As part of our Empire 30 celebrations, Chris Hewitt spoke to Christopher McQuarrie – one of the most impactful action directors in decades. Originally published in the June 2019 issue of Empire.
“I find it funny that we’re talking about me as an action director,” says Christopher McQuarrie. “I don’t consider myself one. I didn’t set out to be one. And if I don’t make another action movie, that will be okay.”
Well, this is awkward. Not least because Empire has convened with McQuarrie, in a London studio on a rare day when the writer-director isn’t racking up the air miles scouting locations for the next two Mission: Impossible movies, to discuss his evolution as a director. And, primarily, his evolution as an action director. And not just any common-or-garden action director, but one of the very best in the business.
Because, while McQuarrie might McQuibble slightly with the label, that’s what he’s become, across the course of the four films he’s made as director. The Way Of The Gun, Jack Reacher, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible — Fallout feature incredible action sequences aplenty. There are bruising punch-ups, Tom Cruise running, stupendously staged shootouts, Tom Cruise running, crunching car chases, and Tom Cruise running some more, for good measure.
Each has, somewhat unusually, been better than the last. Fallout, in particular, is widely regarded as something of a masterpiece of mega-scale mayhem; the kind of classically staged action flick that puts shaky-cam aficionados on shaky ground. Not bad for a guy who didn’t set out to be an action director. “When I did have ambitions to direct, those ambitions were to direct more along the lines of big, historical epics,” he says. “Valkyrie was the sort of thing I had ambitions to direct. I was not waking up and thinking I wanted to be an action movie director.”
Yet some people are burdened with glorious purpose, even if it’s 180 degrees removed from their original intention. McQuarrie’s is to make action movies. It’s something Tom Cruise, McQuarrie’s creative partner, recognised in him the second they met in 2007. “It was working with him on the script of Valkyrie, and the evolution of that, and working with him in the editing room,” says Cruise. “I could see already his understanding of how to put elements together to create an effect on an audience. I said, ‘You have to think about making movies that audiences want to see.’”
That’s not where McQuarrie — or McQ to his friends and colleagues — began as a director. Perversely, he kicked things off with a movie that people actively went out of their way to avoid.
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In 1996, McQuarrie won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with only his second produced film — the twisting, turning, labyrinthine rug-pull of The Usual Suspects. Emboldened, he decided that he wanted to make a film about Alexander The Great. There was just one problem: the only person in Hollywood who wanted to see a Christopher McQuarrie film about Alexander The Great was Christopher McQuarrie. “I was trying a lot of different ways to direct,” he says. “I was trying to get onto other movies that weren’t originals, I was pitching original ideas. It became very clear that the one thing anybody wanted from me was a crime film. So I made a crime film in such a way that no-one would ever ask me to make one again.”
That film was The Way Of The Gun, a bitter, misanthropic tale which, figuratively, might be about McQuarrie’s relationship with Hollywood, but is literally about two don’t-give-a-fuck drifters (Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe) who kidnap a surrogate mother-to-be, and get in way over their heads. The movie has become something of a cult classic over the years, but its reception at the time was catastrophic for McQuarrie. Commercially, it made just $6 million in the US (the 148th highest-grossing movie of the year), and critically it was eviscerated. “I had, for a long time, a thick binder of all the press of The Way Of The Gun, and it was funereal,” says McQuarrie. “People reacted with real hostility to that film.”
Afterwards, McQuarrie found it almost impossible to get hired as a writer, let alone a director. It would be eight years before he had another official screenplay credit. And four more before he would get a chance to direct again. “That was my punishment for Way Of The Gun,” he sighs. “I’d already paid my dues. If your goal is to direct ‘Alexander The Great’, don’t start with Way Of The Gun, dummy!”
Today, McQuarrie says he’s proud of that film, although he’s acutely aware of its flaws. “The camera is not doing anything to help you,” he says. “It’s almost passive throughout, which was a conscious decision I made. I liked a lot of the older films from the ’40s and ’50s, and there wasn’t a lot of fancy camerawork there. Unfortunately, I learned too that the reason why there wasn’t any fancy camerawork was that there was a good story.”
