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 2, which is here.
CL: I think I'm going to add iconoclast to your bio. you've earned it. One of our members has a Covid question: Should spec scripts acknowledge or ignore Covid meaning? should our characters be wearing masks and interacting in a post-Covid world?
CM: Frankly you'll write a script and by the time that script gets read, a year will have passed and the Covid [era will have passed]. If you have a script like Contagion that takes great advantage of that or a script wherein Covid plays a key part in the narrative, great. Go ahead and do that. I'm having these meetings extensively right now where I have scenes with, in a perfect world, potentially hundreds of extras. but I don't actually know what the Covid rules are. The position I'm now taking is you guys have to tell me. I'm not going to write this scene and you tell you tell me how I have to shoot it. Don't make me write the scene twice. Don't make me write a scene, plan a scene, and then when I show up there you're gonna tell me that I actually can't have extras in my scene. I'll just wait until you tell me what the rules are. I'm somebody who likes rules. I'm somebody who likes boundaries. they force me to be creative. I would never recommend that you impose rules on yourself that you don't need. You'll find you impose enough rules on yourself consciously and unconsciously without having to add any more.
CL: A lot of our members are curious about how you collaborate with Tom Cruise. What does that look like?
CM: Tom communicates largely in emotional terms. Tom is very clear in his thinking about what he wants the audience to feel in a given scene, a given moment, a sense of tone in the movie. Tom comes at it in a very general sense of what he wants the audience to feel. Now sometimes that'll involve expressing an idea I don't really get. I don't really understand what the idea is, but I look at the feeling behind the note that he's reaching for and say "okay I know how to construct that in a way that's actually workable, we can actually execute it it's not an abstraction.” It becomes a concrete execution of an idea. So everything we do like. for example in the case of Fallout, Tom had at the very beginning he said "what do you want to do"? I said If I'm going to make another Mission Impossible I want Ethan to go on an emotional journey. I want to make a story. We discovered little things in Rogue Nation that were surprisingly more emotional than we ever expected them to be. What I said to him was I want to embrace that. I want to take the lessons we learned from that. I want to make a movie like that, intentionally. [Then I asked Tom] "what do you want to do"? He said “I want to clear up the story of Julia because people are still asking me about Julia when I promote the movie. Now I want to give them a satisfying conclusion to that story. I feel like there are still the fans of the franchise unsatisfied by that story." I said great if you want to give them that satisfaction, you can't just have Ethan go visit Julia somewhere and tie up their relationship and then go back to the story, because you're going to cut that out of the movie. We've made enough movies to know no matter how well written the scene is that scene is going to end up on the cutting room floor. This means that if you want Julia in the story, the story has to go like a train right through your relationship with Julia and that means there are five scenes in the movie, before the movie is even started, you have to begin the movie with Ethan dreaming about Julia (because we have to reintroduce her as a character and how Ethan feels about her whatever those feelings are), we know there's going to be a dream somewhere else in the movie (to remind you about Julia because in the midst of all the other crazy action we're going to forget about her), we need a scene where somebody tells somebody the story of Ethan and Julia, and I think it would be great to have Luther do that because he never gets to do scenes like that and it would be great if he's telling Ilsa, because that's that's going to be fraught with a certain kind of tension, and then at the end of the movie, in the third act of the film, he's got to run into Julia at the most inopportune time and fight. We understand what her life is, and I think it would be great if she was married to another guy maybe even had a kid with another guy. We tried that, we were we came very close to doing that we almost had a baby in that scene. Then at the end of it would be some resolution to their story something that lets them off the hook. That became the story of Mission Impossible: Fallout. All coming from Tom going "I want to give the audience this sense of satisfaction to this little thing". He didn't say make the whole movie about Ethan and Julia, he just said this is the thing I want to give them. and with every sequence that I present to Tom, Tom's always looking for Ethan's journey within the sequence. He's not going "what do I Tom Cruise get to do"? He's always looking at it in terms of what's driving Ethan through the scene? What is creating pressure on Ethan? What keeps me in Ethan's point of view? What's Ethan doing in the scene to either affect the events around him or in response to events that are affecting him? That's how we build those stories, layer by layer by layer. The opera sequence, for example, I came to Tom (I went to Paris for the weekend and came back having gone to the National Academy of Paris) and said [to Tom] that's a great idea, let's do an opera sequence. He thought that was a terrible idea. He thought the opera was going to be this very boring scene. He'd seen a bunch of opera scenes lately and he was like "really do we have to have opera in the movie"? I said trust me, here's how it's going to go: and then we started to build this thriller around the opera. The opera scene is actually not about the opera, it's set at the opera. The opera is very much the backdrop to the story. What matters in the story is the emotions driving Ethan, namely his reconnecting with Ilsa. The opera was originally supposed to be the opening of the movie. we realized that the opera would have a lot more value if he had met that woman before. That's how the shape of the movie took place. We like a scene and then we say what what would make the scene better is if these scenes happen before it. Mission kind of grows from there.
