Happy Sad Confused - Christopher McQuarrie

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

It may or may not be the FINAL reckoning for the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise but writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is here to talk about the unusual way they make these films, plus give some teases about the future of TOP GUN and DAYS OF THUNDER, and a glimpse at the Superman sequel he wanted to do. UPCOMING EVENTS 28 YEARS LATER Q&A with Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, & Danny Boyle 6/1 in NY -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠tickets here⁠⁠⁠⁠ Gary Oldman in LA 6/3 -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tickets here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Happy Sad Confused patreon here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! We've got discount codes to live events, merch, early access, exclusive episodes, video versions of the podcast, and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There you are, pushing your newborn baby in a stroller through the park. The first time out of the house in weeks. You have your Starbucks, venty, because, you know, sleep deprivation. You meet your best friend. She asks you how it's going. You immediately begin to laugh. Then cry. Then laugh cry? That's totally normal, right? She smiles. You hug. There's no one else you'd rather share this with.

You know, three and a half hour sleep is more than enough. Starbucks, it's never just coffee. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days, delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groom lawn delivered, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no, but a banana, that's a yes. A nice tan, sorry, nope. But a box fan, happily yes.

A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. Is Top Gun 3 harder to crack in some ways than Top Gun Maverick? No, it's already in the bag. You've cracked it? Yeah, I already know what it is.

Easy. Yeah, no, wasn't hard. I thought it would be. Yeah, I thought it would be. And I go, and that's a good place to go from as you walk into the room going, come on, what are we going to do? And Aaron Kruger pitched something. And I went, actually. and we had one conversation about it

and the framework is there. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins now. Hey guys, it's Josh here with another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused, and yes, you knew I was going to have to do something special for Mission Impossible. It's the final reckoning after all.

Well, it's the final reckoning on the screen, but it is the first reckoning between me and Christopher McQuarrie, the amazing filmmaker behind the last four Mission Impossible movies. He is the main event on Happy, Say I Confused today. Some light spoilers, that's why I held it to today. This is a treat of a filmmaker conversation. Okay, more on McHugh, as we call him in a second. Updates as always, June 1st, New York City.

Come on out, guys. And all this information is on our Patreon. on patreon.com slash happy, say I confused, discount codes, merch, all that cool stuff. Check it out if you can and support because it lets us do more stuff. Anyway, June 1st, Jody Comer, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Danny Boyle, all joining me live on stage. It's going to be a really fun night talking 28 years later, very anticipated, long in the making sequel. Danny Boyle was back. I am beyond excited for this one.

So a link is in the show notes for tickets. And then Los Angeles, as I've been saying, come on out, L.A. I don't get out there that often for live events like this. This is your chance to see me do my thing with no less than Gary Oldman, living legend, talking slow horses, the Dark Night trilogy, Harry Potter, true romance. I'm going to talk as much as I can about his entire career because this dude, call him a dude, this legend, this unparalleled performer has done it all. And I have such reverence for him. He's a sweet guy. He's done the pot a couple times. It's going to be last June 3rd. Again, information is in the show notes. Okay.

Let's talk Mission Impossible for a second. I've been doing a lot for this one. I was on the carpet for the New York premiere. Check out clips with me and Tom Cruise and the cast from that one on my Instagram page, on MTV's page. That was really fun, really cool. Always amazing to talk to Tom. And this is really, I love these people. filmmaker conversations. And McHugh is so well spoken. Um, if you know him and you probably do if

you listen or watch this podcast, he's had quite the journey as a filmmaker. Way back when he was quite a young man, he won an Academy Award for writing the usual suspects. And then kind of found himself, not kind of, he did find himself in director jail, directed a movie called Way of the Gun. Pretty good movie, but did not click. And kind of had to claw his way back. And through his collaboration, with Tom Cruise on Valky eventually directing Reacher, Jack Reacher, that film, and then kind of being given the reins to the mission movies

has really risen to the heights now of Blockbuster filmmaking. What they do in these movies is without compare, I think it's fair to say, the practical stunts, the locations, the scale, the way they do it. And McHugh is very smart and cool about, I don't know, opening up about the process,

the very unusual process by which they make these Mission Impossible movies. There's a lot in this conversation. It's a deep dive into mission, their process, his collaborations with Tom, lots of cool stuff about upcoming films they're working on. Top Guns sequel, a musical,

Les Grossman, a Days of Thunder sequel. All of that is in this conversation. And stay tuned to the end because we do talk about the Superman movie that Christopher Macquarie was going to do with Henry Cavill some really cool stuff in there. Okay, so can you tell I'm excited? I'm excited.

Enjoy this conversation a long time coming with Christopher Macquarie, aka McHugh, and check out Mission Impossible, the final reckoning. And like I said, sorry, one more thing.

There are some light spoilers. It's not like we go deep, deep into spoilers, but this conversation is best watched or listened to after you've seen the film. There you go. All right, enjoy my chat. Christopher Macquarie, McHugh, we're doing it. It's happening. We're here. I've been chasing you for a while. It's been my own mission impossible to get you on the podcast. Can I just tell you it's nice to be chased? Thank you for submitting to the chase. Congratulations, man. We were at the New York premiere last night. Another insane accomplishment. I hope you're starting to exhale. I know it's pressure, but it's good pressure. Yeah, the exhale comes from the fact that when we finished Top Gun, we were.

when we were promoting Top Gun, we had already started shooting Dead Reckoning. When we were promoting Dead Reckoning, we were already shooting Final Reckoning. So you didn't get the same feeling that you do on this one where you don't have to be at work on Monday. Dead Reckoning Part 3? Wait, no, no, we don't actually have to do that. It's not hanging over your head like this movie was last time. Talk to me a little bit about, look, I've seen you in these giant contexts like, you know, Spanish steps, New York premieres, you're at Cannes, you have had such the journey as a filmmaker. You were in director jail.

