‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“I am Christopher McQuarrie, the director and one of the writers and producers of ‘Mission — Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One.’” [MUSIC PLAYING] “What are we doing?” “Finding us a new car.” “The inspiration for this sequence actually occurred to me during the shooting of ‘Mission — Impossible Fallout’ when I was scouting locations for the chase scene in Paris. And I came across a little Fiat 500 that was parked along the Seine River. And I thought it would be great, the idea of watching Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise driving in a car like that. When I pitched this idea to Tom, he immediately appreciated the notion of doing a car chase that involved more humor than any of the sequences we had done previously, and he really leaned into that. Something to watch during this sequence is the behavior between Tom Cruise and Haley Atwell. You’re looking at two actors performing in two-shots, meaning you don’t have any editorial control. It’s not like I can pick the best moments of each actor. I have to really be giving you their best at the exact same time. And what it really does is it creates an affinity for these two characters. The most important part about this sequence is not really the action. It’s the feeling of a relationship developing between two people who actually don’t want to be together. And this car chase is all about creating circumstances whereby they are forced together, and over the course of a sequence, you feel them turning into a team. Rome is a very tricky place to shoot. The Fiat is a very difficult car to drive. And obviously, it’s very difficult to drive that car with handcuffs, let alone on cobblestone streets which make all of the driving, everything that you see Tom doing, becomes completely unpredictable. And what you end up with is a sequence where the car almost has a mind of its own. It becomes a character in the sequence along with Haley’s hair, as you can see there. In this part of the sequence, we ended up on the Spanish Steps. We were allowed to shoot at the Spanish Steps with the understanding that we never could actually physically touch the Spanish Steps. But so long as we never touched the Spanish Steps, we could do whatever we want. So what we did is we built the Spanish Steps in three sections on a backlot so that we could drive cars down them. And everything that Tom and Haley are doing here is extremely difficult, extremely punishing. The car doesn’t have really great suspension. So the riding down the steps is very jarring. And we got into this bit here with the cars rolling over we did in three sections. One, Tom drove down the steps. Then we had a bunch of grips roll a car down the steps with no one in it. And then, finally, we built a padded interior for the two actors to actually roll down the steps with the cameras rolling.”