CL: What do you think it is about you that Tom Cruise is so attached to your talent? What is it that you've brought to the table that Tom really connects with? Because clearly he does and he trusts you.
CM: We get we get along very well. We were actually just talking about this. He said "that's why we get along!" Our first priority is story. We don't have another agenda. It's very easy to look at a movie star and presume why that movie star is doing what they're doing. Tom really likes to make big movies for the widest audience possible that he can. He does that through story. He cares first and foremost about story. So do I so. In that we can be quite ruthless, especially when working with other filmmakers. When I'm working more as a writer and a producer, I don't care how much you like a shot. I don't care how much time you spent shooting it. I don't I don't care how much effort you put into it. I promise you, I have put more effort into something that I have cut out of my movie like that. I will be there standing next to the filmmaker and say "you could shoot this but you're going to cut it out of the movie". It's just not going to be there, but go ahead and shoot it. Then when we're in the cutting room and looking at it, watch what happens when you take that out. It's gone and the movie gets better. Most importantly I think the reason Tom and I get along so well is there's there is no end to it. There is not a day where the film is finished ... you know, Top Gun [part II] has not come out, yet Tom and I are still working on Top Gun we are still watching the movie over and over and over again talking about music, talking about cues, rethinking it. Trying as best we can to step back from the movie and look at it the way you would look at it as somebody who didn't make it and doesn't care, and has to be made to care. It's looking at our movies with a kind of wide-angle vision that says I don't care how much work I put into it, or how important it is. Does an audience care when they're coming home from work that day? How do I get them to stop thinking about work and focusing on my movie? That's all we care about we care about. This is the really important thing it's an important choice of words. The word is not entertainment, because everybody has their own definition of whatever entertainment is, and some people think that that's frivolous and some people just think that's tacky and don't want to do it. The word is engagement. I don't care what kind of movie you're making. I don't care what filmmaker you are. If I'm not engaged, why are why are we even here? Why are we watching the movie? What matters most to me is that an audience comes to the film and they're engaged from the first second of the movie until the last second of the movie. They didn't think about the movie until after the movie is over. I don't want you thinking during the film. I want you feeling during the film. I want you to experience during the film. If you're doing any kind of thinking I want you trying to guess where the movie is going. Most importantly I want you to guess what I want you to guess. That's where Suspects comes from. I didn't fool you, you fooled you. You sat there trying to outsmart a movie that knew very, very specifically how it was you watched movies critically. I led you down the garden path. You fooled yourself and you did a very good job of that.
CL: Staying on the Tom Cruise line of questioning, do you have to rein him in because he supposedly likes to do his own stunts? Does that make you nervous? How do you handle that?
