Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One director Christopher McQuarrie reveals that portions of one important scene were actually filmed in Tom Cruise’s garage. The latest installment in the long-running action franchise sees Cruise return as IMF agent Ethan Hunt to track down a rogue AI threat known as The Entity. The movie features jaw-dropping action set pieces and stunts, but also features several scenes that reveal more about Ethan’s past.
Now, McQuarrie reveals in a recent interview on the Empire Spoiler Specials podcast that one Mission: Impossible – Dead Part One scene was filmed, at least in part, at Cruise’s house. The director explains that he was struggling with how and when to reveal information about Marie (Mariela Garriga), a mysterious woman from Ethan’s life before the IMF. He eventually decided to do a lot of the heavy lifting during the mission briefing scene, revealing that parts of the scene subsequently needed to be reshot at Cruise’s house. Check out McQuarrie’s full comment below:
“The focus groups and the test screenings were just not getting the Marie story. And I realized we were just being too clever by half, we’re just not laying it out…
“That entire [Mission briefing] scene came together in the course of a week and was shot in a day. Except for the inserts, which we shot in Tom’s garage in Florida because there was a missing element.
“First, we raced to shoot the inserts and anything you race to shoot just looks like sh-t. It was the longest day on the movie, it was the last day on the movie. I realized when putting the scene together that I had the key, I had Isla, I had the bounty hunters, and we had been struggling with what those flashbacks to Marie meant…
“I was in the editing room. I cut in the Marie footage and went, ’30 years ago you were given a choice.’ I just laid it out. Stop trying to ask the audience to figure it out and just effing tell them, they want to know. I called Tom and I just went, ‘We f–ked up. There’s one very important photo that’s missing.’ I said, ‘We need a mugshot.’ It’s not enough to say it in the abstract. We need this picture.
“That triggered – once I was shooting one photograph, well, might as well reshoot them all. So we brought a desk and some flooring and that bag and some photos and a gun, all the basic props, and went to Tom’s garage in Florida. We had a splinter crew go and reshot everything.”
Mission: Impossible 7’s Unique Production Process Explained
McQuarrie and Cruise have essentially found perfect partners in each other. McQuarrie helped with the script for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011 before coming on board as director for 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, a position he has maintained for each subsequent installment.
Together, the two have developed a unique approach to making each movie in the franchise, starting with a general idea of what they want the movie to look like before then letting the locations, actors, and stunt ideas further hone the story and its individual beats. A Mission: Impossible script, then, isn’t a blueprint for the film, but rather a living document that changes as McQuarrie and Cruise get new ideas.
As such, both the writer/ director and the star are often figuring out story problems on the fly. This approach resulted in the last-minute decision to film Mission: Impossible 7’s submarine sequence (which was supposed to be in Mission: Impossible 8), but it evidently also extended to smaller character moments, like how exactly to flesh out Ethan’s past and his connection to Marie. This approach, while unorthodox, evidently works for McQuarrie and Cruise, who outdo themselves once again with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.