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 (very long) blog post is the final one of this series and is a continuation of part 3, which is here.
CL: Can we go back in time a little bit, maybe to your early days? A lot of our members are just getting started, maybe they have no films under their belt or maybe one, or they've just had a screenplay optioned. One of our members has just written here that on your Twitter feed, of which many of our members are following, that you have recommended that young filmmakers go out and make movies.
CM: Yes.
CL: Can you talk a little bit about that? And can you address that in the Covid- era as well?
CM: Going back to what I was talking about earlier, there are no rules until you write them. Covid is just another rule. Covid is telling you "okay you can't make movies in a conventional sense." It's creating a limitation for you. that's not going to stop you from making narrative. If you're saying I can't make a movie because of Covid, what you're adhering to is the story you want to tell versus the environment in which you want to tell it. I don't make movies. my movies made me. anytime I try to make a movie I don't get it made. It's all when I when I work at creating, when I work at finding an emotion, when I work at doing something, and collaborating and creating, I end up making movies. Your intro left out a seven year period where I didn't make any films at all. Your intro left out a 12 year period between my first and second film as a director. I could not get arrested. I was ready to quit the film business, and I did that because I was trying to control the process. I was trying to make a kind of movie and I was trying to determine what my future was, rather than just going to work and creating my future. When Covid struck and when the movie shut down, what Tom said in terms of bringing together all the crew, and having these calls every day, he said we are creating a future for this business. That's that's the job that we're doing right now. We're not sitting here making mission impossible. We're keeping people working, and we're giving people a future. The movie will happen or the movie won't. If it doesn't happen it's not because we weren't ready. That philosophy applies to Mission Impossible, Public Access, The Way of the Gun, every movie I've ever worked on. You produce and you create. You're focused on execution and not on result. What a lot of the people out there listening to my voice are doing right now, you have a screenplay and you're trying to figure out how to get that screenplay made. That's great. That should not be taking up 100 % of your bandwidth. You've written it. Put it aside, get to work on something else. Create a little film. create a 30-second film. Create a TikTok. Whatever it is, find people to work with. Find people to create with. By creating you will find who those people are. You will create a creative catalyst and that's where the ignition is going to come from. Everybody that I know that made it in the business came from some beginning like that. Yes some of them had a script they submitted and the script got picked up and the next thing you know, Bob's your uncle and they're making movies. That happens. It doesn't happen as often as the people who create. Now if you're a writer and you don't want to do those things, you don't want to direct, and you don't want to produce, you don't want to edit, do it anyway. Because the truth of the matter is, if you don't understand people love to say - and this has become kind of a mantra of mine - writers love to say all the time that “writing is where the process of filmmaking begins.” And they're very proud of that fact. And I hate to break it to you, it's not true. It's where the process of filmmaking ends. You will be writing the screenplay all the way until the last day of ADR. And you probably won't be paid to do it. Understanding the process of filmmaking is where writing begins. The more you know about how movies are made the more rock solid the writing you are going to be delivering. More importantly, the more people will want you on their movies doing their work, getting their movies made and helping to realize what it is they want to do, you have to determine early on that being a screenwriter is different than screenwriting. Getting your movie made is different than making movies. You can do all of those things at the same time. What we tend to do is we tend to choose one path and focus obsessively on that path, and then we find ourselves very frustrated when path doesn't take us anywhere. Well that's because you're actually not moving, you're waiting, and you're waiting for somebody to come along and give you that opportunity. It's not to say that can't happen but get busy living or get busy done.
CL: This is a philosophy that a lot of people are not are not accustomed to hearing. I think it's very refreshing.
CM: You don't have to listen to a word of it. Filmmaking is a process. It's a process of acceptance. Editing is a process of acceptance. Writing is a process of acceptance. You can fight these ideas and many of you will. We tend to look at the executive is my obstacle, and the director who won't read my screenplay is my obstacle. Well, they're not active obstacles. They're not people who are out to stop you from doing your career. You're the obstacle. I was the biggest obstacle in my career, hands down. Because I believed in dogma. I believed in things that I was told. I had gone around for those seven years with screenplays asking for permission to make movies, or asking someone to make my movie. Which is not even asking permission to make a movie, it's asking someone if they would kindly take my dream away from me and make it into their dream. what I started to do is put all those scripts in a drawer. I went into a pitch meeting after Valkyrie. I went into a pitch meeting in a studio with some executive who I never saw again and I sat in his office and he said “so, what do you got for me?” I had been through the process now to the point where I didn't really care about making movies if it meant having to have these meetings. Because those pitch meetings are submitting your scripts to studios. I sat down with this guy and he said “what do you got for me?” and I said “nothing.” He said “what are you talking about?” I said I've got nothing I don't have anything to sell you. “What have you got? How can I help you? I know how to make movies. How can I help you make yours?” He started pitching me his slate of movies. He pitched me the first movie and it was a terrible idea and I went "yeah no, I'm not interested in that. What else have you got?" I'll remind you I needed a job. I needed work. I was like "no, not that one either". He started sweating and