You were going to quit the business. You were done. Do you take stock in those moments where you are, it doesn't get bigger than the stages you're on now to know where you came from? Oh, God, yeah. There was a moment on this movie in particular. I was on the, on this deck looking up at a one-thousand, 10,000-ton steel, 360-degree rotating,

fully submersible gimbal, over an 8.5 million-liter tank, all of which had been scratch built for this purpose, and stepped outside of my body and looked back at myself and said, what are you doing here? How did you end up here? It's not anything you set out to do. It's a very valuable lesson I learned when I was in director jail. What ultimately led to getting out of it

was that I stopped trying to control the outcome. I had a picture in my mind of the kind of movies I wanted to make, the kind of career I wanted to have, and nothing was happening. As soon as I stopped focusing on execution and not result, you know, as a friend of mine, explained it to me in a very, in a golf analogy, you focus on your swing and not where the ball is going. Right.

You are constantly surprised at where you end up. That, even that's great because that really glies into kind of what I want to talk to you a lot about, which is the, when we've talked a little bit about this, the very unusual process that you guys have established over the course of these four films. And it's almost this like embrace the chaos, find the film, see what it's going to be, tell you what it's going to be yeah in a way yeah um that no one else has figured this out like and I don't know if you would even recommend other films do it the way you do it but somehow like why does this process without necessarily sometimes always a locked script where you're filming sequences before you even know where they are yeah why does it work for mission where all

these blockbusters collapse underneath we never stop we never give up we we we We are very honest with each other about what we're doing while we're doing it. You're constantly evaluating, you shoot a scene, you shoot a line of dialogue, you shoot one actor's coverage in a scene, and you step back from it, and you look at it and say, never mind what I meant to say, what did I actually say? Right. What did we communicate? And we either alter it to get the result we're after,

or we go with what is clearly more organic and working for the story. We don't write roles and then go looking for an actor to play that role. We cast actors and we tailor the role to them. And that's why when someone came up to me after watching one of the earlier cuts of the movie and said, God, everyone in the film is so perfectly cast, Well, yes, if you write a role specifically for that actor, then they will be perfectly cast every time. That's not something where we go in knowing what we want beyond knowing that we want to have affinity for that character. We want that character to have power.

We want that character to be likable, even if that character is unlikable. We want to like, not liking the character. And we're, the big stuff, the submarine and the aerial and all of that, the, we're very, very, very specific and very rigid in terms of our planning of those sequences and that and developing that technology. So the assets, the things that are really expensive are first the assets and then the time that it takes to shoot them. But you're malleable in where they even end up, correct me if I'm wrong. Some of your biggest sequences were intended at the beginning of one film and end up in the middle of another. Yes. That's just, I mean, it's insane to me.

It works. Yeah, you just can't panic. You have to be able to pivot and you have to know, how do you do it responsibly? You can't be cavalier about it. You can't. I know the outside impression must be that, oh, they just give them whatever they want, they do whatever they want. No. No.

And, you know, any more than, not that I am comparing myself to him as a filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, the way Stanley Kubrick had the control that he did is he was actually extremely frugal. He shot his movies quite cheaply. The myth becomes that, oh, he had this amazing deal and could do whatever he wanted. Stanley Kubrick understood that if you kept doing what you wanted and your movies didn't make money, You were not going to get money to make another movie, even if you were Stanley Kubrick. And I think what he wisely spent money on often was time. That is exactly right.

Stanley Kubrick understood how to save money everywhere else so that he could buy himself the time. What Tom and I recognize in our process is, the bigger the movie is, the more it has to make. And the more people it has to reach, the more universally accessible the movie must be, globally accessible the movie must be. However, we're also not compromising on the stuff that we consider to be the substance of the movie, which is where you're feeling the narrative tension in these movies. You're feeling the push and the pull between exposition and action, between emotion and spectacle, and how those things are fighting with each other. And that's,

And that's what leads to the kind of unique tone that this franchise has. And that conflict, that friction even applies to action versus exposition, dialogue versus silence. Yes. And it's so funny. This film, I mean, I've seen it twice, more striking than even all your others even, the extremes it goes in both ways. There's a lot of track to lay down. There's a lot of exposition.

You've got to do it. there's a ton of silence in this film. Yes. Like the most extensive, indulgent in the best possible way, silent sequences. And there is that, like, it's just fascinating to me, you as a screenwriter, that it seems like your heart is in the silence now. It really, my, my, uh, my relationship with dialogue has evolved 180 degrees from where I began, you know, starting with the usual suspects.

That is, that's a story about storytelling. It is all dialogue. And over time, I came to realize two things. One, that the style of filmmaking, particularly coming out of that era, there's a dialogue became synonymous with writing. Right. And that, that, this is how you prove I'm a good writer by, Yeah, exactly.