CM: Do I have to reign him in? No. Stunt-wise, no. You might think that Tom is a daredevil. He's not. He's very competent, very careful. He understands that if anything goes wrong, The movie ceases to function. He's also not interested in dying, I can tell you. I can tell you he likes making movies and he wants to keep on doing it. So, no reigning him in is never the issue. What i've learned to do with Tom is, creatively, when we're talking about story that, if I don't get where Tom's going with an idea, if I don't like the idea that Tom is going with, I'll express my doubts. I'll base it on experiences we've had. The peril of all filmmakers that I've watched screw themselves is they take things out of movies because they didn't like it in some other movie. Or, they think it's a trope. The truth of the matter is when you're thinking that way, you're thinking as much of yourself as you are of the movie. You're thinking of how you'll be perceived and not how the movie will be perceived. For me, I only care about what works in the story. For Tom, Tom will suggest something to me and I won't get it. I'll simply say okay here's a lesson we learned from a previous movie. I'll follow this idea but I just want to make sure that we don't repeat this mistake. I go with whatever the idea is and one of two things will happen. Invariably, we will find something really great in that that we both love, or Tom will turn to me at a certain point go this was a terrible idea. It just didn't work. I'm never fearful of Tom because of his pride of authorship sticking something in the movie, because he thought of it god damn it, it's got to be in the film. It's either going to work or it's going to get it cut out of the movie. Which means I have the freedom to try anything. I had a musical number in Fallout and Tom was like "what are you doing"? I said "yeah, I don't know let's try it. It might work, and if it doesn't work here's how I cut it out of the movie." With the opera, Tom was very skeptical of the opera. He was skeptical of the back the bus stop in Jack Reacher. I was very skeptical of Ilsa's shoes on the roof of the opera house. We come up with these ideas and we'll just be very frank and say I don't get this but let's go. Let's try it because we both know nobody's ever going to be in the editing room insisting that it stay in the movie because of the effort that went into it. It works or it doesn't.
CL: Are you still writing spec scripts?
CM: Yes and no. I mean do I sit down and write, when was the last time I sat down and actually wrote or came up with a spec idea? I collaborate with other writers on things. I like a broken toy. I like it when people come to me with a script that doesn't work but has some sort of core idea and I can rebuild it, and resuscitate it. But I just don't have the time. I simply don't have the time to sit down and write uh a story like that from scratch. In the case of Covid, I would have, but instead I started writing a book. It was something I had always aspired to do and never did. I was writing notes on something and realized about 30 pages in that I think I'm writing a book. I've been writing. I wake up in the morning and I write a few paragraphs and try not to think about it. It's not something I remain terribly focused on. Over time i've amassed about 200 pages, which is something I thought I would never ever do in my life.
CL: It's a novel?
CM: No, actually it's shaping up to be something of a little bit about what we're talking about, in a narrative form. Kind of almost - I don't want to call it a memoir because that sounds ponderous - it's kind of about how I arrived at what I'm able to articulate now. These are things that I probably wasn't able to articulate even a year ago. I was standing on set with Tom Cruise and Tommy Gormley and Jake Myers our producer. Tommy has produced almost all of them or he's been the A.D. on almost all of the Mission Impossible movies. Jake Myers has produced a lot of Chris Nolan's films. He's produced The Revenant and he's produced the last two Mission Impossible movies. He produced Jack Reacher. I was standing there looking at the four of us standing there and I thought, between the four of us there is 150 years of unique film knowledge on a lot of these Mission Impossible movies. We create technology and use it in such a way that it can never be used again simply because the elements will very likely not come together. We end up acquiring a lot of knowledge that we don't actually apply to the next film. I thought this is incredibly wasteful for all of us to have this this acquired knowledge. Would wouldn't it be better if somebody actually wrote it down somewhere? It's not an attempt for me to say here's how to make movies. i'm very clear right up front. I can't really tell you how to make movies. I can tell you how I make movies. I didn't have a book of rules when I set out to make movies. Your movie is in you and all I'm really interested in is helping filmmakers understand that the biggest obstacle to filmmaking is ourselves. We we tend to get in our own way. We tend to create our own rules and then forget that we created them. We get tunnel vision very early on. The book is, I think, more than anything else a cautionary tale. it's a litany of every mistake I've ever made as a filmmaker. So you you get to make your own mistakes and not mine.
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