, I think that's what resonates so much about him is that he has almost superhero abilities, even though he's an everyman with everyman instincts, he has better physical and intellectual abilities than most, which is why he's the guy that's always saving the world. Yeah. What we always took it to be is he had training. They all did. Benji has his own superpowers. Luther has his own superpowers. They're specialists in their field. What was really important is that his real, his real superpower is simply relentlessness that Ethan knows doesn't matter if I do jump out of this Osprey and the submarines not there. If I stay in the Osprey, the world's going to end anyway. I don't want to do it. So what you have is a guy who makes inevitable decisions. He makes inevitable choices and does them without hesitation while communicating all the time that he does. He wishes he was anywhere else. I think if Ethan has any superpower, it's simply to overcome his common sense, to not jump out of a perfectly functioning aircraft into the freezing North Pacific in the hopes that a submarine would be there. Yeah. He's hoping his training has set him up because the coward dies a thousand deaths. The hero, but just one. What's interesting about that comment is calling it a coward and calling it a hero. I would say there are definitely times when being brave, who are you being brave for and why are you being that way again? It's not courage. It's responsibility. Sure. And also it's knowing that you only fail when you quit. That's a great way to say it. I mean, if you could convey one important thing that you learned from your underwater sequence here, and I know you could teach a masterclass on it and we have already talked about how you will do some second unit directing if ever presented with the option because it'll just be like a fun film vacation for you using knowledge that you've already learned via trial by fire. But I know that I've read in certain places that communicating underwater as a director is one of the toughest challenges. And what could you tell us, if anything, was a helpful or light bulb moment for you about directing underwater? And then we've got to get to the aerial stuff. Communication. That was it. You improve your communication by getting in the water. The reason directing underwater is difficult is because you're above water talking to everyone underwater through an AD who's got a microphone connected to an underwater speaker. You can't see where your camera operator and your actors are in relation to one another or the set in three dimensional space. Sometimes the camera's not oriented in a way. So when you're saying pan left, they're panning right. Sometimes the camera's upside down and when you say tilt up, they're tilting down. Getting in the water, you're just there. You're there and you're inside of it. And having hand signals and communications, you could just be, there's no coming up to talk about it and discuss it. And you can make big and small changes, whereas when you're not in the water, it's so slow. As hard as you work and as carefully as you plan, you get six setups a day and there's almost no way to break that glass ceiling. When we got in the water, when I got in the water with the team, we were doing 24 setups a day and we were block shooting. We were getting entire concepts, you know, five, six setup, complicated bits of action in an hour. There's no comparison to it. Would you say that your previs and storyboards still worked in your underwater direction or were they just a guide that you then had to throw out? No, the previs and storyboards on movies like this almost never work. If you don't have a previs team, who's been through the physical action of whatever you're doing, in some cases, the physical violence of whatever you're doing, they'll approximate it. The previs of the train gave everybody a concept of what cars to build and what equipment we wanted and what we hoped would happen in that train. But if you could have seen the way the first previs had them running through the train, they were running through the train so quickly, you almost didn't see it. And I said, no guys, they're going to be fighting this environment. They're going to be struggling with this environment the whole way. Same thing happened on the wing. The assumption was simply that Tom is Superman and he could do anything and he could climb up on this bat and punch the pilot. And that would take, that entire piece of action in the previs took about six seconds. In reality, it took Tom about 40 seconds to be able to do that with the wind pounding on him. And in order to get all the setups that we needed to get, it took days to get that. As we learned, we got better and we learned, don't try to shoot the plan. Don't fight the environment, shoot what you actually can. So our action kept evolving based on where we were shooting. But yeah, you, you can try to previs like we couldn't previs the submarine. We tried. I previs camera positions and put in models of water to see where would the best place be to put a camera that it would get the most action. What was the ideal depth of water? All of that was theoretical. No one ever accounted for when they were doing all those models was as soon as you started rotating the set, parts of the set, which they couldn't know because they were not involved with the design of it. We're