And I watch film geeks who are kind of dismissing things as this is the greatest thing ever because of this showy monologue. And the writing in this movie is, you know, I know people were very upset when Top Gun got nominated for screenplay because they just, they were just laughing at the kind of very obvious overt dialogue. Right. The dialogue to me in that movie is the most necessary and obligatory stuff imaginable to get the point across in as few words as possible for a global audience who's reading subtitles. Right. And the substance of the movie, for me, with very few exceptions, does not rest in the dialogue.

Same with these. If you look at Mission Impossible, most of the dialogue is exposition. Yeah. Very, very little of it is anything but it's a genre movie. It's a spy movie. It's very, very particular. By the way, same thing with James Bond. It's all exposition.

What I'm most proud of in this movie are the scenes in which they aren't exposition. Right. It's not just action. It's looks. It's emotional. Yes. It's composition and behavior. That is the end.

evolution of Rogue into Fallout, into Dead Reckoning, into this movie. And I'm just excited to now take everything I've learned from this franchise, unburdened by everything you must put in this franchise, to go and make, you know, my silent movie. I was literally just going to ask, have you and Tom discussed doing an actual silent movie, like whether it's like literally no dialogue or almost no dialogue? The script that I have that I brought to Tom at the, started this process. It was the movie I was going to go off and do before we did this.

And now Tom's attached to it. He has fewer than 500 words in the whole movie. Is this broadsword? He's a, he's a fairly stoic character. He says almost not. He's all through, it's all done through action, behavior. And the character with whom he has partnered in the movie has fewer words than he does. Fascinating. I always think back, I remember like the Coen Brothers were going to do in a completely silent movie at one point. I always wanted

to see that. So this is tickling my... It's very, very hard. It's really interesting. The, you know, audiences don't like exposition, and they're right not to. And there's an art to presenting exposition. You can hide vegetables in a lot of in a lot of sugary stuff. I just, for me, I just try to get through it as elegantly as I possibly can, and in a way

that you can absorb the information. Just because you brought a broadsword. Did I read, is Cavill attached to that or someone else? You're still looking. You read that. Okay, but we don't know officially. Don't believe anything you read about, about any of that stuff. That's just, I, I, my, yeah, my, the, the, the, the, the, my relationship with the world

of film speculation and and film expertise online. Yeah. I just warn everybody who speaks with any certainty about film when not working in film. You are immortalizing your presumptions. Yeah. Well, to believe what I read, you're making 10 movies with Tom next year. I mean, I know you're working on a lot. We're always working on.

Yeah. Yeah, we'll get to that. We're always working on something. We're working on something right now. So we talked about the set pieces. I'm curious, so where were they intended ever to be either part of Dead Reckoning Part 1 or other places in this film, the submarine sequence, and the biplane? No, they were always, the structure of this movie was fairly constant from going all the way back to Dead Reckoning. Once we knew we were opening Dead Reckoning with a submarine, we knew, and Eric and I knew very early.

on, that's where final reckoning was going to go. We were going to return to the wreck of that submarine. And then it just became a matter of, okay, now how do we do it in a way that it's something audiences haven't seen before? It's interesting because, like, you know, this obviously is very much linked with dead reckoning. Yet totally, it's a very different movie. It has a much, there's a weight of the past.

I mean, we've had weight on the past of fallout, et cetera. But this one even more so, it is, as you guys keep saying, it is a culmination. It has nods, overt, and subtle to the past seven films. Again, I'm just curious, like, the evolution, because, like, I don't know, Dead Reckoning had a positive response. It had some mixed response as well, too. The box office, I know, wasn't necessarily maybe what everyone would hoped for.

Is there a reaction to that that affected what this movie ended up being at all? Oh, yes, because, look, we take all that stuff very, very seriously. We, we, and I'm not one to sit there say, ah, the audience didn't get it. Right. These movies, you have to listen to the audience. That's it.

You have to, you work for them. And I said, okay, what didn't work for them and why? It would be very easy to say, oh, Barbenheimer, and just blame it on that. We did not factor that into our thinking. We looked at the film very, very critically and said, okay, where could we have gone better? Where could we have done better? How could it have been tighter? How could it have been simpler?

And it could have been at the expense of other things that were important to us. We then said, all right, let's try to make a shorter movie out of this one. And we pivoted and deconstructed the entire movie, and I built a non-linear version of this film and shot it to be non-linear in order to move certain critical scenes earlier in the story, particularly Mount Weather, the scene with Ethan and the president. Because that's really, that's where the journey, Ethan's journey kicks off. And it was very clear as soon as we assembled it did not work.

So Tom said, just make it linear. I made it linear, did not work. And when I made it linear, why it didn't work is there were, Every scene you put first was a scene where they were talking about the entity before you knew what the entity was. Which is why we then created that opening, that cold intro that just says, here it is. And that's the big lesson for Tom and I over and over and over again. There's just a point where you just have to say it. You just fucking tell them.