Yet The Way Of The Gun — a gnarly, fascinating, flawed film of the kind that would almost certainly not get made today — contains a couple of excellent sequences that established the McQuarrie action ethos right off the bat. One is a climactic gunfight in which McQuarrie displays a knack for establishing geography. “I’m very particular about that. You’re seeing the guy shooting and the guy being shot in the same frame for much of the sequence,” explains McQuarrie, who planned the sequence meticulously with his storyboard artist, Mark Bristol, and his brother Doug, a former Navy SEAL. “You are not disconnected from the action. You feel like you’re actually in it. You’re a part of it.”
The other sequence is an audacious anti-car chase, possibly the slowest in movie history, where Del Toro and Phillippe play a game of cat and mouse with two pursuing bodyguards. Adhering to realistic tactics laid out by Doug McQuarrie, it’s a beautifully choreographed, tense set-piece as the duelling duos stalk after each other, driving so slowly that they often get out of their cars. “That stuff to me is not hard,” admits McQuarrie. “Keeping those pieces in order and doing that stuff is child’s play. Car chases? Child’s play.”
It’s a sequence that certainly caught the eye of Cruise. “I remember saying to him, ‘Chris, look at that!’” laughs Cruise. “That one sequence, you go, ‘This guy absolutely knows how to convey character in action and tell a story.’ That ability has always been there for him.”
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When McQuarrie was finally allowed to yell, “Action!” again, on an adaptation of the Lee Child novel One Shot, he had two things going for him. One was a greater understanding of how to shoot action after his extended hiatus. “There were things I didn’t do on Way Of The Gun, questions I didn’t ask,” he says. “I needed to learn more about the craft. And you just have to go out and do it, and do it badly, and be honest with yourself about why it sucks, so you can improve.”
That extended to his writing style. McQuarrie has never been a ‘they fight’ kinda guy. Instead, for him, story is everything. And everything is a story. “All the action sequences you see in my movies are stories. It’s never about coming up with a spectacular image. It’s about coming up with an obstacle, an objective. So I write what I want to see, in the order I want to see it.”
The second thing he had in his favour on Jack Reacher was his leading man. Cruise had seen enough in the experience of working with McQuarrie as writer and producer on Valkyrie to know that he could call the shots. “I was like, ‘Man, you gotta direct me, you gotta direct me in a movie,’” he recalls. “‘Come on, let’s go!’”
Jack Reacher is a slow-burn, ’70s-style vigilante thriller that pops into a blur of movement every now and again. There’s a couple of fight sequences where Cruise finds himself pitted against multiple meatheads. There’s another tactically accurate gunfight, this time in a quarry. But the standout is a car chase that allowed McQuarrie to explore, for the first time, his ability to fashion an action sequence where once there was none.
“The car chase was originally three pages, and most of it was on foot,” recalls McQuarrie. “He steals a car, he crashes it, he drives away. There was a foot chase where they sent dogs after him. And Cruise said, ‘This is an opportunity to make this thing the centrepiece of the movie.’” Which is exactly what they did, expanding and expanding it into an eight-minute sequence in which Reacher is both chasing, and being chased by, David Oyelowo’s cop, and Jai Courtney’s sinister goon. There is no dialogue. There is no music. The only sound effects are the hum of engines, the squeal of tyres, and the crash of metal on metal as cars try to occupy the same space at the same time. It’s a glorious sequence, enhanced by McQuarrie’s discovery of the ‘pursuit arm’, a camera car that allows enormous flexibility while driving at frankly irresponsible speeds. When McQuarrie saw what it could do, zooming in for close-ups as cars dodged through traffic, “my mind exploded. I took all my storyboards and threw them out, then we started coming up with ways to shoot oners in this action sequence. That pursuit arm is great. I would use it to film my children’s birth.”