getting really nervous. He was really terrible at pitching his own ideas. He didn't know how to do it. I suddenly realized I've been in the wrong chair for 15 years at this point. It's so much easier to go to them and say what do you got. First of all they're motivated to make a movie. I don't have to convince them of making a film, they have films they want to make. I may not agree with the ideas that they're interested in making. I may not be totally excited about them, but I can find a way into those movies. So what happened when I couldn't get arrested, all those years when I couldn't get my own movies made, I started working on other people's movies. I'd heard nightmare stories about Doug Lyman. I didn't want to work with Doug Lyman, based on the myths and legends that I'd heard about Doug. but Tom Cruise called me and he said hey there's this script. It's called "All You Need is Kill." I said yeah I read it it's not a good screenplay. He goes “no, it's really funny.” I said I read the script you did and it's not funny. He said “no, but it's going to be funny. This is a very funny situation and I want you to think of that movie in terms of making it funny.” I said oh okay, all right. Those are my marching orders and that's how we made Edge of Tomorrow. Not because I went and begged to be on that movie but because I looked at a project that terrified me, that I didn't want to do, a genre I didn't want to be a part of, a director who really scared the crap out of me. Because his process is completely very difficult for writers, until you figure him out. And I embraced it. I leaned into it and said "you know, my movie can wait, my future can wait." By the way I took that job the day I finished color timing Jack Reacher. I had just fought my way back to being a director. I delivered my movie and at a point when any other filmmaker would say "what's my directing gig now?" What how do I parlay this into my next directing gig? I turned around and went right back to being a screenwriter for somebody else, because that was where the creativity was. I was not going to go back to handing my script to people and begging for permission to do it. I just won't do it. You know it's fine to make that a part of your day. It's fine to dedicate an hour of your day to to pushing your dream and it's important that you do that. Most importantly, just check yourself. What am I doing to create value in myself so that other people want me working on their movies? I never set out to make Mission Impossible. I never set out to make two of them let alone four of them. but by the time we got to the third and fourth Mission Impossible, I was in a position to say to the studio: "yeah i'll make these movies but I have to start scouting tomorrow and I don't know when you're going to see a screenplay". And the studio said okay on Fallout. I was standing in a desert waiting for the right three minutes of sunlight and thinking about how David Lean when he was making Lawrence of Arabia used to go out to the desert. He had the luxury of standing around waiting until the light changed so that he could shoot Lawrence of Arabia. I never set out to do those things. Had I set out to do them I never would have gotten there. And when Tom Cruise comes to me with an idea, now any idea that he's passionate about, and says I want this in Mission Impossible, I say great, write it on a post-it note stick it on my bulletin board and go away. Because that will find its way into the movie and the harder we try to put it in the movie. The more likely it will never ever work. But every idea that we just think of, and let go of it, finds its way into the process. Because it's who we are. It's part of our subconscious that is percolating and trying to get out. Your movie is in you. Your movie is working to get out. When you're forcing that, that's what you're feeling: the obstacle. You're trying to make your movie happen, instead of letting your movie happen. You're trying to make yourself a filmmaker, instead of letting your film make you a filmmaker.
CL: There's a lot of self-actualization here. I want to know about that desert that you spoke about, that seven years, what was all that about? How did that help to sort of shape this whole philosophy of yours?
CM: It was it was a couple of things. I made The Way of the Gun believing that if you made a film that film would parlay you into other directing jobs. I was determined to make a film my way and break a lot of molds. lo and behold, I did that I also made a movie that nobody came to see. that critics hated. It took 20 years to find its audience. How you can do that, but do that on purpose. Don't do that when you're doing something else. What I define success as now versus then. If we're going to talk about success, let's all talk about a workable definition of what success is. Is it box office success? Critical success is not in our control. Rewards are not in our control. What's in our control is honoring our commitments. That to me is the definition of success. That's not saying I am successful. That's my objective. that's what I look at, as a definition of success. I make a commitment to my audience to tell a kind of story. when I do that I immediately determine the size of my film by determining the size of my audience. I determine what size my movie can be. You can't make The Usual Suspects for 140 million dollars any more than you can make Mission Impossible for five million dollars. You think first in terms of who your audience is and you make your movie appropriately for that audience. It could be an audience of one. I'm not sitting here telling you to be a big mass-market filmmaker. I'm not telling you to make Tom Cruise movies. You want to make David Lynch movies, make them. Don't try to make your David Lynch movie for 240 million dollars out of the gate. Just think about who's really going to show up to a David Lynch movie. You work and you make your movies proportionate to that. I didn't do that with The Way of the Gun. With The Way of the Gun I had an objective that was completely dis-aligned with what i was doing. While I was doing it I wanted to get to a place where I could make big historical epics. I didn't start out by trying to make a movie that made people confident enough in me that they would give me more money. I actually made a movie that was an intent that was antagonistic not only to the studio but to the audience. Then I was surprised when I got exactly the reaction that the movie was designed to do. that put me in the desert for seven years, along with a lot of other choices. I was deliberately antagonistic, headstrong, prideful, responding emotionally to all kinds of horrible insulting behavior that you're going to suffer as writers. I took a lot of things