Hollywood’s littered with movie “What ifs?”—the ones that get far enough to feel real, then evaporate into rumor, vanish onto a hard drive, or survive only as a few dog-eared drafts in a box somewhere. Joe Carnahan has a few of those — including “White Jazz,” his long-gestating James Ellroy adaptation — and one of the biggest almost-happened detours is the franchise lane he briefly stepped into before deciding it wasn’t his road.
Speaking on the Raiders of the Lost Podcast, Carnahan looked back on his time developing the third “Mission: Impossible III” film—work that lasted roughly fifteen months before he exited amid creative differences. The project, which had already seen David Fincher come and go, ultimately landed with J.J. Abrams after Carnahan quit in July 2004.
READ MORE: ‘Mission: Impossible’ At 25: Revisiting The Franchise’s Auteurist Roots
Carnahan didn’t dress it up as some romantic art versus commerce martyr story; it was just self-awareness. When you’re inside a tentpole built around a megastar, you’re not the center of the universe — and the star gets the most say. In this case, Tom Cruise.
“You’re dealing with, and I’ve done this a couple times, you’re dealing with a big movie star,” he said. “It’s their face on the poster. It’s their name on the poster. At the end of the day, that’s how things are going to get done.”
That awareness bled right into his decision to leave, as he admitted that he recognized the job would turn into a slow compromise, and he took the exit before it did.
“I just know myself well enough to go, you know, you know what, this is probably where I should tip my hat, pick up my valise and be off,” he said.
The twist is that Carnahan’s not telling this like someone who hates the star system, because he also credits Tom Cruise with using that same power to lift up a smaller movie — Carnahan’s “Narc” — in a way he still seems sincerely grateful for.
“I owe to this day, Cruise gave ‘Narc’ a shot that it never would have gotten,” he said. “Yeah, it’s a Cruise Wagner production. Tom did that movie… He got Paramount to back a little $3 million indie crime film… And so I’ll forever be grateful for that.”
Carnahan pinned part of the mismatch on being young and misreading what movie he was actually signing up to make — thinking the process was heading one way when it was clearly going another.
“I look back in retrospect, I say, you know, I was young, I was 33 years old,” he said. “I’m like, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing… I thought we were doing X and we were doing Y.”
And then he landed on the most useful kind of hindsight: not regret, but rerouting the lost energy into his gonzo 2006 action bonanza “Smokin’ Aces” as a kind of creative counterreaction.
“I think I’m glad it went that way because I wouldn’t have made ‘Smokin’ Aces,’” he said, suggesting the movie was made fast, dirty and loose as opposed to decision-making committees of a tentpole like ‘Mission Impossible.’ “Like, f*ck it, let’s just go… Like, just start shotgunning cans of paint and see what we wind up with.”
As for “White Jazz,” that lost-to-time project came up, too, but don’t ever expect him to revisit it. Caranhan suggested the original novelist, James Ellroy’s conservative politics have soured him on the idea.
“Ellroy’s politics, who that guy is now, I just can’t,” he said. “He is who he is, and I’m not going to go down that road, but that [film] was of a time and a place, and I thought that script was fantastic.”
Taschen’s UK imprint even called Carnahan a few years back and asked if they could include it in a book about the 25 Greatest Movies You’ll Never See,” and the filmmaker joked that he told them to “go f*ck themselves.”
The conversation also tracks the director’s upcoming film, “The RIP,” starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and Carnahan’s relationship with the late Tony Scott among many other topics. Watch the podcast conversation below.
