At the start of production on “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One,” the seventh film in the “Mission: Impossible” series, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie asked producer and star Tom Cruise what he wanted to do in the movie. Cruise, who has played IMF agent Ethan Hunt for the past 27 years, performing his own increasingly daring stunts in the franchise, said he wanted to drive a motorcycle off a cliff. McQuarrie wanted to wreck a train, putting his stamp on one of cinema’s finest traditions.
In 1896, the Lumière brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train” had one of the first film audiences fleeing the theater in fear, and the same impulse to arouse a potent visceral reaction is what animates Cruise and McQuarrie’s desire to keep pushing the envelope of what action movies can be.
McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen, knows that spectacle is nothing without story, characters and authentic relationships, because the stakes have to feel real. Ethan’s focus is on his objective, but it’s also on what matters most to him — and for he and his scrappy crew of IMF agents, what matters most are the friends in their earpieces, and keeping each other alive.