personally had a big chip on my shoulder. There was absolutely no value in me except the fact that I had written The Usual Suspects. It's the only thing that kept me in the game. Throughout that time I kept writing screenplays, believing another myth. I was believing that if you write a screenplay, I was told by my agent at the time, if you write a good screenplay you'll be delivered well. Those screenplays never got made. It doesn't matter that it's good. It's not commercial. it's not it's not commercial in proportion to its cost. If it was a little three million dollar movie about the same subject I could probably get it made, but it's not it's a 90 million movie about that subject so it's not a good plan. It's a great dream and I'll never give up that dream and I will keep trying to get it made. I'll keep making Mission Impossibles until somebody says "what do you want to do?" I'm here to tell you I made Fallout. Fallout made a lot of money. It made the most money of any of the Mission Impossible movies. It was the most successful movie of Tom Cruise's career, dollar for dollar. They still don't come to me and say "what do you want to do?" They come to me and say we'd like you to do something for us. We'll pay a little bit more money to do it. That's because I'm on a trajectory that didn't start with wisdom. It started from a place of antagonism. I've heard many myths, and I'm going to be one of those stories that you can get where I am by doing that. It's just going to take you as long as it took me to get here. Don't be surprised when you're seven years in the desert like I was. In that time I was rewriting studio movies that never got made. I was using the money out that I was being paid to do that to finance the writing of screenplays that no one has ever made. Except one, and that script was Valkyrie. And in that seven years I was shopping that script all over town. Nobody would read it let alone show any interest in making it. It wasn't until Bryan Singer came to me having read the script. He and I had many ups and downs, many falling outs, and we were in the middle of one of those. I hadn't heard from him in a couple years and he found the script he called me up. He said "I want to make a movie that doesn't have the pressure of a big opening weekend, I don't want to make another Superman. I want to make a movie that is supposed to fail and this is a perfect move for that.” That was the ambition going into Valkyrie. There were no illusions about this was going to be a giant moneymaker movie. This was going to be a movie that people took at face value. It's not a commercial film and it didn't become a commercial film until tom cruise got involved. The whole reason Tom Cruise got involved is because I was in a restaurant, listening to people at the next table talking about Tom Cruise, who had just left Paramount Pictures. And they were talking about Tom like his career was over. I thought I think this guy's got a couple more movies in him and I did something that I'd never done in my entire career. I called my manager and I said is there any way you can get me a meeting with Tom Cruise? I'd never asked for a general meeting in my career. He got me a meeting at Tom's company and I had to go through several several layers of meetings. One with Don Granger, who was then an executive of the company, that turned into a meeting with Paula Wagner, and that turned into a meeting with Tom. That conversation ultimately turned into Valkyrie. If I'd had that conversation even a year before I wouldn't have been ready. By the time I had the conversation with Tom I was ready to quit the movie business. I was ready to let everything go. I wasn't trying to make a movie happen the way I wanted it to happen. What I was trying to do was unload my screenplay so that I could pay off my debts and get out of the movie business. In doing everything I could to get out of the movie business, I got sucked in and I took a producing credit on that movie. I took a producing credit on that movie only so that I would be paid more money. I didn't know how to produce a film. I just figured I put the movie together I deserve a producing credit. Well, Paula Wagner sat me down and she said I understand you're a producer on the film. Of course my answer was "well yes in name only" but a little voice in my head said how you answer this question will determine the rest of your life and choose carefully. Instead of saying "no well yes I'm just a producer but I'm gonna cash a check and get out of here", I decided to say "I am now". She said good because I've been working with Tom Cruise for 25 years, I've been on set with him every day for every movie in those 25 years, and now that I'm running united artists I can't be there. I need somebody to be Tom's onset guy and I want that to be you. Every day I went to work waiting for Tom Cruise to figure out that I didn't know what I was doing. I went to work every day expecting to be fired. All I did was was deliver on everything I said I would deliver on, day by day by day, until one day they gave me a job I couldn't do and when that day came I was going to be fired. Now, suddenly, I'm in Germany and I'm making a World War II movie. I had to let somebody else direct it, somebody I didn't want to let direct it, but now suddenly there I was making this movie. I was learning more about film from a guy who'd worked with every living filmmaker that you could ever possibly want to work with. Every day my wife and I went to bed after having a wonderful day. My head would hit the pillow and I would look at my wife and say “this all ends tomorrow. Tomorrow they're going to figure out I don't know what I'm doing and we're going home.” This is a business. This is not a friendship. they owe us nothing. I have kept that attitude to this day. I don't go to work thinking I've been working with Tom Cruise for 12, 13 years and I'm entitled to my position on the movie. I go to work every day saying if i'm not the right guy to make this movie they should have fired me. They should send me home today. If I can't do this i'm a liability and I'm in the way and I'm leaving. That has kept me moving forward every single day. I'm not trying to hit a target. I'm not working towards a specific movie or a start date or anything else like that. I'm working towards production, creating. I'm not worried about “what am I getting from it? When am I getting it? What is my credit?” All those things come in their own way, and the harder you try to make those things happen the more people want to stop you from getting it. The more you produce and the harder you try to get out of the room, the more people throw enticements at you to stay.
CL: What is it about this that you love? What is it about filmmaking that you love?
