First, there is no such thing as Christopher McQuarrie's "Zen and the Art of Filmmaking". I made that up. But if you've ever read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there are parallels. Pirsig compares the romantic view of motorcycle maintenance -- thinking of a motorcycle as an ideal machine, getting frustrated when it has to be taken into the shop -- with the rational view -- where one uses problem-solving skills to diagnose and repair the bike yourself. (For those who haven't read it, it's a cool title but doesn't have that much to do with Zen Buddhism.) After watching/reading all of McQuarrie's interview, I think you will agree he is very much a highly-skilled problem-solver.
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.
This is a continuation of part 1, which is here.
CL: Someone asked you how can you budget when you do stuff like this?
CM: You know that it's a very good question. In the case of Mission, we budget for time and obviously resources. I'm the cities that I'm shooting in. I know what the action scenes in those cities are because I'm developing the action first when I go to a city. What used to happen is I would create an action scene, then we would find a location, and then I would have to rewrite the action scene to fit that location. Then you would lose that location or you would run out of time at that location and things would change on you. That's a lot of extra steps. So what I do now is I go to a city with no preconceived notion as to what the action scene is going to be. I let the city tell me what the action would be. When I went to Paris we had an idea of a breakout but we didn't really know if a car chase was going to work or not. It wasn't until I took a ride along the river and went into this tunnel that went under Paris and I looked up and I saw these skylights going into the tunnel. I know exactly how this car chase is going to end. I work backwards from there. Once you do that you very quickly start allocating acquiring resources. You're coming up with big ideas, you're coming up with gags, and you're rounding up all the best looking streets in Paris where you'd likely dream of having a car chase. As they start to give you those resources, you start to figure out how many cars do I have how many motorcycles do I need? Is a car in the scene or is in a motorcycle in this scene? The budget very quickly starts to come together. We allocate a certain portion of the movie understanding that X number of scenes have to be on a stage, because that's where our crew base is, and that's where we get our tax incentives. For shooting in the U.K. you have to shoot a certain number of days, that means a certain number of set builds. We also know certain characters are not going to be in Paris or New Zealand they're just going to be in London. It all starts to come together without you ever really knowing what necessarily the plot of your movie is. Plot doesn't matter. Plot's kind of irrelevant. What matters is story. when we think story, we think in terms of character. Most people, when they think story, they think in terms of plot. They think why are the things in the story happening? What are the big objectives? Why are all these pieces moving? We don't really think that way that. Stuff comes up as a matter of course. We start to say okay, Ethan is in this location he meets this character and they have this scene together that's about the two of them as people. Why were they there in the first place? So plot comes in at the at the very, very end. It's big logistical questions first, second is character development and then third is let's come up with a reason why all this is happening.
CL: When you started your career is this the way you thought? If not then so what was the evolution of what you know? What was the arc, the evolution?
CM: It's a very good question. You know my first film as a director was The Way the Gun. I didn't even understand budgets. I didn't understand schedules. I didn't understand how long it took me to shoot a scene. What I also didn't understand about The Way the Gun is that cinematography has as much to do with the writer as it has to do with the director. That the way you write a scene will determine in many ways how that scene has to be shot. It'll determine how that scene has to be edited, if that scene is to be coherent. Location has as much to do with cinematography. Where you choose to shoot a scene will provide opportunities or limitations for a cinematographer and so all of those things are interrelated. I didn't know any of that. I didn't understand any of that. I wrote a script and then I did what writers do when they make the transition from being a writer to director, I shot the screenplay. I didn't really direct the movie. Over the course of not only directing my own material, but producing other people's movies, editing other people's movies, fixing movies that were broken, and having a certain emotional attachment from those movies, I started to understand how those things are interrelated. So I would say to any writer that it's probably more important that when you study movies, it's less about studying the writing and it's more about studying the way the scenes are shot, the way they're edited, the locations where they take place. Go look at your at your favorite movie ever made and it's a mystery to you why that movie looks good. When you make movies long enough you start to understand there's a very simple formula behind why those things look that good. It's just for certain filmmakers that aesthetic is not a priority, and for other filmmakers that aesthetic is the only priority. What we're trying to do all the time is create a balance between those priorities. How do I make it look like a big movie but feel like a proper story?
CL: Would you write a script like The Usual Suspects today or is that in your past?
