The following contains minor spoilers for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
The Mission: Impossible franchise is known for going to beautiful locations all over the world so Tom Cruise can climb the world’s tallest building or otherwise put his life at risk in some exotic location. But apparently a few shots of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One were not shot in Venice or Norway or Abu Dhabi. Instead, they were filmed in Tom Cruise’s garage.
Appearing on the Empire Spoiler Special Film Podcast (via DigitalSpy), director Christopher McQuarrie explained that a few insert shots from the Mission Briefing scene early in the film were shot in Tom Cruise's garage because when McQuarrie was editing the film he realized there were a handful of pieces he needed but did not have. According to McQuarrie…
That entire 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.
Dead Reckoning Part One gives us a peek at Ethan Hunt's backstory before he joined the IMF. It turns out that he, and a lot of other agents, ended up there as a way to escape some amount of trouble they had gotten into. There's a lot that we still don't know about Ethan's story, and there will likely be more explained in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two. Ethan is believed to have killed his girlfriend, and he joined the IMF to escape the law.
Apparently, test audiences had trouble understanding the flashback sequences that showed what had happened to Ethan’s old girlfriend. They had filmed the insert shots that were meant to help explain things better on the last day of filming, and the director admits they rushed through them trying to get everything done.
The result was footage that McQuarie admits looked like “shit” as well as at least one shot that the director realized he needed but didn’t have, a mugshot of Ethan Hunt. So needing to shoot a handful of brief scenes, and needing to do it quickly and cheaply, Tom Cruise apparently volunteered his garage. McQuarrie continued…
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
It's all a little funny that some of the new Mission: Impossible movie was filmed in Cruise's garage because of just how much work went into the new film shooting on location all over the world. Dead Reckoning took literally years to finish because production was quite slow due to filming under strict covid protocols. Production was shutdown due to covid more than once and filming saw numerous delays for required quarantines as production moved from one country to another. All that to end up shooting at your lead actor's house.
Shooting a movie in Tom Cruise’s garage is probably a lot different than shooting a movie in most other garages would be. One can imagine it’s a lot bigger and thus setting up a mini film shoot is probably a lot easier. But now you won’t be able to look at those scenes in Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One quite the same way again. You know which scenes are from Tom Cruise’s garage.