CM: Without question writing, which I think is infinitely harder than directing. Writing is a lot harder. With writing, it's the it's the moment of ignition. There's a part of the writing process where you're doing everything you can to get the story started and you can't do it. You don't want to do it. You want to walk away from it. And something clicks and suddenly the story is telling itself. The story is in the back of your head and it won't let you go. I'm not having to think about the movie. The movie won't let me stop thinking about it. That to me is the greatest part of writing. It's the most exciting part of writing. With directing, it's the creativity that comes from finding the emotion within a set of inert tools -- a screenplay, a lens, a light, a location, an actor, … Everything has become for me going all the way back to Usual Suspects. The Way of the Gun is a film that is doing everything it can to provide information to the audience and asking the audience to turn that information into emotion. It's asking the actors to turn that information into emotion. What I've learned is it is the director's job to create the emotional environment so that the script doesn't need to be emotional. The actors don't need to emote, the composer doesn't need to do that. All of those things become accents to what was already there when you selected the right lens, the right location, the right light, and created an emotional feeling. Finding those emotions. And the fact that you can. When you guys see Top Gun [part II], I can't wait for the world to see this movie, when you see what all of those things converging, when they really harmonize and really work, creating an emotional experience, that's to me is … Since the time I was a little child I told stories. I told stories for no other reason than to move the person I was telling it to. I'm not an auteur, I am not a visionary. I don't care if you know that I directed my movies. I don't care if you ever know my name. I care that I move you. I care that I move you, not just now, but a hundred years from now long after I'm gone. It's the only thing that interests me. Moving, engaging an audience. Ideally, the biggest audience possible.
CL: You said earlier that you had considered walking away. If you had actually put your career behind you what would you be doing now?
CM: I'd inevitably have ended up writing. I would have ended up writing books. I can't not tell stories. or, I would have become a film teacher. I would have parlayed my award for Suspects into a teaching job somewhere. Frankly, as you have noticed from my hour-long answers to questions, my filmmaking curriculum would have been a bunch of poor kids having to listen to me tell stories all day. I would have found a way to tell stories to make a living. I was just very fortunate in that I met someone who cared as much about stories as I did, at what would have been the end of my career.
CL: That's Tom Cruise?
CM: That's Tom, yes.
CL: In the beginning of your career, how did you fall into screenwriting?
CL: By accident. I never set out to be a screenwriter. I was in sixth grade. I remember very distinctly. I was 12 years old. I was sitting at my desk, writing a short story. I have no memory of ever having written a short story before that. I don't know what the story I was. I know that my teacher, we had a substitute teacher named Mrs Huber. Mrs Huber saw what I was doing and said "what are you writing?" I said "I'm writing a story" and she said "is that what you want to do when you grow up?". It never occurred to me that that was even an option, That writing was a career. I was immediately struck with the realization that yes that was what I wanted to do. I told her so and from that minute on I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. This was a blessing and a curse. It gave me a great deal of security and certainty that not only was that something they knew what I wanted to do, but I also knew I could do it. I didn't need to run faster than people to do it. I didn't need to be able to lift great weights. I didn't have to have great aim. I didn't have to have any kind of special physical skills. I just all I needed was my brain and my hand and a pencil. At the same time, I knew from that moment on the school didn't have a thing to teach me. I knew how to read, write add subtract and multiply. I didn't need anything else that school had for me. I knew from third grade. I hated school. I knew from third grade that you didn't have to go to college, that college was optional. As soon as I discovered it was optional, that was like having four years taking off my prison sentence. I said I'm never going to college. I'm just never going to do it. I was granted a certain amount of certainty at a very young age, with absolutely no guarantees and nothing to back it up. Mrs Huber was the substitute, the actual teacher was a woman named Ms Denlinger, her name is now is Hensley, she recognized that there was something there. I was a weird kid. I was being picked on by other kids one day in class. Every kid in the class was picking on me. She said you all need to pay attention to Chris, you need to be nicer to him. He's going to be on television one day. I was so stunned when she said that. Somebody saw in me some ability that I wished for but did not know that I had. When I won my academy award she was the first person I thanked. I've never forgotten. I'm still in touch with her. I was just emailing with her yesterday. I was off as a writer and I wanted to write books. I loved writing short stories. I loved Roland Dahl and Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write stories like that. I went to grade school with Bryan (Singer) and Ethan Hawk and [musician] James Murphy from the LCD Soundsystem. All of us went to school together. Brandon Boyce was another one who was there. We all we had kind of a filmmaking storytelling creative. I don't even want to call us a “collective” because that sounds too organized. We just believed in each other. It just was a thing that was that was accessible to us. No one ever told us we couldn't have it. Nobody ever said you can't be a filmmaker. My parents who desperately wanted me to get some kind of decent grades and get a college education. My father was a teacher. My parents, as much as they understood that what I was wishing for was one in a trillion chance, they never discouraged me. they never said I couldn't. While they desperately did everything they could to get me to focus on school, they also never ever ever said you can't do that. You need to find some other line of work, in case that doesn't work out. That was never introduced to me as a concept. I just knew. It wasn't until years later ... Bryan and I knew each other in school. I had been in a Bryan Singer short film, Ethan had been in a Bryan Singer short film. We ran in the same circle until really my senior year in high school. After he had graduated, he was two years ahead, he came to me to develop his first couple of screenplays because he remembered the short stories that I had written in school. He remembered the acting that I did in school. I was always in the school theater, because there were lots of girls and there was no homework. Ultimately, I graduated high school. I went to Australia for a year. I worked at a boarding school which essentially meant I worked about 11 hours a week and drank a lot of beer. When I came back I went to work for a detective agency in new jersey that belonged to my uncle. I got very interested in law enforcement. Throughout that I was reconnecting with Bryan we wrote a screenplay over the phone together. I applied to the New York Police Department with a friend of mine who I'd grown up with. I had been accepted into the Academy and was about to go. Bryan called me. He had made a short film with Ethan, and Ethan had then suddenly been in Dead Poets Society. The short film got a lot of attention. Bryan called and said I have an opportunity to make a feature film for 250 [thousand] dollars and would you write the screenplay? I said sure, and he said great, I need it in two weeks. I learned how to type. That was the first time I actually ever typed a screenplay. It was only the second screenplay I wrote. I put it in the mail shipped it to California, Got my car and drove to California after it. Three months after I arrived in Los Angeles we were we were in pre-production on on our first feature film [Public Access]. That's how I got into screenwriting. You'll notice there's a theme running throughout this -- it was just kind of like I have this aspiration, I'm going to follow other interests and keep my hand in it at all times.
