Christopher McQuarrie on taking Mission: Impossible 6 in a new direction

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

For the first time in the history of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise, we'll be getting a repeat director with Christopher McQuarrie, but despite his excellent work on MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION, McQuarrie isn't looking to repeat what he's already done. Just as Brad Bird changed the tone of the franchise with GHOST PROTOCOL, Christopher McQuarrie told Collider that MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 will take the series in a new more serious direction.

You know, you worry all the time. Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because [Ghost Protocol director] Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” And we did. But now we find ourselves going, you know, are we going where Bond went where Bond became–serious. It’s another kind of tone. Which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place. But we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Well thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “But we can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. And we’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying well how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

McQuarrie has previously teased that the film will give us a "very different" Ethan Hunt and explore his character in a deeper way than any of the previous movies have. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 will be changing things up in other ways as well, for one, there will be much less globe-trotting in the upcoming film than there was in ROGUE NATION. "I was determined, unlike the last movie, to spend more time in one location," said McQuarrie. "I went back and I looked at the first movie, which started in Prague, and realized that they’re in Prague for the first half of the movie. So, I sort of pulled back a little bit on the globe-trotting. I think in Rogue Nation I think we might have been in six countries in the first ten minutes of the movie." After the script issues which ROGUE NATION faced, McQuarrie swore that he wouldn’t start a movie without a finished screenplay again, but that doesn't mean that big changes can't happen on the day.

Rebecca Ferguson’s character is back in this movie and her introduction in the movie was originally this page of dialogue when Ethan runs into her at this event. I also am working with a new cinematographer. And we kept talking about shooting things in longer takes, oners, less editing. And I realized that the scene that I had written for the two of them forced me to cut back and forth. And I was very frustrated in the last movie that every time people started talking, it eventually – the movie just stopped and turned into– just coverage. Just coverage, coverage, coverage. And I thought how do I get out of that. I want the camera to feel lighter. I just want the scenes to feel lighter. So, I realized this scene between Tom and Rebecca was going to just drag me down into coverage. So I started taking away the lines of the scene that weren’t necessary. And one by one I cut away every line until there was nothing left in the scene. And what happens now is Rebecca just bumps into Tom. Tom sees Rebecca. Rebecca sees Tom. And they have this whole moment. There’s a whole story between the two of them and there’s another person standing there. And she can’t say what she wants to say. He can’t say – and they just behave the scene. And it was really liberating. So we’ve gone in and done a lot of that. We’ve just sort of chipped away.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 is set for a July 27, 2018 release.