scooping up tons of water and dumping it back into the set. So it turned into a rain machine in there. The difference between Mission Impossible and other movies, because we've done this so many times, we don't know what's going to happen, but we know something like that will. So we're preparing everybody for the year that we're preparing the sequence, constantly reminding them, understand that the previs is a guideline. This is not how it's going to be. This is a cartoon. This is a kind of approximation of what we hope to achieve in order to move you all in a direction so that we're not all just waiting for the gimbal to be built because there is no rule book. There's no instruction manual to the point where now I can, if somebody were to say, Hey, I want to do an action stick, I would say, show a car, show the camera package. I'll walk you through trial and error. Some of the things that we experienced, but I can also have some prediction. I can tell you what you're going to discover and I could tell you where your blind spots are. If I'm looking at it and going, I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody does. There's no rule book for where that person is going. Well, so one of the things that I, that I really admired is for, you know, a movie that has espionage and, and it's. thriller in that sense, and all this highfalutin technology. You chose to make the most important symbols in the film that Ethan was carrying around. You chose to make them analog. You know, it's a letter from the president. It's a necklace from an admiral. When did those ideas come around? Because that was a really good move that also gets us away from the, into an analog sphere, which we know the entity has as a weakness. The answer is in your question. When we knew we had a digital villain, something that was manipulating the truth, the only thing that humans had in their possession that the entity didn't was emotion. And so we decided very early on that humans were going to be communicating. Their code was an emotional one. The note that the president sends to Admiral Neely is an emotional, it's a reference to an emotional experience the two of them had, a date that they would remember for those reasons. And it communicates an entire story. Its impact is emotional. We had a whole other story behind the St. Christopher medal. We just decided ultimately we didn't need it, but the symbolic nature of the St. Christopher medal did it all by itself. What I loved about the making of this movie is I got to dispense with so much of what is normally the most time-consuming stuff, which is the graphics on all the screens, all the stuff that comes from all the technology in these movies. It's just, it's very time consuming. And the entity gave us a respite from that. We also love the kind of updated Churchill war room of Mount Weather. That was really cool. That was Eric, that was Eric. That was all the push sticks and all that stuff. Eric's also all things submarine, all things nautical, everything navigational, all of that stuff. And there's a lot of it in there, the ghosts of a lot of stuff that we went into in a lot of detail. How would the military communicate if they were not using digital communication and how would they function? And then it was really interesting. We wrote in the script that you see it when they first get on the aircraft carrier, there's a sextant there. And it turns out when we got to George H.W. Bush, the navigator explained to us that the first thing they do in the morning is they take a sunshot. They still use a sextant. They still rely on good old fashioned manuals, celestial navigation. That's awesome. Well, you know, speaking of good old fashioned, I mean, the aerial sequence is absolutely astounding. It harkens back to the silent film era. You're using crop dusters, again, analog, the entity can't touch it. How did that break for you guys? When did you realize it was going to literally be these crop dusters in pursuit and just crazy hijinks? Eric and I knew we wanted a submarine sequence in this movie, and that was the seeds of that were planted in part one. We knew we'd be going back to part two. We knew in part two, we'd be going back to the wreck of that submarine. And Tom wanted to do a wing walking sequence. What happens then is when you open that door, a door is open that cannot be shut. You're involved in it and you discover very quickly that you have to find the right aircraft. Does it have the right powers, have the right stability? Does it have the right maneuverability? That Venn diagram very quickly gets you down to a certain kind of biplane, which was the Stearman. Then you had to reinforce that plane. And then you had to figure out what you could do with the limited number of maneuvers that that plane could achieve. And I thought quite early on when I saw that it could really only do five maneuvers, six maneuvers, and one of those maneuvers was essentially a combination of two other maneuvers that would have been very dangerous to do. It probably would have broken Tom's spine when it was in the middle. And when you boiled that down, you thought, well, I only have so many notes to play with. We thought it would be over very quickly. And then character got involved and Tom, Tom doing his R&D and figuring out what could physically be achieved. The whole thing just spiraled. How long did it take to