We can dance around this all day. I know. Let's just get it. Rip the band-aid and make it as entertaining. possible. Put it in Angela Bassett's mouth and it'll be good. That's it. And that's why the scene where he confronts the entity. Yeah. That scene contains within it everything I insisted could not be in the scene and contains nothing that Tom insisted must be in the scene. It's a rejection of everything we believed it could or could not be. And we did it two days before we locked

picture. We just said, here's just, just spell it out, just lay it all out. But I also, by then, where he's kept talking to the entity. He's talking to the entity. But I had also, by then, made a discovery because I thought it needed to be visual and was really fixated on the visual nature of it and was frustrated with the visual nature of it from what I had originally imagined it to be. I'm glad I didn't do what I imagined it to be because it just it's it wouldn't have been something uh it it would have been it would have been it would have been it just would have been it would have left less to your imagination yeah what I discovered was the the the essence of that the essence of that

sequence and what made it work was sound and the way my sound team had discovered a way to mix that voice particularly when you're sitting in a Dolby Atmos theater. Or when the movie comes to home media, to listen to that in a really good surround sound system, the entity really gets in your head, and it's very effective. That's one thing, the sound mix, the other is the music that Alfie and Max created two days before we left picture. It was really incredible. They came in at the last

minute with that cue that is totally different from everything else. When's the movie done? when it's about to come. And it's ready to come out. That's when you're done. I mean, you take what you can get. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. It's curious to me, like, his relationship with Gabriel, the back story of Ethan, that you kind of flash back to in Dead Reckoning, Part 1, Marie, the character of Marie. Yeah. It seems like, was there an intent to go back to that more? We did. We did. Look, everything in the movie that you have questions about, we shot the shit out of it. I'm sure. And because what matters to us, we hate exposition, but we don't avoid it. We shoot it and overshoot it. and over, over, over inform and over include, and then are constantly pulling it back.

How much do you need to know? And the truth of the matter was that flash to it at the beginning of the story coincides with a line of exposition that summarizes what that is. And I shot a backstory. I shot a sequence that told you a little bit more about their relationship. And the truth of the matter was that unless I made that movie,

it's always going to feel somewhat ambiguous and open-ended anyway, so we just said, screw it. The other thing was we knew, because of the strikes and everything else, we were that much farther away from Dead Reckoning. If it had come out the following summer, that would have been different. But there was so much distance on the movie,

it gave us the permission we needed to just let Dead Reckoning go and make this a standalone. I know you talked about when Dead Reckoning came out, the idea, among many ideas, to de-age Tom at one point. And you had mentioned, I don't know if it was flippantly or seriously, like, what if we get Julia Roberts and we de-age Julia Roberts and we have them in the 80s? Was that essentially the Marie character? Is that what you're saying about was kind of the idea? That was an early iteration of it. And what we ended up realizing was if you de-age those three people, if you took Esai and Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise and de-age them and put them all in the same scene

it would have been as expensive as the submarine it's so much money to do that de-aging correct when you have multiple characters in a shot as soon as I researched the technology I realized if you're going to do something like this it has to be awesome we've seen some masters try it and even they've had trouble with it so yes I get it and what I look at when it works, when it works, all I'm thinking is,

wow, this de-aging is really good. When you see a character that you've known for so long, be it Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell, Tom Cruise, and you see their younger self in a different context, on digital, not that like, you know, that's why the bit with the rabbit's foot, we shot it on film. We went back and shot it entirely up.

And we studied the, we studied the lighting and the camera work on that movie and did our best to recreate something that was integral to Mission 3. And that helps that when you're looking at the shots that we have of Tom from Mission 3, it doesn't feel out of place. It looks like Tom Cruise from that era. The film looks like Tom Cruise movies from that era. And that's why when we did originally have a very elaborate scene of Ethan's past, and we were doing all that research, the understanding was how do we do everything down to the grain of the film make this look like? Right. And so I realized, okay, that it would have been what was the mission impossible before mission impossible? If I'm shooting Ethan's past, if I'm shooting mission 0.5, it would have been 1980.

And that's how we found Julia Roberts as it, because she was just popping. And we thought it would have been Tony Scott's. I love it. Mission Impossible. The choice. I can see the movie. Yes. And having worked on Tupgun, learned a lot in terms of studying Tony Scott's photography and watching

Joe Kaczynski build upon that and remain Joe Kaczynski while making a- Top Gun movie, but I had a lot of time during that process to go, well, what if we were making the Tony Scott movie, how would you do it? And I, that would have been fun. I would have enjoyed doing that. So I went from making a 10-minute Tony Scott sequence to making, you know, probably 12 seconds of J.J. Abrams. I got you. When you, I know you're plugged in, you see what the fans are saying. When there was... I don't. Really? I haven't. I haven't. I Yeah, on this one, I have specifically avoided it. Well, let me ask you going back.

I mean, you must have been aware, I would think, when Ilsa dies in the last one, a lot of folks were like, she's not really dead. She's coming back. Did you ever consider, like, if that's kind of what they want to see? Do we, you know? It's the cost versus benefit. It's the death of essential. characters has followed Ethan throughout every one of these movies.

From the start. Yes. I don't think up until that point a character that resonated so deeply with the audience had died. And I know there were people who were dissatisfied with the way it happened, which is where I thought that that wouldn't motivate me to undo the one thing that gives Mission impossible teeth, which is death is permanent. Right.

One thing I wanted to bring up, and I hope you appreciate it in the spirit I bring it up, is that leaked audio from the making of dead reckoning part one, that like you never want somebody recording something illicitly, but I will say this. A lot of folks, we all already have respect for Tom, the kind of things he was saying there is who he is. Maybe not that, you know, that was an unusual tone for him. We were not used to hearing that. But he and you, safe to say, felt the weight of not just that film, but the industry.

