Read an extract of our exclusive Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One feature from our July 2023 issue below, or see the full piece here.

Christopher McQuarrie had a problem. He was well into production on Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One when the news came through. Berlin was no longer going to let him use an under-construction airport he had earmarked. “We were going to shoot this airport sequence and a foot chase there,” he says. “And then Berlin said, ‘No, we’re too close to the opening of the airport.’” Suddenly, the foot chase was off. The airport sequence was out. Another punch to roll with, on a production packed with them.

“Then Abu Dhabi said, ‘Well, we have an airport,’” recalls McQuarrie. “And we said, ‘Great — instead of a foot chase, let’s do something in the desert.’” Which is how McQuarrie, his star/ producer/creative partner Tom Cruise, and the cast and crew of Dead Reckoning wound up in Abu Dhabi, making what McQuarrie calls “the hardest, hardest sequence I have ever had to work out. Now, it’s a sequence of which we are immensely, immensely proud. But it’s like everything else on Mission — if I’d known going in, I would never have done it.”

Welcome to the McQuarrie/Cruise method of making movies, honed over the course of their decade-and-change working relationship, through the likes of Valkyrie (co-written by McQuarrie), Jack Reacher (which he wrote and directed) and Top Gun: Maverick (which he co-wrote and produced), plus a whole host of Mission: Impossibles. It is loose, it is improvisational (except for the big stunts, which are planned with military precision), it is not for studios that are faint of heart or shallow of pocket. It is, says Tom Cruise, “never boring”, the star unleashing that laugh. “Never boring. It’s constantly evolving. You have to be pretty unrelenting, and honest with yourself about stories and structure and what’s working and what’s not. I don’t want to stop until it’s right.”