The adage of Hollywood and or pundits who closely follow Hollywood, writers, armchair analysts, etc., is that you should always have a plan and never just “make it up as you go.” Filmmaking is such a massive endeavor and a massively expensive endeavor, a plan to execute all the ambitious things you want to do is critical, and it’s why some big films feature massive and extensive pre-production periods: precisely to map out and work out how to pull all that stuff on in advance so on the day of shooting, no one is wasting money. However, the new king of “making it up as you go,” and or one of the most iterative, on-the-fly filmmakers working today is Christopher McQuarrie, ironically a screenwriter by trade (the map as it were), but so seemingly expert and now experienced in the field of filmmaking he—and partner Tom Cruise—can just sense when something is not right, not working, not serving the bigger picture and needs to be adjusted on the day, right here and right now, in the middle of shooting a movie.
Their sense of constantly adjusting as they go is almost nothing short of miraculous, relentlessly questioning what they do, how to change it, and how to improve it. Case in point the big submarine sequence that opens up “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”— a scene that disturbs a ‘Mission Impossible’ trend of constantly opening up a film with Ethan Hunt—it was a scene that not many studio execs seemed to understand McQuarrie said, and it was one he was also worried he might have to cut out of the film despite its massive costs.
In a recent episode of The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, McQuarrie explained the submarine madness of it all. And incidentally, much of that comes from Erik Jendresen, a friend of McQuarrie’s who has a co-writing credit on ‘Dead Reckoning.’ McQ said Jendersen— who had to leave ‘Rogue Nation,’ and couldn’t really work on it but was an ear to bed on that film and ‘Fallout‘— was originally only supposed to write on ‘Dead Reckoning Part 2,’ but such are these malleable films that he has co-writing credit on both films.
And many of the film’s submarine elements come from him (‘Dead Reckoning’ itself is a nautical term). .” Anything nautical, the submarines, that’s all his research, that’s all his era of expertise,” McQ explained. “Erik is a seaman in his own right and lives on a boat” (not for nothing, McQ said one of the most significant character arcs in Part 2′ was written by Jendersen too, but wouldn’t reveal who).
But the submarine set-piece of it all that opens the film and breaks a ‘Mission Impossible’ rule by not opening up the film with Ethan Hunt? McQ says the studio was very hesitant about it.
“The submarine sequence was very contentious,” McQuarrie admitted. “It was very difficult for people outside of the movie to see the purpose of the submarine in part one. And Tom and I stuck to our guns and said, ‘You need a real-world demonstration of what this thing can do. Without this, The Entity [the A.I. villain of the movie] is an intellectual abstraction.”
McQuarrie said he was relieved to read that in even negative reviews of the movie, everyone seems to understand all the ideas laid out in the movie and why the submarine sequence exists.
But the submarine of it all actually factors into part two as well (obviously, if you’ve seen the movie, you know this), and so keeping that set and not breaking it down over several years was and is challenging, to say the least. “That meant, when we built the submarine and how we built it and then how much of it had to stay in existence for the second part of the movie over such a long period of time—it was an extremely challenging logistical and engineering nightmare that many people were reticent to confront,” he said. “It was a big deal. Sets like that have to exist over the course of two movies [normally, you don’t do that]. It’s not something you would normally build and store for years. It’s a very long game and a huge future projection filled with uncertainty. It’s very scary, and we just kept reassuring the studio that this was the right thing to do and the submarine sequence was going to work.”
However, worse, McQuarrie convinced the studio, showed them rough cuts that satisfied everyone, and then began to worry that he himself might want to cut it out of the film, that the movie itself may not want it to exist within part one.
“If there were a way to cut it out of the movie, it can go, it must go, and that was my fear,” he admitted. “It was not that it had to go, [my fear was], was I going to find an edit of the movie where it could go? And in the world in which it could be cut out of the movie, I would have to cut it out of the movie, whether the studio was asking me to or not. I wouldn’t leave it in the movie just because we spent a ton of money on it. I lost a lot of sleep thinking, am I going to end up in a moment where I discover, ‘Shit, I never should have done this.'”
The runtime of the movie was, at one point, almost four hours in the rough edit, and McQuarrie said they had to confront the possibility of cutting the scene.
“It was a big unknown and a big uncertainty for a lot of people. And when you fight for something that hard and you get it, that generates a tremendous amount of anxiety,” McQ continued. “Because there were times we were uncertain if the submarine sequence worked, whether or not the submarine was the right opening for the film.”
Did they have a backup plan? Yes and no, but more importantly, McQ knew if they didn’t use it in part one, he devised a plan where they eventually would. “I also know there’s a world where—had I cut it out of part one, that sequence could be employed in part two.”
And man, if that kind of narrative reverse-engineering trigonometry doesn’t impress you, you need to watch ‘Dead Reckoning’ again. There’s a lot of great stuff in this podcast, and you need to listen to it. I mean, we didn’t even get into the part where McQuarrie said the A.I. The Entity of the movie didn’t actually even exist until mid-way through shooting the movie (!!). How about that for an iterative process?!
“Dead Reckoning’ is in theaters now. Listen to the podcast below.