The industry puts movies like Top Gun, like Mission Impossible, on their shoulders. Yes. Do you feel that? You talk about that with Tom? We consciously decided that. We agreed to that. Tom has asked all the time, why don't you do more movies like? Why don't you, you know? Right. You know. And Tom and. answered, quite frankly, at one point during all that, he's like, look, the industry needs

movies like this right now. We made the, these movies are very hard to make. They're enormously physically, emotionally, emotionally, and mentally taxing. Factor in a pandemic and two industry strikes. What should have been a two-and-a-half-year process for both movies stretched on to seven years. I didn't see my family for half of that time. That, put an enormous strain on all of us. We're, you know, you don't see me driving around in a gold-plated Lamborghini. We, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, when you make a movie, you don't get paid overtime. Right.

When you, when the movie goes, when the movie goes as long as this one did, we made an agreement very early on that Top Gun Maverick and these two Mission Impossible movies were going to be movies that did everything they could to preserve. a kind of filmmaking, a kind of storytelling, and a film-going experience during a time when I really feel the industry is, I don't want to say imploding, but certainly receding. And I feel there's a venue now with streaming wherein you can abdicate certain burdens. I choose my words very carefully, it's not a void. It is to abdicate those burdens. You're, yes, making a movie that has to compete on its opening weekend sucks. That's also an important part of why a movie has the quality that it does and lasts as long

as it does. You've got to fight for those eyeballs. You don't have to do that in streaming. You don't have to do that. The metric by which they measure success on that is completely different and has nothing to do with an opening weekend. I don't begrudge that.

I think that's great. Just know that when you're doing that, you're not paying into the system. You're not paying into theatrical. You're getting to make the kind of movie you want to make and the way you want to make it. And that's great. That doesn't, that doesn't, that removes essential

element, an essential element, from the creative process, which is the audience. They are your collaborators, whether you like it or not. You work for them, whether you like it or not. You never reach a place in your career. Tom Cruise, 40 years in this business, as successful as any actor has ever been, should be in a position where he can do creatively whatever he wants and can and will not. Some crews subscribe to the fact that we work for the audience, and our job is to get them to come into theaters.

It's why we test our movies, which a lot of people think is sacrilegious on a cop-out. And I would say the bigger cop-out is not testing your movie. You don't have to change your movie, but don't you want to know? Right. Don't you want to know how your movie is going to be received? At least the movie that's intended to appeal to as many human beings as possible. Yes. And test audiences have told us many things where we've said, thank you now.

Right. And there are other things that test audiences show us and we say, thank God, because I couldn't see the forest for the trees. They're a very important collaborator, and ultimately they are the people who reward us and allow us to go on. They're also the people you have to dynamite out of their homes to come to a movie theater. And we believe in this medium. That to us, the communal experience and the love of sitting in a theater with 500 people. you will never get the cheers that you got in Top Gun Maverick

or in E.T. at home, you just, you won't. You won't have the same feelings. Watching the Godfather on the big screen, which I didn't see on the big screen until I was in my 40s, but watching that with an audience and seeing the reaction to certain scenes that to me at home were, ha, that's clever. And feeling it actually play like a big summer tent bowl movie.

Watching John Frankenheimer's The Train recently at BFI and seeing it play as well as any summer blockbuster the way they got the humor and the way they felt the triumph of those characters and the devastation they felt at the loss of others. You only get that in a theater. The emotional experience is muted at home. It's something you can never truly replicate. Tom and I devoted are quite literally devoted our lives to it and he quite literally risks is there for it. truly while we're making these movies i'll tell you something else about that recording with enough distance to get away from it um just to give you a sense of reality when you heard it and you read the the associating copy close your eyes and and show me how you picture the event oh interesting

yeah just what do you picture what do you what do you imagine the event being i mean these obviously on set, surrounded by a dozen actors, extras, you, and a couple folks were getting too close to each other. How many people total would you say was that based on your mental picture? It's a trap. No, no, it's not a trap. It's quite literally what impression did it give you? There's no right or wrong answer.

Yeah, I was like a dozen, 20, something like that, yeah. Yeah. There were seven people in that conversation, and two of them were me and Tom. Yeah. And it was not in front of the crew. That's how it was reported. Got it. And two of the people there were people who had specifically been tasked with the health

and safety of our crew and had repeatedly not lived up to that responsibility. Not lived up to that responsibility. What you're also not hearing is the 30 minutes of audio that came before it that led to that. when the number of times of trying to get one's point across is not finally getting across. The breaking point was reached, yeah. So context is very, very important, and it's not something you can ever add to something in the age of the internet in real time. But the truth of the matter was there was a much greater context to that, and now factor into it the fact that the person who is raising his voice

is quite literally going to work every day and risking him. risking his life for a very expressed purpose of keeping the industry alive. That was not a guy pissed off because his latte was cold. Right. Or even that seems in my eye line, which is justifiable. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Other outspers you've heard, which, by the way, you listen to those things out of context

and think, oh my God, you make one movie and you will totally understand. Yeah, no, I get it. When you understand the pressure, the pain, the risk, the time, and the responsibility. And add COVID and everything going on. You add COVID and everything else going on. Yeah. And you can't respond to it. You just, you can't respond to it.

What I am grateful for is that people in the know, people who make movies for a living, understood, A, we've all been there. We've all lost our shit. Every single person. Ye without sin cast the first tone, but that also what he was saying was very, very sincere. There was, you know, he was, he was on the phone every night fighting the good fight to keep things going, to keep things live. And I was a fly on the wall for all of that. I watched him will that into existence. And then I watched how long it took for, people to change for crews to adopt a different mode of behavior and to take seriously what it was. And it did not matter what you believed. These are the rules now. And if we want to keep working, we just, this is what we got to do. It's not really about what is true for you and what is not.