But McQuarrie’s trump card, on Jack Reacher and his next two films as director, was his leading man’s willingness to put himself in mortal danger for the sake of a good shot. “I have been described in one article as Tom Cruise’s enabler,” laughs McQuarrie. Later, upon hearing this, Cruise guffaws. “I think I’m the McQ enabler!” Either way, it’s a match made in heaven. Here’s a director who likes a degree of veracity in his frame. And here’s a leading man who likes to do all his own stunts, including driving. Very fast. Through Pittsburgh streets. On virtually no sleep.
“Tom and I would shoot first unit all day, and then at night we would catch up with the action unit and shoot all night,” says McQuarrie. “It was intense. Tom is operating on no sleep for most of that car chase. There were times when he’d go past you and you’d hear tyres squeal and a crash, and you’d think, ‘That could have been Tom improvising, or Tom could be dead.’ Could go either way.”
Cruise, who’s very much alive, despite his and McQuarrie’s best efforts, remembers it well. One moment, in which he slams into Oyelowo’s car, was entirely accidental, but made the cut. As did another take in which he stalls the car after crashing. “When you see me in that scene, I’m so pissed at myself,” he laughs. “I wanted to do a drift, and it was very difficult to come around. And I was exhausted. But McQ was like, ‘No, this could cut in and be great tension.’ It needed it, actually. He has that ability to understand story and keep driving towards it.”
Jack Reacher fared much better, critically and commercially, than Way Of The Gun. So Cruise invited McQuarrie to direct the fifth Mission: Impossible movie, Rogue Nation. It was a step into the truly big leagues for McQuarrie; the closest he’d come yet to something along the scale of Alexander The Great. He met the challenge head-on with what seems like characteristic confidence. For example, he says it’s the first movie on which he felt suitably steeped in technical knowhow to have a lighting discussion with his cinematographer, Robert Elswit. “There are some directors who create a stunt and surround it with lots of cameras and then try to figure out how to cut it together,” says Elswit. “He’s the opposite. You end up with real shots.”
McQuarrie admits to a restlessness, a voracious appetite to learn his craft, to improve as a filmmaker. “I see a lot of filmmakers who seem to get comfortable in their later years,” he says. “I never want that to happen. I never want to get to a place where I’m like, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ It can be better. You can understand the craft better.” And maybe it’s the writer in him, automatically cutting the movie together in his head and on the page as he goes, but it seems that he has an innate understanding of editing. Which, naturally, helps when putting together sequences as complex as the ones in Rogue Nation, which has an underwater heist, an incredibly complicated opera house sequence involving several assassins, and a car/bike chase in Morocco. “He understands editing, top to bottom,” says Cruise, and he’s backed up by Eddie Hamilton, McQuarrie’s editor on both Mission movies. “He’s exceptionally good at editing, and throwing away footage and lines of dialogue which are ultimately unnecessary to the finished film.”
Rogue Nation, though terrific, was a seat-of-the-pants experience for McQuarrie, so it perhaps isn’t as emphatic an evolution of his approach to action as it might appear at first. “We were late out of the gate, and we were frantically trying to keep our heads above water while shooting,” he admits. The entire third act was nailed at pretty much the last minute. Even the film’s signature stunt, where Cruise’s Ethan Hunt clings onto the side of a plane as it takes off, and which Cruise did for real eight times, was conceived on the fly. For a while, it moved around within the film’s structure, before finally rocking up as the pre-credits gag. “McQ says he was joking, but he was like, ‘What about being on the outside of this?’” remembers Cruise. “I said, ‘That would be awesome.’ I’ll never forget it. The amount of work that goes into that. We had to clear the whole runway. If I got hit by any particle, any little stone, a bird in the air, it could kill me.”
McQuarrie, who has watched Cruise zoom past him at 70 miles an hour, and who has subsequently watched his friend dive out of a plane at 25,000 feet, perform stunts in a helicopter, and run around on a broken ankle, says it’s the most nervous he’s ever been. Not that he can remember much of it. “When I get really stressed out, I just zonk out,” he says. “I go right to sleep. It was very hard for me to stay awake on that plane. I was intensely stressed out because I was completely convinced that this may be a picture wrap on Mr Cruise. I may be the guy who kills this guy.”