shoot? We were in Africa twice because of weather. We had to go back. And the whole thing in its entirety took about four and a half months. You got to understand that a lot of that was rigging as well. All those camera rigs were evolving and being developed while we were shooting the sequence. It was all folded into itself and the rigs were constantly being refined and redesigned. The pilots were working with the camera operators. There were days you would be building a rig and testing it. And then the next day you'd shoot it. I mean, Mary Boulding, my first AD, could do an entire podcast on just the logistics of the 60 odd camera positions spread out across four planes that were required to do this sequence. I mean, this is my 20th year of podcasting, and I've rarely been able to ask this question, but what the heck did film insurance have to say about this? Not even just for Tom, but for you, because you've told me that like you've hung out of helicopters before in a harness. What did your film insurance have to say about this? The only way to direct Tom was you had to open the door and get on the skid. It was the only way he could see you from the wing of the plane. I got on the wing of the plane because it was the only way to understand how to write the sequence. You'd have to ask my line producer, Chris Brock, who's the executive producer on the film. It was Liberty Mutual. You only pay for what you need. Editing is the last stage of storytelling. What were the lessons your film taught you in editing? Were there any cut scenes you want to tell us about? There was one thing in particular. There was a journey across the ice with Grace and Topiza. It'll be on the deleted footage montage on the home media that I really loved. It slowed the movie down in a place where a movie of this size couldn't afford to take a breath. But really more than anything, the thing I learned in this one, the first act was the hardest thing we've ever had to do. Getting everything into the story that encapsulated not just part one, but the franchise, that was really very challenging to do in a way that was engaging. And you never had to watch any of the Mission Impossibles to watch this one. And we were very acutely aware early on that needed to be the case. It's interesting. You've said before that you've done different things you learned in test screenings. Is it like a shopping mall crowd test screenings, or is it like a friends and family of people working on the movie test screenings? We do both. We originally had four test screenings in the schedule, proper test screenings. By the time we got around to the first two, I knew I didn't need an audience to tell me that things in the movie needed fixing and that we were still really wrestling with some... There are deceptively complex things happening in this movie editorially that took a very, very, very long time. Then yes, we had friends and family screenings as well. And we have filmmakers come. Do you remember how big notes that kind of came out of those? Guillermo del Toro really was hugely helpful. He came to the editing room. He watched the movie and then came to the editing room and sat and walked me through the movie and gave me his reactions in real time. Because what happens is a lot of times when you're reading cards and when you're getting a summarization from the studio, they're saying, oh, the audience thought it was this and the audience thought it was that. They speak in real generalities and make general comments about the humor, the dialogue, the characters. But there are not a lot of specifics and it can be very frustrating because I'm not here to fight with any of it. What's true for you is true for you. You like it or you don't. Tell me where and point right to a thing where this bumped you and why. There's too many flashbacks. I'm like, okay, tell me the ones you could take out. And we did. We did a flashback pass. We did a pass for certain words that were repetitious. Really? Or we'd watch the entire film like that. Yeah. If you give me a note, if you give me any note, if you said, I didn't like the color of Ethan's shirt in this scene, I will watch the entire movie just looking at people's shirts. Because what that does is it gets you out of the space of looking at it from what you intended it to be and start looking at it from what you communicated, whether you meant to or not. On movies where I had time, like I did on Top Gun Maverick, I would put the movie on and put it on an iPad on my desk out of the corner of my eye and work on other things while the movie was playing. And I caught things because I wasn't looking at the movie. I wasn't deliberately. You cannot help but project what you want the movie to be on what it is you're reading or what it is you're playing back. I do it with screenplays too. You just, you get really caught up. It's just great to have somebody say, I thought it was long here. And it's just tell me the first act is long. I don't need you to tell me anything else. I'm just going to watch that scene and start to look at it for what can really come out. What people don't understand is that sometimes when you take those things out, the movie feels longer. We had a cut of fallout that was five minutes shorter and the scores went down and the notes about length went up. That's, that's, that's wild. Like the editing process, we could do a whole