This is reality. Reality and truth are two very, very different things. I want to look ahead a little bit. We alluded to some things. Is Top Gun 3 harder to crack in some ways than Top Gun 3 harder to crack in some ways than Top Gun Maverick? No. It's already in the bag.

You've cracked it? Yeah, I already know what it is. Easy. Yeah, no, it wasn't hard. I thought it would be. Yeah, I thought it would be. And I go, and that's a good place to go from as you walk into the room going, come on, what are we going to do?

And Aaron Kruger pitched something. And I went, um, actually. And we had one conversation about it. And the framework is there. So, no, it's not hard to crack. The truth of the matter is, none of these are hard to crack. It's the execution. It's as you start to execute it and as you start to interrogate it.

And as you start, why these movies are made the way they are. It's not the action. It's not even the level of or intensity of or the scope and scale of the action. the engineering around the action. It's none of those things. It's the emotion. I was going to say, what I remember, I mean, I remember a lot of things from Maverick,

but it's him and Rooster at the end. It's that moment. And getting to that place, getting to that place, finding the right emotional balance wherein you have a conflict between these two characters. They kept saying,

we want more scenes with them together because they wanted to recreate, Maverick and Goose, which of course we understood. And your desire is to rush right to what the audience wants. The minute their relationship has resolved, the movie is over. Tighten that screw as much as possible. Yes. And if they have too many conversations where they don't talk about their problem,

you're just like, guys, just talk about your fucking problem already. You'd be frustrated with the characters. Tom and I inherently understood that balance, and everyone else around us was pushing for, what they wanted in the movie in the in the micro and Tom and I were focused entirely on the macro the and the and the challenge of that became of course the fact that when you're making a movie and you can you can reference other movies when I say this if your character doesn't like the protagonist no matter how much you want me to like that character the rules of movie making say I don't like that character right even if I don't like the protagonist all that much You're an antagonist. Rooster was always riding the edge of falling into being an antagonist. You had to build an entire world around that character

so that you liked him despite the fact that he didn't like the guy you're rooting for. That's the bones of the movie that we knew and were always after, we're always pushing in terms of making sure in every scene, I feel affinity for this character. I want to like both characters. And I want to see them be friends. And that's the reward of the movie. It's not finishing the mission.

It's not great balls of fire. It's not any of that. It's the ultimate emotional payoff. Much like in the first movie, his relationship with Iceman. Yeah, he had his relationship with Rooster, but his relationship with Iceman, as much as Iceman was antagonizing Maverick,

he was cool, and he was a better pilot. And he was right about everything. was saying, you want to see them be friends. Why the sword fight in Princess Bride works, as good as the choreography is, yes, it's great choreography. What really makes it great is there are two great characters and you don't want to see either of them lose. And you want those characters to be friends. And that's why that ending is so utterly satisfying. Understanding those things. There is no cookie-cutter version of that. You have to strive for and fight for and push for that dynamic. I can write it and we can shoot it. That doesn't mean you'll feel it. And we look at it

all the time and go, I ain't buying it. Rooster and Maverick and Penny's relationship ultimately worked when we shot Jen Connolly for a fourth time on a little piece of a bar in front of a screen. And she improvised a line in the middle of a newly written version of the scene where she said it always ends the same way with this beat. Let's not start this time. When she said that I suddenly knew how to structure the rest of their relationship, because it's really hard to create conflict between a man and a woman in a movie in which the man desperately needs to go and do what he needs to do. How can that character be saying to him, what about me? Same thing with grace in in these movies.

How do you create tension in the relationship without having one of the characters be completely ignoring how important the stakes of the movie are? Those are big challenges, and they take forever. Haley's first scene in the movie, we shot two months ago. And we shot it after we tested it the first time

and looked at it, went, oh, of course, I know exactly what I need to do with this character, and I need to do it in two and a half minutes. And I am very fortunate and that I work with a leading man to whom I can say we need to do this again we have to do this scene and you got to give everything to Haley you just got to you got to give it all to Haley and that's going to make her essential to the story that's that's how those movies are engineered you do it by sense of feel are you going to end up directing the next top gun is that a chance

that a real possibility because Joe's got a full slate too Joe to me I I have given that absolutely no thought okay okay no thought whatsoever I do however I have done a lot of research into how to make a Tony Scott movie. So I wouldn't. Yeah, that's right. I'm not the sort of director who would be squeamish about, yeah, I get it. I'm making a sequel to a Tony Scott movie. Do your Tony Scott.

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Okay, flights on air Canada. Oh, wow. Mayorka, that's new. Oh, nice. But Vienna is a classic Mozart, Palozo. Alice's and schnitzel. Now you're cooking. If you're hungry,

deli brings the heat. Heat. Cartagena's got sun and the sea to cool off. So does Martinique. And that French cuisine? Book it. Yes, chef. Wait, what about Lyon?

Choose from our world of destinations if you can. Air Canada. Nice travels. Let me just throw out a bunch of these other potential times. Tom Cruise projects. You tell me which of these are priorities are likely to happen. The musical? Is that something you guys have really... Everything is a priority. Everything will, in one way or another happen. It will not necessarily happen in the time or place you think it will.

Okay. There are all things we're talking about. There are all things we have ideas about. The conversations we've had about Les Grossman are so fucking funny. That's real. I mean, we're talking about it, man. We're having very serious conversations about it and how best to do it and where, you know, what, it ultimately comes down to what that character is, less gross men.