CL: There is a common sort of edict that you often hear, that you must you must have at least ten screenplays under your belt before you can be a screenwriter. But that doesn't seem to be true.
CM: Here's how you become a screenwriter. Get yourself a pencil and a piece of paper. You don't need a computer, you don't need final draft. Write interior [INT.], then choose any location you want, and then decide whether it's night or day. You're a screenwriter. There's no such thing as an aspiring screenwriter or an aspiring filmmaker. You're either creating or you're not creating. I'm making two Mission Impossible movies and I'm producing Top Gun [part II]. I haven't made it, I'm making it. I'm in the process of of getting where I still dream of being. You will be too. Everybody thinks there is a destination. There's not. There's a journey and you start the journey. I hate to say it the beginning of that journey is steeped in failure. If you think that you're a failure as a writer because you're failing, You're doing it wrong. The whole idea is you're supposed to be failing. You're supposed to be learning from your mistakes. You're supposed to be going through a process of trial and error. Trial by fire – the strongest steel goes through the hottest fire. Everybody is so consumed with getting to a place of success. As we talked about earlier, if you think money is success, let me tell you money can turn into failure faster than anything. If you think a hit movie is a success, I had as good an experience you can on my second feature film. My first sole writing credit and won an Academy Award. It didn't solve any problems for me. It created a lot more problems than it solved. The night I won that award was not a happy evening. Bryan and I weren't speaking to each other. I was in a miserable relationship. And more importantly, I didn't know what my next job was. That's not the case when I came up with The Usual Suspects. I was working in a copy room in a law firm in downtown Los Angeles. I was making a couple of bucks an hour, I was broke. I was miserable but I had an idea that I knew was a great idea. I had to compare the two experiences. The experience of winning an Academy Award for The Usual Suspects or coming up with the idea. I'll trade coming up with the idea every time. That's where you are now and you and it doesn't look like that because you're in it. You're not looking back on it. Just keep going, just keep doing what you're doing. Not everybody's gonna make it. Not everybody has the many, many, many components that come together. Not everybody learns. That's really the thing. It's not about whether or not you have talent. It's whether or not you learn. I'm here to tell you, I work with some very highly successful people in the business. They don't learn either. They don't learn no matter how many times you teach them. That's what this process is. It is a process of learning. It's a process of growing. It's a process wherein you you cannot grow without failure. And you need to learn to accept failure like everything else.
CL: The comments here - people are really blown away by this because this is you know this is a philosophy. I'm learning more about attitude and importance of that more so than almost anything else. I mean that really seems to be what it is that you're saying here.
CM: We choose words. I mean, look at everything that's going on in the world right now. We choose words without agreeing upon what the definition of those words really are. So you and I can be arguing about something without ever having sat down to talk about what the definition of that word is that are we even arguing about. If you and I sat down and had an argument about success and failure for an hour without ever without either of us ever saying "well, what is success? what is failure?" The fact that success and failure are interchangeable - one can very quickly turn into the other without you having even realized it. When Tom Cruise broke his ankle on Fallout, I knew that that was actually a hugely beneficial thing. When Mission Impossible shut down in Venice two days before we started shooting and they evacuated the city, I was relieved. I knew that that was a beneficial thing. Yes there were a lot of really catastrophic things that happened as a result of it, there were all things beyond my control. Suddenly things that were not in my control were in my control again. I could affect change, I could save jobs, I could do things, and keep people working, and fix other projects that needed fixing. As opposed to sitting there saying but now my life is on hold, my dream of what I'm gonna do after Mission Impossible is gonna happen two years later than, not in control of those things. I'm only in control of the things that I'm in control of that are right in front of me. When you start to look at success and failure as interchangeable ideas, you relax into life a lot more. If you need that fear, if you need the fear of failure to drive you, go for it. That's great. I get plenty of that anyway. I don't need to go looking for it. I get the fear of failure when I don't have a screenplay and I'm on my way to work and I know I don't have the pages today. If I don't come up with to something right now the whole movie stops and I'm going to lose my job. That's where my feeling fear of failure comes in. I don't worry any more how will I be regarded as a director. What kind of films will they let me make? What awards will I win? What are the critics going to think? None of those matter because in 10 years they'll change anyway. Tell me what won the Academy Award two years ago, tell me what won the Academy Award five years ago, the best picture, tell me what movie is your favorite movie, tell me your top three favorite movies, tell me the movie that makes you cry every time you watch it, and tell me if those if those movies are really the same. That's the world I'm interested in.