podcast on it. I guess pickups are important. You have obviously engineered into your schedule for a film like this, pickups. What was something that was important to pick up? Because it's always interesting to hear the things that are like blind spot on the, on the page, but something that as a filmmaker, like, oh yeah, let's go get that. Grace's introduction in the movie, which we shot about two months before the film was released. There was a scene like it. And for a lot of reasons, it's kind of a long story of how we, and not an important one, but with time and pressure and everything else, you talk yourself out of things and you say, oh, I don't need it here. I can fold that information into that scene. Well, that's information. And when you stopped and looked at the movie objectively, and I didn't need an audience to tell it to me, I just watched it with an audience. It doesn't matter what this character is saying in the scene, visually look at how we're presenting them. Her character was expressing exactly what her intention was. Everything was there, visually, the movie and where it juxtaposed in the first act of the movie, there was a subconscious that just made you not trust the character. But when the character's introduced in the movie, saving Ethan's life and stating, you're the only person I trust, and also gets into the same jam that Ethan does, that all those questions are eliminated. And the experience of making these movies allows you to look at a scene like that and say, here's everything I need to say in the scene. Here's everything Ethan can and cannot do in that scene. And the scene needs to be two and a half minutes long. The scene was ultimately two minutes and 40 seconds. We were that close in our estimation. And I said to Tom, when we wrote it, I said, it took us 20 years to know how to write this scene. I mean, there, that goes back to your original question, what did I learn about writing while writing a Mission Impossible? I learned how to set a character up at two and a half minutes. Look at how you introduce Pom and Tarzan and Shea Wiggum and create the entire team all inside a three and a half minute scene. That's what I learned how to do for Mission Impossible. You also did this great hat trick in which you had an entire fight happen off camera and just hold on Grace's face. And then when you turn the camera around, if you're going to do that, you've got to earn it. And you turn the camera around and there's just this beautiful, brutal portrait that's like a still. And was that just like the solution of, we're not going to have time to, you know, do... Well, that was the idea. And there was less of it. We knew it was a big, long movie and there was less of a fight. And Tom came in and when we did it, he was like, there's not enough fight here. So we had to improvise most of the beating that he gets from that guy, including getting thrown over the table. All of that stuff was made up on the day. There just wasn't enough fight. And the rhythm of the scene was not correct. The tableau that you're talking about, fight may use such a pretentious word, that shot of all the people laying out on the floor, that took the morning to figure out, to get it right so that it was a visceral feeling that told a story and it told the story in a wide shot. That took a lot of time to figure out, you know, there was no way to rehearse that stuff. You just had to go in and do it. That was more challenging than shooting a lot of the stuff in the fight was just getting that image that you're talking about. You know, you and Eric are great collaborators. The film came off as just the kind of action film that people wanted it to be. But I'm curious, what was your geekiest argument for the two of you? We know the buck stops with Chris. Well, first of all, just before Eric goes, the buck does not stop with me. The buck stops with the movie. We're not in control of anything. The movie is really in control. We don't really argue about, you know, like I'm asked all the time, do you and Tom argue? And I say, yeah, we argue every day on your behalf. We're arguing about what we think the audience needs and what the audience wants. One of the things that we went around and around about earlier on was how does the entity physically interact with the real world? Do you remember this, Eric? Very early on, we had that. And what's really funny is that through trial and error and a lot of debate, we shot it down. Eric was really the one kind of advocating that there should be people who are pulling levers. And ultimately, the acolytes kind of came back around into it. So it was what Eric was arguing for. And it found its way in in a completely different way after we moved on from it. And that's a very typical of Mission Impossible is whether you reject something or whether you can never make something work. If you let it go, it always finds its way back in. And we find ourselves learning that lesson over and over again. When we're stuck, it's because we're forcing it. We're trying to make the narrative do something it doesn't want, or we're trying to put something in the story where it doesn't necessarily belong. It doesn't mean it doesn't belong in the movie. It just doesn't belong in the movie where it is or that way. Yeah. I guess because you brought it up, what could you tell us if there was more to the acolytes or the disciples? I