Director Christopher McQuarrie faced an unenviable task in taking the reins on Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the fifth entry in Paramount’s blockbuster action franchise: taking a series that has already been graced with top-tier helmers like Brad Bird, J.J. Abrams and Brian De Palma, and making it his own. Luckily, a conversation that Yahoo recently had with McQuarrie and star Tom Cruise indicates that the Mission: Impossible series in good hands – and that Rogue Nation may actually go down as the most ambitious installment to date.
McQuarrie explained that he felt the burden of expectation keenly while working on the film, and he wanted to do right by the previous entries while making his distinctive:
“I asked myself ‘what can I do to celebrate all those elements of the franchise?’ A signature sequence the way (Brian) De Palma did, a villain the way JJ Abrams did, the stunts the way Brad did. You’ll see references to all those films throughout the movie. There’s [also] a real Easter Egg for anyone who notices it – it’s almost a reverse of something from one of the earlier movies.”
It seems that the answer, for McQuarrie, was to go bigger, and his stars picked up on that mission. Rogue Nation will include an action sequence unlike (and possibly more dangerous than) any Cruise has ever attempted in his career, the actor said, adding:
“We have something I’ve always wanted to do: an underwater sequence without cuts. The kind of training I had to do for that was pretty intense. I’ve done a lot of underwater scenes but I’ve never done one [like this] that will get the audience to lean forward and have a visceral reaction.”
If McQuarrie and Cruise are to be believed, Rogue Nation may top even CGI-heavy blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Terminator Genisys in terms of action. The director teased a Morocco-set sequence that sounds insane, if just based on the lengths McQuarrie and company went to in order to commit it to celluloid:
“We built camera equipment for this movie specifically to shoot this sequence. It’s stuff that’s never been done before.”
Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation opens on July 31.