CL: Here's a question from MG. He's asking is there more less a similar level of pressure working on a big franchise with a huge star where the audience is already in place versus working on an original film where the story has to find and build its own audience?
CM: There is no difference in the amount of pressure on a 5 million movie like The Usual Suspects or a 180 million dollar movie like Mission Impossible. The pressure comes from different places. The pressure has different demands. For all of the luxuries that a huge budget like Mission Impossible affords you, it also has gigantic responsibilities. For all the luxuries that you don't have on a movie like The Usual Suspects, and how difficult that makes every day, and how you have to shoot for 24 hours a day just to finish your film, the burden at the box office is slightly different. No one can claim that their movie was the most difficult movie ever made. No one can say that the making of my movie was more difficult than the making of somebody else's. You can say I didn't give a damn and I chose not to try, and I didn't let the pressure bother me. But the consequences are very much the same. The Way of the Gun cost eight and a half million dollars. And it demolished my career. It demolished my career for for years and took me a long, long time to to build back. If somebody handed me that again tomorrow and said make a feature film for that amount of money, those are muscles I have not exercised in 20 years. I'd be terrified. I would be terrified. I'm much more much more frightened of that than strapping Tom Cruise to the side of an airplane. especially because I'm inside the plane, I'm not outside.
CL: Do you regret making The Way of the Gun or do you feel like it was part of your journey?
CM: It's part of my journey. For years I saw it as a bone-crushing failure. I now look at that film as a success. It's a success by that definition. The people I made the movie for discovered it they just didn't discover it on opening weekend. If I had set out to make that movie with no objective as to what that movie was going to get me down the road, if I just made that movie to make it for whomever it was intended for, that film would have been a success by our definition. That film was only a failure because I expected things of it that I actually didn't work to achieve. That it's absolutely no different than just throwing a dart at a map. I was making a movie and hoping it would be a hit so that I could parlay it into another hit. There's actually a way to go about making movies in such a way that they are. You can't guarantee a hit but … you know Roger Corman guaranteed that you can make movies without losing money. You just have to be realistic with yourself about what your ambitions are, what your budget is, who your audience is, and frugally in the in those terms. We're taught by the culture what success is by what a successful filmmaker is, by what an auteur is, by what the visionary is. So much hype is heaped on top of directors and writers and actors, and everybody thinks that the goal. That's not the goal, that's a byproduct. It's a byproduct of production. Success is a byproduct. Happiness is a byproduct of production. Instead of pursuing those things, just produce. And some of those things will come. I'm not guaranteeing all of them but some of them will. More importantly, you'll be producing.
CL: Someone here asked what advice do you have for write new writers writing action?
CM: Yes very good question. Most importantly, clarity, geography, and story – those are your big three banners you put at the top. I'm not interested in spectacle. I'm gonna come up with a big trailer idea. Those things tend to take care of themselves. When you come up with a basic concept for an action sequence, tell the story well. Write action sequences. Stories in and of themselves are character journeys. By the way, another word that we talk about and don't define, "story." What is story? - in a way that we can work with it, in a way that everybody understands what we're talking about. Because when I say plot you guys might think one thing and I think another. When we say tone you may think one thing, I think another. We talk about story -- story is an emotional journey, that's all. You're taking the audience on an emotional journey. If you want to really break it down to something, a version of story, and I'm not saying mine's right or wrong - it's what I work with, story is a series of emotional impulses designed to separate the audience from their conscious reality. What I'm trying to do is not through scenes, lines, musical notes, words - it's through impulses. instantaneous impulse-by impulse, shot-by-shot, frame-by-frame. I'm trying to involve you in my reality, and separate you from yours. I do that through engagement. By keeping you engaged by, keeping you engrossed, and by keeping you listening to what's happening in my story, and wondering what's happening next in my story, you're not thinking about yours. That's what I talk about when I talk about story. That's what I talk about when I talk about an action scene. I'm not sitting there describing this amazing shot. It's this incredible thing that's going to look great in a trailer. I'm telling a story the same way. I'm writing my screenplay the same way. I'm telling a joke at a dinner table - and if you can tell a joke you can write a screenplay. Screenwriters hate it when I say that but that's the truth. I mean screenwriting is just a very sophisticated form of setup and payoff. Telling a joke is the same kind of storytelling.
CL: jHw is the World War II bomber movie coming along? Will we get to see that in the near future? Can you tell us more about it?