McQuarrie’s failure to kill Cruise, and the rapturous reception afforded Rogue Nation, meant that he became the first director to return for a second Mission: Impossible film with last year’s Fallout. This time, McQuarrie had more time, and was conscious of making a film that felt and looked very different. He chose to recruit new key collaborators virtually across the board (only Hamilton and his stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, made the cut). “I understood enough that by making that one change, this would feel like a different movie,” he says. “And what could I do, as a writer-director, to make things feel different? I would write scenes how I would normally write them, and then think, ‘How can I take the dialogue out of this scene?’”
For McQuarrie, Fallout is the apotheosis of his development as an action director thus far. It’s the film on which he had the greatest amount of authorship, opting out of using a second unit. “I have to be in control,” he explains. “Why you see such a prevalence in second unit is because an accelerated film schedule necessitates it. Someone else goes off and shoots all the action stuff, and the director is a manager, more than a director. And then there’s a disconnect in the action, and a lot of times you have to go back and reshoot that stuff. I will never shoot that way again.”
After a “stressful” experience on Rogue Nation, McQuarrie was determined to shoot every frame of Fallout himself. All the better to achieve his main objective: to introduce emotion into his action. “There’s an evolution from Jack Reacher to Fallout,” he says. “Jack Reacher is a more technically skilful movie than The Way Of The Gun, but it is not an emotional movie. The most important thing is emotion. That really came to the fore on Fallout.”
In almost every Mission: Impossible movie, Ethan Hunt is driven by his do-gooder’s doggedness to track down the MacGuffin, kill the bad guy, save the world. That’s what he does. He hunts. That’s still very much the case in Fallout, but every major action beat is now underpinned by a deeper emotional base. Ethan is haunted by visions of his ex-wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan). The machinations of the villains, Sean Harris’ Solomon Lane and Henry Cavill’s August Walker, play on Ethan’s mind and emotions, whether it’s in a high-speed chase through the streets of Paris, a foot pursuit in London, or hide-and-seek with two helicopters in Kashmir. “In the helicopter chase, you’ve got a longstanding grudge which is being played out,” notes series stalwart, Simon Pegg. “In the bike chase, there’s a whole thing going on with Ethan and Walker. Chris brings it right down to a very personal thing. He just knows how to modulate tension.”
McQuarrie once publicly proclaimed that he wouldn’t be tempted back for Mission: Impossible 6 after completing Rogue Nation. He made exactly the same mistake upon finishing Fallout, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to see an announcement that he will be returning to direct Mission: Impossible 7. What was surprising was the disclosure that the next Mission will actually be the next Missions, plural, with the seventh and eighth films in the franchise set to shoot back-to-back next year, for release in 2021 and 2022. It’s too early for McQuarrie to discuss specifics, or how those two movies will further his progression as a director, but you can expect a significant upping of the ante. “I pitched the idea of making two movies,” says McQuarrie, “and now I have to justify why it’s two movies. You’ve got to earn that. You’ve got to make something that swallows the last three movies whole. I’m freaked out now. We’ve talked ourselves into something. Holy shit.”
And after that, the action director who’s not an action director foresees a period of inaction movies. The kind of smaller, more personal films that even he, now flushed with success, still struggles to get made. He doesn’t see himself making an action movie without Cruise, that’s for sure. “I’d automatically be hamstrung,” he smiles. “I can picture myself on set with Insert Actor Here going, ‘What do you mean, you won’t jump out of the plane? What do you mean, you won’t set yourself on fire?’ Post 7 and 8, I’m looking at a world in which I will be able to say, ‘I’m going to make this movie or I’m not going to make a movie, and I’ll be okay with that.’ And in the midst of that, Tom will come to me with an idea and I’ll say, ‘That’s a good idea.’” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Bastard.”
Perhaps he’ll be able to get the best of both worlds, and make ‘Alexander The Great’, a movie that he’s long waited to make, that will play to his strength as a director of action set-pieces, and also allow his friend, partner and leading man to indulge his love of running/climbing/jumping off things. Tom Cruise on an elephant, anyone?
