At a recent sit-down lunch, "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams talked with PVP about several things, most importantly about his landing the gig of directing the next "Mission: Impossible": "I keep taking meetings, because I've done some directing for TV, some for my own episodes and some for others. And I was in a meeting to talk about War of the Worlds, with Spielberg and Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, and I'm like.... 'Holy shit, I'm with Spielberg and Tom Cruise... How do I talk to these people?' But I fumbled my way through that, and figured I wouldn't get that project. Which, uh, yeah, I didn't get that one.
But! Somebody stuck the DVDs of Alias in Tom Cruise's hands, and so later, I'm on set of Lost filming that in Hawai'i, and I get this message to call Tom Cruise! So I call him and he says he watched the first two seasons and loves my style, and wants me to direct M:I 3, and would I do it? That's a really easy answer. I mean, at first, I gotta say, I was thinking Mission Impossible? God. I saw the first one, I tried to sit through the second one... There isn't much there I really liked... But the script that Frank (points to Frank) wrote blew me away, and I realized how cool it'd be to make this the kind of movie I love. And of course, the fact that Tom Freakin Cruise asked me to do it".
He also spoke about the departure of Lena Olin from "Alias". Olin was a regular during the second season playing Irina Derevko, the mother of lead Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) and an ex-KGB agent turned dangerous traitor. Olin left the show with some rather public compaints and was mentioned but never seen in the third season. Recently talks to get her back seem to break down, solidfying the talk that she'll never come back.
Abrams says "Of course we don't want to see her go, but it seems like it's inevitable now. We've, I've been trying to bring her back, but for now we're rolling with it. I can't say how it would be different with her remaining versus leaving, because we didn't necessarily have specific plots attached to her character. But it's a major impact on the show regardless".
Thanks to 'Ant'.