could see there being a much larger subplot of these people that literally are a part of a doomsday cult. They are welcoming the end of the earth and direction from the entity in the aftermath. Was there a lot more that you wrote? Or was it really a flavor that you just wanted to keep as their impetus for moving their plot forward? There was a scene after he gets in the fight on the submarine, and they kind of have an interrogation. And you'll see snapshots of it on the deleted footage where he expresses what he believes. And we had it in the movie for a very long time. But then once the acolytes came into being, you got to that scene and you didn't need it. And what was really important about that is you were explaining it after the fact, as opposed to setting it up. It was there. It was there in our pocket. It didn't take long to get. We had it there in case we needed it. And a lot of times we over explain the movie, knowing full well that a lot of it is going to fall out. But you always want to have it in your pocket for when a focus group says, I didn't get this. I didn't get that. Because you definitely don't want to go back and shoot it later. That would be about the one. Can you think of one, Eric? No, I can't. I can't. Because it's not, we don't have geeky arguments as much as we have really sort of passionate conversations and discussions. And it's just, it's about new ideas and pushing each other and inspiring each other and playing off of each other. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. We work for the movie. Like, we're not, the movie's the boss. That's just it. We know we're making this point. We know we want to create this feeling. We know we have these toys to play with. And there are times you'll suggest something and you kind of go, eh. And there's nobody fighting passionately. Like, oh, I've always wanted to see this in the movie. It's like, yeah, I've always wanted to see that in the movie too. I'd love it if that worked. We could all go home. Eric, you were saying you'd love to go back. What would you go back for? No, I would just love to go back for just a second to answer the earlier question of both of our definitions of plot. My definition is plot is a rectangular piece of earth that a writer goes to be buried in, which is why I'm all about cremation. I would agree. I would agree. That makes sense. Very good. Now, you know what? For the first time in my life, I know why they call it a plot. I understand plot. Yeah. Wow. What was your toughest scene? What was the one that for each of you, you could remember really sweating? Like rewriting the most, like, oh my God, I'm back at the scene again. What was the scene for each of you that you remember rewriting the most? I know mine. I'll see if Eric has the same one. Congo Yoa. Yeah, that was it. That was it. I mean, there's no contrast. Oh, it's hard. Why? Why, Eric? Brutal. For a couple of reasons. One, you had all of the moving pieces. You had everybody kind of separate in their own separate places. There's the bomb diffusing going off. There's the whole notion of what's happening to Benji, what Grace is doing while Ethan is doing all that. Making all of that work and making it also feasible. The basic idea of how do you trap something that is everywhere and nowhere and has no center. Getting there was, it took years. Trauma. To get there. True trauma. It was so stressful and heartbreaking. And interestingly, going back to Dead Reckoning, when we came back from location and sat down in the stage, I brought together the entire cast not having solved the train yet. And I brought them all into the red car in the train. And I said, I do not know anything about this sequence or how it ends. I know it all ends here. It all will end in this red car. I don't know which of you will be in this car. It was literally like an Agatha Christie movie where it's like, you know, I brought you all here to reveal the identity of the murderer. The entire cast was sitting there. And I said, it's all going to end here. Mount Weather, our first day in Mount Weather with the president's cabinet. I said, one of you is going to die. And I don't know who it is, but one of you in here is going to die. Actually, no, we knew who was going to die. We didn't know who was going to kill that person. We didn't know who the killer was going to be. Or maybe it was flipped around it, but it was something like that. Congo Yoa was that to the nth power. What's everybody going to do here? How are the characters all going to fit together? How are you going to resolve Kittredge? How are you going to resolve Shea Wigginman? How are you going to do it in a way that didn't come at that character's expense? You had to maintain affinity for the characters all the time. And Paris in Edge of Tomorrow was like that. There's always one, there's always one scene where all of the consequences come home to roost. And I remember at the table read for Edge of Tomorrow, watching Bill Paxton's face reacting viscerally to what was happening to his character, knowing that it was wrong when we wrote it, but also knowing we have to have a table reading this weekend. But you could see the actor just drawn. He was in the whole movie right up to that moment. And then he just, he was like, he knew it wasn't right. It was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Kangaroo was that. It was years