What this post is is an attempt to present (an edited) version of the transcript of Chris Lockhart's interview with Christopher McQuarrie on his podcast, The Inside Pitch. That is one heck of a remarkably candid (and generous) discussion of McQuarrie's philosophy of filmmaking, spanning over 2 hours. Among other great advice, McQuarrie discusses his experience and lessons learned in making The Usual Suspects, The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher, and his Mission Impossible movies such as Rogue Nation. If you have searched the internet for McQuarrie's approach to screenwriting (I have) you will find this interview to be a diamond in the rough.
Now, if you are a normal person, just stop reading and go check out the 2-hour interview here. This series of posts is merely provided for those few (like me) who prefer to read things slowly. I warn you that I got this from editing the Youtube transcript, which recorded every "um"s and other speech imperfections (besides having no punctuation or upper/lower cases). Editing it has probably created a large number of errors. A minefield of my grammatical errors ahead: the reader is warned.
CL: Welcome to The Inside Pitch. I'm Chris Lockhart. This is our first live interview and we are starting at the very top. I'm joined by group co-admin Ramesh Santaham. Ramesh say hello.
Ramesh: Hi everyone.
CL: I want to thank him for producing this event today. if there is such a thing as having a perfect career in Hollywood our guest today has come pretty damn close. he started as a screenwriter winning a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award, amongst other accolades, for The Usual Suspects which became an instant classic. he made his directing debut with his screenplay for The Way of the Gun. he co-wrote and directed Jack Reacher and has recently been writing directing and producing the Mission Impossible movies, one of the most successful film franchises in movie history. now you may have noticed a common denominator in these titles is Tom Cruise who very well may be, and this is not hyperbole, the greatest movie star who has ever lived and with whom our guest has forged a successful creative relationship. here is producer-writer-director and Oscar winner Christopher McQuarie.
CM: I cannot possibly live up to that.
CL: I just wanted to start off with a current event question, which is that your latest film, Mission Impossible VII I believe, had to halt production in Italy because of Covid. What is it like to have to stop a freight train of a movie like that and how are you handling it and are you working toward filming again soon?
CM: Yes, well in the case of in the case of a movie like Mission Impossible, where we're constantly in a state of measured panic, we're kind of making up the movies as we go along. We have a very set plan but we're always improvising and we're always changing things on the day. Having the movie suddenly stop is actually something not only that doesn't intimidate us, it's something we've had happen before. tom broke his ankle. Rogue Nation shut down for 10 days. Ghost Protocol shut down for two weeks. All for different reasons and one of the things we have learned from all of that, and it's an expression we say on the movie all the time is, disaster is an opportunity to excel. When something goes wrong you don't panic, you don't freak out. You start to look at the at the silver lining of whatever it is. The negatives were obviously we were gonna we were gonna miss our release date. we had an actor conflict that couldn't be resolved. There were certain things where where it definitely had a negative impact on the movie. but the positive impact on that is many things that we could only just repair turned out we had a great more time to repair them. The trick then was keeping pre production going. we had actually not started shooting, we were two days away from shooting, so technically we were in the last few days even the last 36 hours of pre-production, when the movie shut down. The big benefit was we actually had a chance to write a screenplay which we didn't have two days before.
CL: Some members of the group have heard that you're not really working with the screenplay in these Mission Impossible movies.
CM: That can't be true. To the extent that it is true it depends on the movie. in the case of Ghost Protocol they had a full screenplay when I came on board. We threw out everything that they had yet to shoot. we couldn't change what they had
shot but imagine coming into a movie 10 weeks into a 17 week shoot and looking at all the assets you have. all the assets you have yet to employ, roles you have yet to cast, scenes you have yet to shoot, sets you have yet to build and sets you have yet to strike, locations you have yet to find. Essentially, take the material that's there and look at it not as the movie you were trying to make but actually the movie you had made. It's another thing that we like to say all the time – prep is the movie you want to make, production is the movie you think you're making, and post is the movie you've made. we've now flipped that whole thing around and we are prepping the movie we think we're making but we don't we know enough to to not believe that that's what we're doing. Let's take this opportunity to find a character rather than having to write one specifically and get locked into it. It gives the actors a lot of freedom. In the case of Rogue Nation, I didn't have the trust in the studio and they were pushing very hard for a finished screenplay, even if it meant writing a screenplay that they knew we would never shoot. They really just wanted the security of a document. Going into Fallout I recognized that that created more problems than it solved. It actually got people stuck on certain ideas that we were never going to use. they couldn't unthink them. They couldn't get it out of their head. so I said okay i'm just going to give an outline this time. Even the outline created expectations that people could not unlearn. They would keep bringing me designs that were referring to an outline in scenes that were just placeholders. so when they came to me to do seven and eight and, ironically, they needed me to start right away. they needed me to start the next month if we were going to make our proposed release date. I said if you need me to start shooting them if you need me to deliver the movie by this date, I have to start scouting next week. they said how are you going to scout without a script? I said truthfully for Mission Impossible you can't write a script without a location. so let me go find the locations first, figure out where the movie's taking place what the action scenes are, and then I'll tell you what the movie is. That's what we've been doing.
CL: to me just sounds like it is so anxiety-ridden.
CM: The first time you do it yes, absolutely, like anything. I mean you know the first time you make a feature film. I don't care how prepared you are it's terrifying. you think you know what you're doing and you don't find out until the editing room that you don't know what you're doing. We've simply learned to embrace that. A plan is not a guarantee of success and chaos is not a guarantee of failure. we don't create chaos deliberately, we just embrace the notion that it's coming. It's going to happen there's going to be the unexpected. Somebody's going to break their ankle, some rig is going to break down, you're going to lose a location the day before you shoot there. when you walk into a movie knowing that there is going to be a certain degree of chaos you're not caught off guard when it comes. You've already started thinking about what would I do if I couldn't do that? It used to be I would go in and try to maximize the scope of the given location. I look at a location now and go how how much of this can I shoot in the least amount of time? Kind of get the beautiful big scope shots then make sure that the stuff that I owe at the end is the small stuff that I can recreate back on stage. You watch Mission Impossible, all of the exposition in the movie, you learn all that information in cars and phone booths and in small restaurants. You learn them in locations that we can recreate and reshoot that information again and again and again. You'll also notice when they're out running around the streets of Paris they're not saying a lot. As a result that means I know I put a critical line of dialogue in Ethan Hunt's mouth while Ethan Hunt is driving around the Arc d'Triumph at 60 miles an hour, I better be pretty damn sure that line is important to be in the movie. What Tom and I have learned to do over the course of three of these movies together now is we're constantly striving to make a silent film. We're pushing harder and harder with each film to find ways to make movies where the dialogue doesn't matter. As a guy who started, you know, with a very dialogue-heavy script and still write very dialogue heavy scripts, because of the exposition I'm forced to write, I'm extremely suspicious of dialogue. I consider dialogue to be a last resort rather than a first.
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