Tom will be the first one. And Ken, is that the lead? Because he obviously worked as such a side character. You hit the nail right on the head that I was going to. A leading man, Tom Cruise will tell you, a leading man has different responsibilities. 100%. No one knows it better than him. And everybody's going, oh, why doesn't he do him?

Magnolia's, it's like, well, you're a supporting character in that movie. You are allowed to say the things he says in that movie because he's not the protagonist to that film. He doesn't have the same burden. He doesn't have the same responsibility. Ethan Hunt, a character of whom people can be critical, is on rails. There's so little that he is able to do outside of his responsibilities as a leading man. And when you try to push those boundaries, mission instantaneously ceases to become mission. That's the line we're always walking is the difference between a leading man

and a supporting man, a character role versus a more traditional matinee protagonist. So that's figuring out on the Les Grossman's side maybe how he reacts to something else, what he, what you... All we do, we don't even think about the structure, we play with scenes. And Tom is so, just to be sitting at a breakfast table,

not talking about the movie we're making for a minute is such decompression and just riffing with Tom playing less grossment at the table is just it was one of the real joys of making this movie it was all the stuff we were doing planning the future while slugging out the present how much work has been done on the Days of Thunder idea

of trying to figure out where Cole Trickle is now and the best named character in the history of cinema totally totally know what the premise of the movie would be be. In five seconds, I knew what the premise would be. And I looked at the response to Top Gun Maverick and immediately turned to Tom and said, Days of Thunder. I said, but not the same, not mirroring what you did on Maverick. It's the, it would be the, you, no, because it's a completely different characters, different movie. It has a different cultural impact than that movie.

And all those things go into figuring out how to make the story. All these stories now, everything I'm talking about post-fallout, the big thing for me in Fallout was the discovery of just how important emotion was in narratives like this, which normally aren't really a priority. Emotion is something you inject into those movies with Fallout. emotion was baked into every frame. I did not call action on a shot until it was somehow framed emotionally.

It didn't matter if it was, you're looking at Ethan Hunter, you're looking at a set of car keys. When we did Maverick, in that earliest conversation with Tony and Jerry and Tom, was understanding what was the audience feeling about the world around them when they made Top Gun the first movie.

I was the only person in that room that hadn't worked on the first film. My only qualification I felt in that room was, I remembered vividly what it was to be a 17-year-old kid paying to see that movie. Let me tell you actually what it was like in the real world watching your crazy movie. It's like I know what you guys all meant as artists.

I was the focus group in that first meeting. And with, you know, many years of distance and 30 years working in movies, at that point, 25 years of working in movies, I was able to articulate what it was I was feeling and said that unless we can isolate what that is for an audience now in 2000, at this point, it was like 2008, 2009, and then late, and then, no, 2011, and then when I came back to it in 2019, it was, it was. until I read the draft, the first draft of Top Gun Maverick in 2019, that I was able to call Tom and go, I know what it is. I know what it is. I know what the essence of the movie is. And I know what everyone thinks, will think, the essence of the movie is. And I told Tom, everybody's going to think that this movie is about Tom Cruise, the movie star, and Maverick the pilot, and the end of F-18s, and the end of the end of cinema, you know, the end of manned flight and the end of cinema, and they're

never going to know what it's really about, and I'm never going to tell them, but here's what it is. And Tom said, I totally agree. After, in the, in the wake of that movie, I then turned to Tom and said, now we've got to do that for mission. And here's... I mean, Day the Thunder or... What's that? You're saying Mission or Day's the Thunder? For mission. Oh, mission. And that's how Dead Reckoning came to be, and that's how, that's how the entity came to be. Got it. This concept of information technology is something we've been talking about for a long,

long time. But it was an intellectual idea that you had to explain its threat to the audience. You had to explain its influence. But now the world was ready for, like caught up to this idea. By 2019, people were aware of the algorithm and they were aware of the effect it was having on their lives. And you could very clearly feel they were beginning to develop an anxiety about it. That replaces the Cold War.

Right. As your, as, as, because in Top Gun, Maverick, you had the Cold War. Or sorry, in Top Gun, you had the Cold War. In Maverick, you didn't. You had to find a different anxiety. In Mission Impossible, the first Mission Impossible is a spy movie just a few years after the Cold War ended, and you could feel spy movies are going,

well, what the fuck are spy movies even about? The essence of what I do now, post-maverick, post-dead reckoning, is to look at a movie and go, why now? And what itch does this scratch? What anxiety does this suit? And that's what this movie, Final Reckoning, was engineered entirely for. Is there any other character? Because this is the luxury of Tom,

is he has this amazing pantheon of great characters. I'm curious where Vincent from Color of Money is, or Daniel Caffey, or Joel Goodson. Are any of those other ones, you must, and all the time with Tom, go through the filmography, be like, oh, at Post Maverick, I think about all of them. I don't need, I mean, I think about all of them. I think about who would Joel Goodson be, who would, who would, yes, and of course

people are suggesting all the time, oh, you do the color of money and he's the, right. The difference being where Paul Newman was in the color of money versus where Tom Cruise isn't. Yes. You know. His 62 is a little different than where Paul. The guy is in his fifth decade of making movies, and he just made final reckoning. He's not quite ready for that kind of thing.

