Moving from the film’s opening sequence to its grand finale, McQuarrie again took an opportunity to shoot down reports that surfaced in February, claiming production was halted while he, Cruise and a “mystery writer” figured out an ending for the film that was more to the studio’s liking. On the contrary, the studio never deemed the ending unsatisfactory, as The Hollywood Reporter suggested, but rather McQuarrie and his star thought the ending written in the script could be improved upon. “Every Sunday, I was writing a new ending of the movie — shooting Monday through Friday, scouting Saturday, writing Sunday, and on Monday we’d throw it out.”
So McQuarrie brought in his good friend Dylan Kussman for help, and the two would sit down with Cruise and executive producer Don Granger to try to find their ending. Production continued, the crew would shoot all day and then McQuarrie & Co. would get together at night to continue working on an ending. Finally the crew ran out of things to shoot, so production took a break while McQuarrie and his small team tried to figure out how to end the movie.
Ultimately, after trying to write bigger and bigger spectacle, they came to an idea of something smaller, more personal: a foot chase, a knife fight and a love letter to London that circles back to the beginning of the film, ending with Cruise’s Hunt finally getting the best of Harris’ Lane and the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) being formally reinstated. The scene plays superbly, I love how understated and small-scale it is in contrast to the film’s flashier set pieces and I love the redemptive quality of a shot like the one below.
Another of those flashier sequences in the film is the Torus underwater sequence, which was also shot practically and took place inside an actual tank, though the real tank is never filled with water. The idea of filling it came from production designer Jim Bissell; the studio was coming to take a look at what McQuarrie and his team were doing, and they were scrambling to put images up to show executives, and as McQuarrie tells it, “Tom walks in with them and he looks and he goes, ‘Awesome, we’re gonna do an underwater sequence!'”
A lot of consideration went into how to film the stunt, and the biggest issue was how to do so safely and efficiently. As many now know, Cruise had to hold his breath for 6.5 minutes to get the shot in one long take, and that required a lot of advanced training, but that wasn’t McQuarrie’s (or Cruise’s) plan from the get-go.
We knew from [shooting underwater in Edge of Tomorrow] that we could get six setups a day, as opposed to on our best day we got fifty-some setups in a night. You could get six setups a day, max, and that was shooting little tiny pieces, and we had ten days in the schedule to shoot the entire sequence. … I sat down and I was trying to figure out how could I fit this sequence and the many setups we had, and I realized if I shoot all of this in oners, I only have to do two setups a day. But in order to do two setups a day, Tom has to hold his breath for the entire setup.
McQuarrie turned into a real-life version of Pegg’s Benji, suggesting Cruise could easily pull off the feat — “Oh, you can do that!” — but the studio was understandably wary. Aside from needing Cruise to hold his breath underwater for an extended period of time, among the biggest logistical issues was figuring out how to end the sequence — in which Ethan blacks out and drifts through the water — and knowing whether or not Cruise was acting or had actually passed out. The crew developed safety signals and Cruise, not McQuarrie, was the one to signal action when he was ready to start the scene.
The Torus scene was among the last ones finished in post-production, and McQuarrie wasn’t sure it would play the way it needed to for the story. Something seemed off, and Cruise realized what was missing: a gulping, choking sound effect to help the audience understand Ethan’s physical duress. “Tom came in with the dialogue editor and grabbed a microphone on the soundstage, and [he] said, ‘Play the sequence.’ … And we’re like, ‘So what is he doing?’ and Tom starts going ‘Urmph! Urmph! Urmph!’”
That effect was the last element added to the scene’s sound design, and it played tremendously for the crew in the design suite, to the point one person almost threw up. Other set pieces in Rogue Nation include a car chase and a motorcycle chase, both of which follow the Torus sequence, after Ilsa abandons Ethan and Benji. Both are exhilarating to watch and just as insightful and entertaining to hear the film’s director and his star talk about.
For instance, Ethan’s spell of short term memory loss following the Torus scene and leading into the car chase — “What are you talking about?” — was based on McQuarrie’s brother Doug, a Navy SEAL who experienced similar trauma following a drowning incident; some 7,000 people crowded the narrow streets of Casablanca to see Cruise flying through them at 75 miles per hour; the crew destroyed 25 BMW motorcycles and 13 BMW cars; and McQuarrie and Cruise even developed rom-com style code names for each of the big sequences in the movie.
We started breaking [the sequences down], and [McQuarrie] and I would call the subterranean chamber “boy meets girl”; the Vienna opera house “first date”; and then the motorcycle chase was the “break up”, you know. And then you gotta bring it back together.
Speaking of bringing it back together, Cruise wants McQuarrie to remain in the director’s chair for a sixth Mission: Impossible film, and given the critical and financial success Rogue Nation has already enjoyed — raking in $55.5 million domestically and another $65 million internationally during its opening weekend — I have a feeling the pair might find a way to make that happen, and I hope they can get Rebecca Ferguson to join them.
I’ve discussed a lot above about Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and yet what you’ve read above is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Goldsmith’s interview with McQuarrie and Cruise. The pair dive even deeper into various anecdotes and on-set stories — such as how Janik Vinter went from dying in an early fight scene to finding his way into the film’s finale — and they talk more about their process working together, including past and hopefully future collaborations as well.
Cruise and McQuarrie are a lot of fun to listen to, so if you have time do yourself a favor and listen to the whole thing here; that’s your mission, should you choose to accept it.