CM: That movie is called The Last Mission. I still control the rights to the book. I still have the screenplay. Very recently a producer called me and asked me to read it. He said "can I show it to a production company"? I said "no". he said "why not?" Following in my philosophy, I said because here's what happens: when you do that the production company will read the script they will take three weeks to call and pass on the script, and they'll pass for a reason like well we're already working on a World War II movie or well we don't want to make a World War II movie. Those were things that were evident before they ever read the screenplay. When somebody wants to make a screenplay about World War II B-29 bombers in the Pacific, I've got the script. So you go find the people that want to make that movie and then I'll come in and solve their problem. I'm never going to send a script to them and give them the freedom to read my script and to to get a look at what they were never going to buy. That has become my philosophy. Of course, what that does is it creates an appetite for the thing that you will not show. I did an interview with Empire magazine for the Jack Reacher movie that came out in 2012. We did a we did a spoiler special on Jack Reacher. In it I talked about a project that Tom Cruise and I are talking about doing post Mission Impossible, which is a much grittier R-rated film. It's a return to something a lot edgier for tom, that tom has completely embraced. I didn't say what the movie was but within this interview I talked about it. A company that had caused me a great deal of trouble on another project, I don't need to go into it all, called immediately and said "hey, is this thing real? Because we're really interested." They didn't even need to know what it was they just knew that Tom Cruise was attached to this movie. It was a smaller movie it was rated R. We said "well, when when we're ready we'll call you". It's not to say that we are all in that position, it's not to say that we have the luxury of doing that, but it is it is a way of looking at the people that you're handing your script to, and asking yourself what are they really doing? It's very rare that people are looking for raw material to turn into a movie. What they're looking for is to attach themselves to movies that other people are making. That's why I'm talking to you. Keep writing your screenplay, keep trying to sell your screenplay, but remember that when people are reading your screenplay they're reading your writing. What you're really selling is not the screenplay it's selling you, it's selling your skills as a writer. It's telling them that you have skills that they need because they are always looking for writers that they can rip off and get those writers to write their other movies for them. Instead of looking at that as something to be exploited, you're looking at that as an opportunity to exploit. That's your way in, and the only way you hurt yourself in those things is when you make deals you can't get out of. You get emotionally attached to the work that you're doing, instead of getting emotionally attached to how well you're doing the work. That's what you need to focus on.
CL: As we wrap this up, are there questions that you wish that we had asked you? Are there things that people don't ask you that you feel we should be asking you?
CM: The only other thing I'll talk about, we touched on it early on when we were talking about dialogue, my suspicion of dialogue. Another thing is music, the way that I deal with music and film, how I work with a composer. I'm talking about this because right now we're in the process of mixing a movie, and a lot of what we're doing is mixing the music. What I've learned to do probably really only in the last couple films is to regard music and dialogue as very much one in the same. Dialogue is just as musical as as music is a language. By thinking of dialogue in musical terms, thinking of dialogue in terms of something that that conveys an emotion, rather than information, it has changed the way that I write scenes. When I find myself writing something that is purely informational, if I can't inject it with something like conflict, humor, tension, suspense, drama, especially conflict, then I know that what I'm doing is I'm writing information. Information is the death of emotion. It was the biggest lesson I learned between Rogue Nation and Fallout was how to articulate that. Somebody asked me about writing exposition and what was the secret to writing exposition. Without thinking, I said that "information is the death of emotion". Think about your dialogue as a delivery device for emotion. There's nothing less emotional than watching a character experience an emotion. What you want is the audience is experiencing an emotion through that character. That really changed the way that I wrote dialogue, the way that I wrote exposition. It also changed the way I frame shots. It's the other thing I want you thinking of when you go out with your phone after this and you're playing with lens, light, and location. Just be asking yourself is the frame that I'm setting is this pure information? Or is this emotion? You can take a picture of anything and it's just a thing. If you look through all the photos in your in your phone right now. unless you're somebody who's really enthusiastic about photography, most of us take pictures, and I'm just guilty of it as anybody, we take pictures that are not actually photographs. they're bookmarks. They're things that are meant to remind us of things that were important to us. Whether your dog or something you care about. We all take pictures of ourselves on our phones. Now very few of us actually stopped to take to consider what the emotional effect of the photograph that we're taking would have on others. When you're writing dialogue, when you're thinking about music and you're thinking about framing your shot, I want you to think about how it feels. Not what it means, but what it feels. remember the most important thing is what you mean doesn't matter in the least. The only thing that matters is what your audience feels. The sooner you start to connect empathetically and emotionally to your audience, the sooner you will be communicating with them. The same way that you'll be communicating with the camera, and the same way that you'll be communicating with the page. I think that's everything I could possibly impart.
Ramesh: I have one I have one other quick question someone asked, because this pops up a lot in discussion. How do you process notes during development?