of fingernails on a chalkboard. Yeah. I mean, the difficulty is you also have all your characters in one place. So of course, that's a nightmare. So. And that's also a logistical nightmare. You're talking about the coverage that it's going to take to shoot them. And the time that you have in that location and how much of it was on a practical location and how much of it was being rebuilt. It was so horrific. Writing-wise, the confrontation inside the mine before the third act kicked off and everything that happens in the mine, Benji's injury, Don Lowe to Pisa, all of that. evolution of that sequence was ongoing and constantly haunting us. And it was such a brutal... That was the hardest thing to write, far and away. I would say after that was Ethan's confrontation with the Entity editorially, as well as writing the first act of the movie. His first act is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Harder than the aerial, harder than the summary. Really? Harder than the aerial or summary? Why? Because of the exposition? Because, yeah, there's just so much going on in the story that you need to know. And I know a lot of people feel like you don't need it. Everything that works in the third act works because of the work we did in the first act. And it was really brutal. We were so challenged and so leveraged in terms of everything we needed to deliver on. It created enormous demands on the first act and how to get into the story and how to structure it. It was a real nightmare. It was very, very tough. Well, obviously the challenge of Everybody in the Mine is your entire cast is there. A lot of mouths to feed, a lot of plates to spin, lots and lots of coverage, very little time. Compounded by the fact that we added Donnellon to Pisa later because we liked him so much, we realized we can't have them leave the story. That's just two more mouths to feed. And thank God we did it. It all came together in the end. The thing that ultimately broke it open, I don't know if you agree with me, Eric, was when we discovered that it was Kittredge walking in and using the bomb against Eaton. And understanding what Kittredge was doing there, we suddenly understood what everything was. It was very, very hard to figure out. The gunfight was hard. How much of it to have that you believed in it, and that people survived, and then enough of the guys were gone, and constant math problems. Well, trying to come up with the really satisfying sort of technological aspect of what is Benji's plan, the capturing of the entity, the chaos of Kongo-Yoa, the chaos that's happening there. And then we actually kept on adding chaotic elements to it. The notion of Benji's shots, and then Kittredge surviving, and all of it designed to intercut with Eaton on the biplane. So it was the ultimate challenge that kept challenging us throughout the making of the movie. And I can't compare it to anything I've ever been through creatively. It was really hard. People look at the movie and think the submarine must have been hard, and the aerial must have been hard. Writing Kongo-Yoa was hard, shooting it was hard, and the first act to the movie. There were no easy bits. I would say the most fun on the movie, the aircraft carrier, like things you would think are like, my God, that must have been really hard. That was a blast. Great time. Shooting all the things with Tramiel on the submarine, everything on the Ohio was fun. Everything in Mount Weather was fun. You had this interesting opportunity here to tell us as a director, what were some of the most surreal, just fond memories you have? Just moments, glimpses, aside from just being on the wing of a dust grabber. What were some of the favorite glimpses and vibes of the movie that you saw that the camera didn't? The behind the scenes in the tank, when we were lining up shots, because it would sometimes take hours to rig shots and get them ready. And it was a unique opportunity for Tom to rest. And we would just be underwater with the team, listening to music on the hydrophone. That was like the only time we ever had music on the set is when we're underwater. When you see Hayley Atwell on a dog sled, and that really beautiful shot of her in the dog sled at the end of the big fight at St. Matthew Island. I'm actually laying down on the front of the dog sled because it's the only place they could put my monitor. So I'm bundled up like a papoose. I am the cargo of the dog sled on which everything is resting. With my head sticking out and my monitor, I quite literally couldn't move my body except for one hand. And to be in the Arctic at sunset on a dog sled, directing with one hand, just going like this and going like this. There were so many of those. Watching Hayley and Lucy Tuligargic, who plays Tepeza, Lucy teaching Hayley all about her culture and teaching her these games that they would play when they were children to stay warm at extreme temperatures. It was quite literally like watching the end of Never Cry Wolf, but happening for real. The making of the movie was such an extraordinary experience. And what we would always say is, you know, those who weren't there could never know. I'll tell you the one. There was a period of adjustment to working in the Arctic. It was very intense. And after the first day, people making that adjustment, there were certain people who were not taken to it. Other people were taken