CM: I would do that a second if I could come up with that kind of ending. I mean Suspects all came together because of the ending. It was very crystalline in its execution because of that ending. Everything that happened in the story was simply a matter of delivering on that ending. I started with the first the title, then the poster, then the ending of the movie, then the beginning of the movie, which I had actually written a long time prior as a scene to some other idea. I didn't know where to start Suspects, so I took this old scene that I'd written -- it was a beginning with no ending -- then I took an ending with no beginning and put them together. I connected the two and that's that's how Suspects came together. If you watch Suspects you'll notice it doesn't have a beginning. It starts in a flashback and a B-story. It's the story has no has no real legitimate beginning point it begins after the story has started. The whole movie is about an ending.
CL: How do other writers, your colleagues, feel about your philosophy toward writing? now did you get some blow back from them?
CM: I hope that what i'm saying doesn't come off as though i'm devaluing writing. What i'm trying to do is I'm trying to empower writers to be a more necessary and involved part of the process. Writers are taught to take themselves out very early. Writers are taught that you write a screenplay, you sell that screenplay, and then miraculously a producer gets a director attached to it, and then somehow they find financing, and they shoot the movie that you wrote. Which sounds to me like hitting the lottery many, many, many times in a row. The problem with that is that writers are neither taught how to how to engineer movies, and more importantly they're taught a lot of bad habits by executives in terms of executing stories that are based on plot, answering the question "why"? executives tend to be like children in that phase of life who just keep asking why? Why? … If you know why things are happening is not really important. Why the big events of the story are happening is much less important than why is the character acting out a certain way within that? I'm much more interested in why characters are doing what they're doing than what the plot of the movie is. What I'm trying to do now is I'm trying to create some kind of a syllabus, a breakdown, so that writers are able to understand the engineering of a movie. How to write movies instead of screenplays. Writers really aren't taught to write movies, they're taught to write scripts. They're taught to write documents that sell and get made. But then once you catch a director, one of two things happen: either the director has to change them because they're not really shootable as movies in that form, or more often than not the director changes them. because if you tell a director something is black when you show up on the set that day it's going to be red, if you tell them it's white, it's going to be green. They're going to do what they want to do. It's taken me years to develop material in such a way that now I can stand on a set and hand pages to a director and say you can try to change these pages but you can't. You just can't. If the director says well I don't want to do this because I've seen this in other movies. Great take it out but then the whole scene doesn't make any sense. It used to be I would be on the set as the writer watching a director mangle my script, sometimes for the better. Now I get to watch directors tangle with my pages and try to change them and they're not able to. That's because what I'm doing is I'm writing a movie. I'm writing an an editable actionable plan. Any writer who's listening to me right now you'll gain a lot more knowledge by studying editing than you will by studying screenwriting. Screenwriting is something inside of you. It's what you're going to do and it's going to be dictated by so many other things. watch how movies are built. That's where it really comes together. Watch how movies evolve through the process of editing.
CL: Yeah you know I always say movies are not written, they're constructed. because they're built.
CM: They're written three times. It's written once on the page, once on film, and then in the editing room. The writer comes back to that process. Again, what writers are taught to do is they're taught to hang on desperately with both hands and to remain involved in the process any way they can. Well the problem is that when you're doing that people's natural inclination is to get rid of you. Nobody wants that person who's desperate to be at the party. It took me 20 years to learn the easiest way to make sure that you never get fired off of a movie is do everything you can to get off the movie. The movie becomes like glue you cannot escape. What happens then is you make yourself invaluable to the process you become a person who's there moving it along. Once i've written the screenplay and handed it over to somebody else, if i'm not directing it, it's there moving. if they want to change it they can change it and I support them and I do everything I can to help them do that. I'm no longer about "oh I wrote the scene this way it would have been so much better like that." What I'm about is my time and when I see a director making choices that are going to force me to have to rewrite the scene, reshoot the scene, do it again, that's where I become very sensitive. You can do that but then I'm going to leave because you're you're wasting my time. I watch writers all the time. They fight for extra steps, they fight for wanting to be invited to the set, they fight for all of these things that frankly don't matter. You can't arbitrate and make people want you to stay. You can produce for people. The more productive you are, the more people want you there, and if people don't want you there get out. why would you want to be standing around on a movie with people seeing you not doing things? Let them miss you. if you're a writer worth your salt you will have other ideas. Move on to the next thing.
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