Before Christopher McQuarrie took on a series of increasingly grand impossible missions with Hollywood legend Tom Cruise, the pair first teamed up as director and star on an adaptation of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. Eight years later, the filmmaker sat down with Empire – remotely, of course – for a retro Spoiler Special Podcast episode, available now to pod subscribers. Yes, it’s another mega-McQuarrie interview special!
Along the way, McQuarrie and Empire’s very own Chris Hewitt dug into how McQuarrie and Cruise brought the character of Reacher to the screen, how the director followed up his 2000 directorial debut The Way Of The Gun, the making of that incredible car chase, and much, much more. And while the big-screen Reacher franchise ended after 2016’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, in which McQ handed the reins to Edward Zwick, McQuarrie revealed that he and Cruise imagined a future that not only saw Reacher’s cinematic adventures continue, but one which leant further into the grittiness of the source material.
“Tom and I were talking about, had the series continued, to take Reacher to a place where, in the post-Deadpool, post-Joker world, Reacher could have been an R-rated movie and an R-rated franchise and really fed into the brutality of those books. We were fully ready to lean into that,” McQuarrie tells Empire. Instead, he teases, he and Cruise could have something else R-rated on the road up ahead. “It’s a very un-Tom character, and we have plans for an even more un-Tom character that we’ve been talking about, which I’m hopeful about in the future. […] The franchise has moved on, and we haven’t. So we’ve now got stuff in the hopper. The [Jack Reacher] stuff we’re talking about now is tinker toys [compared to it], I’m actually very, very excited.”
For the immediate future, the pair will be continuing their work on a double-bill of back-to-back Mission: Impossible sequels – set to resume filming once lockdown measures allow. Listen to the full Christoper McQuarrie interview on the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast. Not signed up yet? Join us here.