No, no, no. And if you look at John Wayne when he was 52, you know, and everybody loves to compare, or 62, everybody loves to compare Tom to how old he was. Right. And Wilford Briggily. Yes, all of it. The whole thing. Tom's a very, a very unique specimen, and so it's not an apples to apples any more than,

I hate to say it. Gender switching is not apples to apples. Sure. When you take that movie and you just, you know, you put a man in a woman's role and the woman in a man's role, it just has a different vibe. And you've got to and you've got to lean into that. You have to acknowledge that and you have to go, okay, well, who am I really making it for? Right.

And it's also the actor. It's there, there are no arbitrary choices. You have to put it there and you have to look at how it resonates emotionally. And you have to acknowledge when, well, it's not working. that way, how do we serve it? How do we serve it so that it does? And that's, and so if I was going to make a movie about, say, Joel Goodson, in his, as a 62-year-old man, in this modern reality, what itch is that movie scratching? Right. And who is that character? And one of the things that Tom was very particular about with Maverick and which we talk about all the time

with why Ethan is a challenging character. Tom's only big note, his only rule for Top Gun Maverick was, I don't want sad Mav. I don't want to meet a guy at the beginning of the movie who used to be Mav, and he's got to spend the movie getting his Mav back for the simple fact that that totally taints the first movie. I know at the end of the movie, he went off to become Sad Mav.

And that's why when you look at these franchises and how they resolve characters, you've got to be very, very careful. because it's going to change the way you watch those other movies. And we were very conscious about it with this, that there was, every decision we make represents the conclusion of that character's arc. Not just Ethan, but Benji, Luther, William Donlo, Kittrich, and even the characters like Palm and Haley, who are in it just for these two movies.

They all had to have resolutions that had equal weight and resonance. And now I hope when people go back and watch Dead Reckoning, when Haley first walks on screen knowing what her character's arc is. When Palm Clemente F. first comes on screen, what her character's arc is. When DeGas is on the train talking to Shea Wiggum about whose side are you on, following what his arc is. Those were all things we knew from the very, very beginning of, this and when and when people were projecting onto those characters where they thought they

were going or where they wanted them to go we had to play the long game and say just wait for it it's been some distance now what was your superman pitch you pitched a another story after man of steel i'll never tell i'll never tell but boy it was fucking good and it and it and it It was, you know, Green Lantern was what had come to me. And Green Lantern is a tough one. Yeah. That power, that's... The power is very...

The weakness is tough. Yep. And I cracked it. And it was fun. And watching him learn how to use that power and what the... And giving that power a flaw. Right. So that it was not pure invincibility.

Yeah. There was a, you know, and it's all there. It wasn't just yellow? That was like, you're talking about Green Lantern? No, no, no. Well, the whole concept of Green Lantern is the ring has to be recharged. Right. The ring has to be recharged.

And that's not a bug, that's a feature. That's the thing that made that, yes, you have infinite power, but you only have so much... You only have so much battery life. And that can run out at inconvenient times. That, for me, solved the whole Green Lantern problem. Um, the costume is another, is another thing, and you, you can figure that out. If you can, but here's the thing, I look at any superhero and growing up, if you had told me that there would ever be a Captain America or a Thor that did not have me laughing

hysterically at, at the character. And how the, that, that is proof. Just check your certainty, man. When you dismiss an idea, you're not dismissing my idea. you're dismissing yours. You're dismissing your concept of it. In the same way, I was dismissing fine. So I realized, don't worry about the costume, worry about the character, and how do you give that character tension and stakes, and also how do you do it with Superman? And Henry had a, had a take on that. And I suddenly realized how these two characters had, how these two characters had

amazing similarities, which also allowed for amazing conflict and an amazing universe-expanding resolution. Now I'm just getting upset. Yeah, but I will tell you, I will tell you the first, the first five minutes of my Superman movie, which was the, a imagine, you remember Pixar's Up? Sure. A sequence with no dialogue that covered that characters. Yeah. Okay.

The first five minutes of the movie was a setup after which you knew exactly what made Superman tick. Yeah. And exactly what Superman was most afraid of. and why Superman made the choices that he made and it would have been epic. It would have been epic. In five minutes, the scale of the movie would have been absolutely extraordinary.

And the other thing, and I think, I hope that anybody who watches this movie that enjoys the end of this movie walking away, that's the feeling I would want you to walk away from because that's really what Superman is about. It's about hope and it's about it being inspiring. and the joy that that character created. I don't think you need to live in the shadow

of Donner's Superman. I don't think you need to live in the shadow of John Williams' score. But you do need to recognize that that movie captured better than any other with respect to everyone that has followed. It captured better than any other, the heart of that character. Yeah.

The problem with Superman is that when they constantly are trying to create bigger and bigger and bigger obstacles for a character with infinite power, And all the best sequences in Superman understand that Superman's greatest obstacle is himself, followed potentially by Greenland. All right. It's all right there, guys. It's all right there. Just sitting there waiting for somebody to make it. I appreciate the time, man.

I'm glad this happened at the right time for Final Reckoning. Congratulations. It is like all four of these movies, but this one especially, the degree of difficulty, how you guys approached it what you're trying to do with these this is an audience movie I saw it in IMAX last night I've seen it twice

see this movie thank you for the time man really I appreciate it it's great talking to you and so ends another edition of happy sad confused remember to review rate

and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts I'm a big podcast person I'm Daisy Ridley and I definitely wasn't pressure to do this by Josh I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Shear, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives. Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't. He's too old. Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dude, too, is overreacted. rated. It is. Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspool,

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