“Mission: Impossible” director Christopher McQuarrie is urging fans not to believe everything you read about Tom Cruise.
McQuarrie, who has directed the franchise films since 2015’s “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”, would neither confirm nor deny the rumours of Cruise bowing out of the movies after the upcoming “Dead Reckoning – Part 1” and “Dead Reckoning – Part 2”.
Sources previously told Variety that the flicks, expected to be released in 2023 and 2024, will act as “a sendoff for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character.”
During an interview on the “Light the Fuse” podcast, McQuarrie insisted, “Let me tell you, I’ve been working with Tom Cruise for 15 years and I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been standing next to the man, witnessed an event and then read about it in the trades the next day and none of what they describe is actually true,” Variety reported.
McQuarrie gave the following example: “We were in Birmingham shooting a scene between Tom and Haley [Atwell]. The next day I read an article in the paper that said Tom and four other guests went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant. I read that Tom insisted on sitting at a table not in a private room but in the main restaurant with the other diners and that Tom ordered three orders of chicken masala because he liked it so much.”
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“I called Tom the next day and said, ‘There’s something weird about this article. It’s 100 per cent factually correct!’” McQuarrie added. “That’s the first time I’ve read an article in which everything happened exactly as written.”
The movie-maker went on, “I read that ‘Mission’ was going to be shot concurrently and then we decided not to do that.
“When you read articles in the trades, just put the imaginary word in front of the headline: ‘The Agenda Is…’ When you read ‘anonymous sources’ or ‘sources close to the production say,’ that’s somebody putting it out there for a specific reason.
“That’s someone wanting others to think that for a specific reason, and you can never know for sure what those reasons are. You learn to ignore it and laugh at it. In today’s world, you wait 17 minutes and another news cycle will sweep it away.”
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McQuarrie also confirmed he was working on a new movie with Cruise, which he described as even “gnarlier” than the “Mission: Impossible” films.
“It’s kind of under wraps,” McQuarrie explained. “It has neither a fuse nor a fuselage. Oh, that’s not true… It does have some fuselages. It’s something we’ve talked about for a really long time.
“It’s way outside of what you’re used to seeing Tom do. It’s the kind of stuff I really love. It’s a little bit more in my wheelhouse. And yet it takes everything we’ve learned on this journey, which is making movies more and more about emotion and real emotional experiences.”
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1” is expected to be released in theatres on July 14, 2023, before “Dead Reckoning 2” launches on June 28, 2024.
