At this point, it feels like there’s very little Tom Cruise hasn’t done when it comes to stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise. Having said that, each new entry has given us something incredible that we’ve never seen before. One certainly has to wonder just how Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie put together a story that let Cruise do these wild things. It turns out the stunts came first, and the rest of the movie was written around them.
Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie recently revealed to EW that two of the biggest moments in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One, hilariously came about because he and Tom Cruise both just decided on two things they wanted to do, and then the rest of the movie was apparently built around them. McQuarrie explained…
At the start of this movie, I said to Tom, 'What do you want to do?' He said, 'I want to drive a motorcycle off of a cliff. What do you want to do?' And I said, 'I want to wreck a train.' 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.
You’ve got to start somewhere when you put a movie together and considering how important the stunt work has become to the Mission: Impossible franchise, it’s maybe not that wild to start there. Of course, it’s still pretty funny to just pick out two set pieces based on whatever crazy thing the lead actor and director want to pull off. Cruise wants to ride a motorcycle off a cliff? Great, we’ll write a script that justifies that.
McQuarrie’s own wish list item does shed some light on exactly what we’ll see in the new Mission: Impossible. We knew the movie was filming with Tom Cruise fighting on a train, but how this would be differentiated from the train sequence in the first Mission: Impossible was unclear. The difference is the first time the train survived unscathed. That won’t be the case this time around.
It will certainly be interesting to see how Mission: Impossible puts its own spin on the classic train crash. Trains have been a key part of movie making since literally the beginning of moving pictures and McQuarrie is right that many of the great filmmakers have taken turns crashing them. One can only imagine what a film franchise that has hung Tom Cruise off the side of the world's tallest building will do to make its train crash the biggest of them all.
While Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 were delayed multiple times, they both finally appear to be on track with Dead Reckoning Part One coming this summer and Part Two set for next year.
