A new Summer movie preview guide at Entertainment Weekly has gone into more details about Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s highly anticipated “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”.
When the pair discussed the different stunts they hoped to achieve with the new film, McQuarrie says he himself wanted to “wreck a train” whilst Cruise wanted to drive a motorcycle off of a cliff.
Cruise, of course, got to fulfil his dream on the first day of shooting with the already well-documented stunt in Norway, which can be seen in the trailer and for which a featurette was released months ago.
For McQuarrie, his dream took almost a full year to turn into reality – mostly due to the difficulty of finding a location for the sequence. After at least one false start, they ultimately sent a 70-ton train plunging into England’s Darlton Quarry in August 2021. McQuarrie says:
“We’re enormous fans of Buster Keaton, John Frankenheimer, David Lean, all of these filmmakers who at one time or another had a fabulous train wreck. I thought, I’ve earned that, I want to wreck one too.
I think the energy that went into developing it, designing that, building it, and then making a sequence that justified its existence was probably the biggest challenge of my entire life.
McQuarrie also spoke about the film’s villain, played by Esai Morales. The character he plays seemingly has connections to the past of either Ethan, someone in the crew or the IMF:
“I can tell you that he’s definitely the antagonist in our story, or rather he is one of the antagonists in our story. He’s something of an enigma. You discover more about him over the course of the two movies. There’s definitely more to him than meets the eye and he’s something of a ghost of the past.”
He also spoke about Hayley Atwell’s character in the film and said he’s deliberately staying vague about her role in the story:
“The less I tell you about Hayley Atwell, the better. Hayley represents a stranger in a strange land – she’s somebody who does not come from this world, she’s not a spy, she’s not an agent. If anything, she’s an agent of chaos, and is something of a random element that’s thrown into this story.”
Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell, Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn, Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow and Henry Czerny’s former IMF director Kittridge all return for the films whilst Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, and Greg Tarzan Davis are also onboard.
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” opens in cinemas on July 12th.
Source: EW
