Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One director Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that the movie nearly included a digitally de-aged Julia Roberts as Ethan Hunt's doomed lover!.
The director was keen to have her on board to play a love interest for Tom Cruise's hero, due to the fact she was a rising star during the time period it is set in.
Speaking on Empire's Spoiler Special podcast, he said: "I said, 'OK, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott's Mission: Impossible. That's who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era.
"We looked at Days of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was Mystic Pizza.
"And I was like, 'Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, as this young woman.'"
However, he added that the only way he "could have seen doing the sequence justice" was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and have a small role.
He added: "And of course, as you're conceptually going through it, you're like, 'Now all anybody's going to be doing is thinking about the de-ageing of Julia Roberts, and Esai [Morales] and Tom, and Henry Czerny."
Plans to include Julia Roberts were ultimately scrapped though, due to fears audiences would get "distracted" and the high costs of the digital de-ageing process.
McQuarrie added: "I got the bill for de-ageing those people before their salaries were even factored into it.
"And if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done. It was so… the force multiplier of — and the way we shoot scenes, and the fluidity, and the camera movement."
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One has been a box office success and What to Watch's 5-star review praised it for "understanding its audience and gives them exactly what they want — and a little bit more."
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is playing in theatres worldwide.