to it quite well. Hayley took to it like fish to water. She really, really, that was her environment. And on the second day, there was a lot of anxiety about how people were going to last for the weeks that we were there. And then on the very last day, when I rode my snowmobile out to set, which is how you got to work in the morning, and I found one of the grips essentially naked making snow angels on the ice cap while everybody was listening to music. And within a matter of weeks, they had totally acclimated to the environment. That was the most fun we had on the movie. The Arctic was far and away the most fun. You would think that was really hard and punishing. And it was actually, everybody came alive there. They loved it. Eric, do you have any surreal memories that I know you really weren't on set that much? Your back crashed out and you were at Chris's apartment, almost like in misery as a captive, right? Yes. But for a good deal of time, I was literally floundering my back on the floor in the apartment. I had my own little monitor on an iPad with a feed to the set. But I think one of my memories that was just so odd and so painful was during the shooting of Mount Weather, of all the sequences over the course of many days, of being on the set and having a zero gravity chair set up in the corner where I have to be lying. And every once in a while, I could get up and go over to Chris and say something and go back to the chair and get into the zero gravity. Simon had one of those chairs that you can rock back in and you go to zero G, which took all the pressure off of my spine, which was great. So what, the keyboard was in the iPad and the iPad was suspended overhead? Oh yeah. Okay. On the floor in Chris's apartment, I was on an iPad and on set, I was in a zero G chair. Wow. And my daughter has a little dog, this tiny little, very, very, this dog's like a teddy bear. You saw that dog? Yeah. That dog was basically Eric's spirit animal for the whole time that the back was out. Little furry Florence Nightingale. She was amazing. Love them as well. But look, this podcast, I'm glad we made it right in the nick of time as you're headed to the airport. I had to travel, you had to travel. We were able to piece it together. And look, you guys, I really am excited to see what you do next. I can't wait until you announce what the secret project is. And I hope it goes forward as does, I hope the last mission, because I just love that script so much. I just overhauled it in a 72 hour sprint, taking everything I learned. And what was amazing is I went on the title page to amend the date on June 30th, 2025. I amended the date from December 30th, 2006, 19 and a half years to the day. And I'm so glad I didn't make the script that I had because the one that's there now is four pages shorter and 10 times better. It didn't have to change that much, but it's changed significantly. Eric read the first, what was it, Eric, about the first 20 pages of it? Yeah. And it's very much the same, substantially the same thing, but it's a completely different movie. Completely different movie. That's awesome. Well, I really hope it gets made and thanks for being so generous with your time and have a great trip. And we'll talk again soon, hopefully as either your secret project gets made or last mission or something else. Or something else. Good talking to you, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff. And that's how the Q&A went down. Special thanks again to co-writer, director McHugh, a.k.a. Christopher McQuarrie, and co-writer Eric Jenderson for being so generous with their time and having the patience to conduct multiple interviews over a series of weeks to get this interview just right for their latest film, Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. And while you're surfing around online, I hope you also check out Backstory magazine. I hope you test drive us at Backstory.net or via our free app, Backstory, on iPads and Google Plays around the world. And if you like what you see and I hope that you do, I hope you consider becoming a subscriber. So it would really mean a lot to me to have my podcast listeners and Apple Podcasts and Spotify and my YouTube watchers of the Backstory magazine YouTube page, which is where you could see all these Zoomcasts. That's right. You could see the background change behind Christopher McQuarrie over the series of weeks that it took us to get this interview right. It would really mean a lot to me to have you consider becoming a subscriber. So thanks for supporting independent entertainment journalism. The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast is a copyright of Unlikely Films Incorporated in 2025. All rights reserved. And folks, if you want to drop me a line, I'm really easy to find. You could find me as YoGoldsmith on BlueSky or Backstory underscore mag on BlueSky or YoGoldsmith on Twitter or Backstory underscore mag on Twitter or YoGoldsmith on Instagram or Backstory underscore mag on Instagram. Do you see a trend here? I also have a Facebook fan page, which is an easy way to connect. And of course, you could go old school and drop me a line anytime. Backstoryletters at gmail.com and I will do my darndest to respond. I'm Jeff Goldsmith, the publisher of Backstory magazine and the host of the Q&A, thanking you for tuning in and telling you to stay out of trouble till next week.