The world is changing and truth is vanishing in our very special episode today, accomplishing a mission we’ve been hoping to make happen since the very inception of the show. Yes, this week’s guest is a true maestro of modern blockbuster filmmaking – a writer-director who won a Best Screenplay Oscar before his 30th birthday for the timeless neo-noir, The Usual Suspects. Since then, he’s leaned into action cinema of most breathtaking spectacle, without ever losing sight of the stripped-down dramatic principles that made The Usual Suspects such a gripping introduction to his work.
He’s one half of a director-star symbiosis arguably up there with Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and DeNiro, Scorsese and DiCaprio and Spielberg and Hanks. And this summer, he and his close collaborator, Tom Cruise are back with a terrifyingly relevant spy thriller sequel that needs to be seen to be believed. Yes, this week on Script Apart – it’s the phenomenal Christopher McQuarrie.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lights the fuse on a number of fascinating questions. Questions like: how do you take a series that’s already threatened the world with nuclear bombs and all sorts of other threats, and raise the stakes even further, seven films into this franchise? Christopher’s answer was to take the anxiety around artificial intelligence that’s been such a fixture of our recent news cycle and fashion those fears into a espionage adventure pulsing with paranoia. What’s all the more impressive about this is how long-delayed Dead Reckoning Part One was by the Covid-19 pandemic – meaning McQ predicted this. In the conversation you’re about to hear, the filmmaker is really articulate about the real-life threat, its overlap with his movie and how he anticipated it, far in advance.
You’ll also hear how Christopher constructed the story and crucially, the emotional arc of this latest Mission movie – the journey Ethan Hunt, played by Cruise, needed to go on this time around, to make all the film’s stunts and spectacle mean something to those in the audience. Get ready to discover the rationale behind that shocking death, and how the film’s astonishing climax – a train sequence that acts as a literal cliffhanger – came together on the page and the rationale behind that shocking death at the end of the film’s second act.
One thing you won’t hear much about, unlike in most episodes of Script Apart, is the film’s first draft. And there’s good reason for that – there wasn’t one. What you’re about to hear is a tale about how writing a Mission: Impossible movie isn’t all too different from what it must feel like for Ethan, surviving one of these films. There’s a lot of improvising out of tight spots – the screenwriting equivalent of Tom riding a speeding motorbike off a Norwegian cliff top into a base jump and landing on a moving train.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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Script Apart with Al Horner