MASTERS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

To rejuvenate the Mission: Impossible franchise, Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise pushed stunt filmmaking to places it had never gone before. Here, McQuarrie spills the secrets of how they keep doing it.

- BY ZACH BARON

WHEN IT COMES time to start a new Mission: Impossible movie, the first thing that happens is Tom Cruise, the star of the franchise, and Christopher McQuarrie, its longtime writer-director, sit down together and they ask each other: What do you want to do? The answer is inevitably: something difficult and dangerous.

Years ago, when Cruise and McQuarrie were beginning to sketch out the plot of 2018's Mission: Impossible—Fallout, Cruise proposed a helicopter chase: his character in the films, Ethan Hunt, pursuing a bad guy, played by Henry Cavill, while both of them were aloft. As a rule, in Mission: Impossible, stunts are real: meaning they are performed by the actual actors involved, at least when possible, and when they are being done by Tom Cruise, that means all the time. “He's the only actor in the world who is actually going to do everything,” Fraser Taggart, the series’s director of photography, told me.

In the Mission: Impossible franchise alone, Cruise has climbed the shiny glass sides of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest build-ing; hung from the side of an A400 military transport plane as it took off; and ridden an actual motorcycle off the edge of an actual Norwegian cliff. He has a commercial pilot license. He is one of 36 people in history to be named an honorary US naval aviator. He can parachute and BASE jump and free dive. But one issue with this particular idea for Fallout was that Cruise, at the time, was not trained as a helicopter pilot. So Cruise and McQuarrie made inquiries, and they were told that at eight hours a day, seven days a week, it would take three months to get Cruise up to speed. Cruise asked: What about the other 16 hours in a day? A month and a half later, he was ready to fly.