McQuarrie Talks Keeping Mission: Impossible Fresh

How do you keep a series that has been going as long as Mission: Impossible fresh and not become tiresome or bloated?  Up until now the movies have been surprisingly decent.  But what about the sixth movie? Speaking with Slashfilm, director Christopher McQuarrie says he wants to take the sequel in a different direction and push into new territory:

“My desire as a filmmaker is to always be a better filmmaker than I was on the previous film. I’m not a filmmaker interested in stasis. I really want to grow and push myself. I think if you look at the three films I’ve done — from The Way of the Gun to Jack Reacher to Mission: Impossible – I think it’s very clear there’s a distinct voice that runs through them, and they’re each sort of expanding, in terms of the storytelling and use of technology. I’m learning on each movie the mysteries of this technical craft or that technical craft. I had things I specifically learned from this movie I want to apply to the next. I gotta imagine it’ll look different. Let’s put it this way: if it looks the same, I’ll be disappointed.”

The cool thing is that it doesn’t necessarily mean the next movie will get crazier and bigger. In fact, McQuarrie came to realise that one of the best approaches to these kinds of films is to keep it as streamlined as possible:

“I think the biggest thing I learned is you don’t always need as much as you think you do. The motorcycle sequence was originally so much bigger, so much longer, and so much more involved. There were so many action sequences in the movie. You can make a bigger movie with less, and I’m determined to do something leaner, less heavily reliant on plot, and a little stripped down.”

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation was reviewed on this site, the verdict can be read here.