Something that’s brought up in a new Happy Sad Confused podcast with “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One” star Hayley Atwell. The host of the podcast, Josh Horowitz, essentially says ‘Mission Impossible’ movies should not work. Unlike most films with a screenplay and plan, ‘Mission Impossible’ films do have a script, but they are incredibly malleable, and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and star and producer Tom Cruise are constantly iterating while they shoot the film. McQuarrie has admitted in the past that the films are often written around set pieces—conceiving of insane stunts and action sequences and then reverse engineering the plot, the character motivations, etc., around them.
As I said in my “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One” review, this is a terrible way to write movies, and many of the big Hollywood blockbusters that have failed miserably have done so because they followed this exact cynical path of devising of entertaining action and then, caring about story, plot, and character.
However, somehow it works for McQuarrie, a writer/director so astute and intelligent that he’s acutely aware that a movie without a plot, a real story, real characters, and characters that the audience care and root for won’t work. So while he starts from a strange, untraditional point often, he clearly knows the pitfalls, how to avoid them, and how to construct a real story and plot around action beats.
The Cruise/McQ iterative, pliable process of making movies even applies to characters. In the aforementioned HSC podcast, Haley Atwell describes the process of making-up her character as they went through the audition process and beyond into filming. That’s right, there wasn’t much of a character on the page. Instead, McQ and Cruise told Atwell that they wanted to discover who her character Grace was with her, creating her character side by side as they went.
“We don’t have a character,” Atwell recalled Cruise telling her in the screentest, “We find the actor we want to work with, and we create the character with them. So they created this environment where I could just create different choices and readings, and they said in the edit, ‘You gave us so much range, we could either dial you up or dial you down.’ And I was like, ‘that’s because I have no idea what I’m doing!’”
Atwell said that process, as scary and uncomfortable as it was for an actor who looks at the screenplay as a bible, that she did find freedom in it eventually and felt “safe.” She also said the way McQuarrie explained the process to her actually made a lot of sense, given that a screenplay and words on the page are not the same thing as actors on the day, on a certain set, with certain weather, etc., etc.
“They’re always reevaluating what they’ve done and what they’re doing,” Atwell said of the Cruise/McQuarrie method. McQuarrie even has his own spin on the classic film idiom of: there are three films you make, the screenplay, the actual physical production, and then the edit. “McQ says, ‘There are three movies. The first one is the movie you think you wanna make; that’s pre-production. Then there’s the movie you’re actually making in production, and then in the edit, you discover the movie you’ve actually made.’ And they can be very different.”
That’s insightful and a nice corrective on the original maxim because post-production is the final reveal of what you actually got and what you have to work with (and what you’re stuck with unless you’ve got the money for reshoots).
Atwell even described a scene that they scrapped that ended up being a bridge too far for her character. Grace, the con woman thief of the film, in one iteration of the movie that didn’t make it to the screen, actually betrays the entire M:I team, presumably because, like in the movie, she is scared, unsure of what’s going on, and is so in over her head, she’s just in survival mode the entire time—something that McQ and Cruise wanted the audience to know and feel how she felt.
But the conceived scene was just a little bit too much they felt. Atwell explained that they had envisaged of a nose-touch nod to “The Sting” where Atwell’s character would visually snub Cruise’s Ethan Hunt every time she outwitted him, but they dropped it and abandoned the entire team betrayal because it just made her seem a little less charming and likeable than she is in the final movie.
“How it ended up reading [to the audience], was that she was more calculating, and that she seemed to relish making life hard for Ethan,” she said. “And it meant when they’re watching, [the audience thinks], ‘we don’t like her because of that.” Atwell suggested they were always looking for the right balance. “We want her to be clever, we want her to be nimble, and have a physical relationship with Ethan and dance when they are handcuffed to each other, but we always want to be on her side,” she explained. “Or at least we want to go, ‘we kind of understand or forgive for the things that she does because she’s actually in a state of hyper vigilance. She doesn’t know this guy, she doesn’t know the world she’s in, so she’s in survival mode.”
You can say what you want about catering to likeable or unlikable notions in cinema, but it’s probably fair to say general audiences are much less forgiving to women and it’s not a bad approach that they took, threading the needle of making Grace cunning and capable, but not too at odds with Ethan, given she joins the team eventually.
It’s a fascinating, bold process, and it’s a really engaging talk, so give it all a listen now. “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One” is in theaters now.