CM: Here is the thing. I'll tell you a story. I got into a debate on social media because I said there's no such thing as a bad note. There are only bad examples. If somebody knew how to write a screenplay they wouldn't give you bad notes. The truth of the matter is every note is the same thing. It's whoever that's giving you the note, a person who can't write, saying help me to like your movie. Help me to be more engaged with your story. Of course when they give you a suggestion, they're not writers so their suggestions are patently awful most of the time. That's very frustrating because we listen to that and think they're making me write this crap. What I look at the emotion behind the note. I look at what emotion that note is searching for and I find a way to do it on my terms, instead of the terms that they are suggesting in the note. Sometimes you're just going to get a note from the head of the studio saying I want it to be like this. That's horrible and it's miserable and you got to go through with it most of the times. When you think of it in terms of take that idea and find a way to make it your own, you come up with creative solutions. When I said this on social media this guy said that "I got a really stupid note and it's undeniably the dumbest note anybody's ever given me." I said okay what was your note? He was doing a remake of Walking Tall. Walking Tall, for those of you who don't know the movie is the seventies exploitation/vigilante movie about a sheriff named Bufort Pusser who very famously had this 2x4 that he would go around beating the crap out of people with. It was this visceral fun sort of Dirty Hairy movie with a guy beating the crap out of people with a 2x4. It was a little bit of a revenge story. They killed his wife, I think. In the story there was some violence that he was responding to. He was working on the remake to Walking Tall and this executive gave him the dumbest note he'd ever received, which is he wanted him to make the 2x4 a character in the story. I said that's an excellent note. He said that's the dumbest note imaginable, because in his mind he saw Bobby the talking 2x4 that was a character in the story that spoke to Buford. I said Bufort and his wife are building a house when the villains of the movie come to kill Buford. In the process they fail to kill Buford but they burn his house to the ground and in so doing his wife is killed. Buford ends up in the hospital. When he gets out of the hospital the first thing he does is he goes to the wreckage of his burned home that was going to be where he spent the rest of his life with his wife. He pulls a 2x4 out from one of the unfinished walls with nails sticking out of it and he spends the rest of the movie beating the crap out of the people with that 2x4. Now don't you think every time you look at that 2x4 it doesn't have some meaning? Don't you think that 2x4 becomes his sidekick in the movie? He says "yeah I got to admit that's actually good." that is how you take notes. That is how you respond to a note. You look at the note and take the note in a way that makes me proud, and it fits into my storytelling philosophy. I don't have to take the note literally. Take it figuratively., take it emotionally, make it character, make it story, never make it plot. Sometimes the worst idea ever turns in to something that's pretty effective. Surprisingly, Tom Cruise wanted to take off Rebecca Ferguson's shoes. I thought that was a dumbest idea I'd ever heard and I didn't have time to deal with it. All anybody talked about after that movie came out is we love the shoes the shoes are so great. He [Tom Cruise] knows something - the truth of the matter is he understood that. What Tom said was he said when you're on a date with somebody and you've been out to a formal occasion and at the end of the night your date always takes off her shoes. She ends up carrying her shoes. She's gonna have to jump off the roof of a building. Do you really think she wants to be wearing high heel shoes when she does it? It was character, it had a flare, it had an emotion, and it was a connection between those two people in the midst of this big action scene. The shoes taught me everything. I just learned to go with it. Again, always find a way find a way to turn it into the 2x4.
CL: Ramesh, are there any other brilliant questions?
Ramesh: There was one - should new writers write for budget? Should they keep that in mind? If they want to write a huge sci-fi pic or if they want to write a huge action film should they go ahead and do that?
CM: No. If somebody tells you to write for a budget, sure and that's going to come soon enough. Write for story. right for story and character. Know write for your voice. Don't write for spectacle. Don't write for flavor of the moment, trends, whatever. Trend is happening now. by the time somebody reads your script it won't be the trend anymore. It'll be old hat you'll be accused of ripping everybody off. Just write just write for your voice and tell a story. Story and character.
CL: How do you define voice?
CM: I wish I could. You're gonna find it. Your voice is in you. What I'm talking about is you're looking for ways to tell your story the way you want to tell it. You will find your voice. it's in you. story is in you. For the directors who are out there, your style as a director is in you. You don't need to follow the style of another director. You don't need to avoid the style of another director. You don't need to say "I don't want to do that because this other director is doing it". You can't be like another director, no matter how hard you try. You can be kind of like, you can resemble but it's always going to have your DNA. The same way that you can't not be like certain directors. People enough people accuse me of ripping off enough people, and they've never caught me for who I'm really ripping off. Because the people I'm stealing from, they're they're not filmmakers like I am. My DNA affects what I did and it's that much different. I'm similar to other filmmakers because I have similar tastes and I have similar ideas, not because I'm trying to ape somebody. All you need to focus on is connecting with the ball. The hardest thing you can do swinging a [bat in] baseball, swinging a golf club, the hardest thing you can do is connect with the ball. So many complicated pieces that go into swinging a a baseball bat, or a golf club, or a tennis racket, and connecting perfectly with the ball. Don't worry about where the ball is going. You focus on execution and not on results and you'll find your voice.
CL: Well I cannot thank you enough for taking all of this time to speak to our constituents here on The Inside Pitch. Let's all in some silent way sending out good vibes to Christopher McQuarrie for taking the time out today. So thank you. Thank everybody for tuning in. We really appreciate Chris. Again, thank you so so much.
CM: My pleasure.
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