Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie has a career so well known that he needed no introduction to his 9 a.m. audience at his panel during the 2025 Austin Film Festival. While he is now known as the talent behind some of Tom Cruise’s most notable films, his basis in film school didn’t come from lectures in a class room, but a summer job that lasted for four years, McQuarrie said.
The director said his first job in the industry was as the security guard at a movie theater during the crack boom of 1987. His job description was technically just to stop fights from breaking out amongst the rival gangs that attended the film, but McQuarrie took away something vastly more important – having the best focus audience for those four years. This experience established two clear things in his mind that defined how he would make his later films: 1) the audience is smarter than you and 2) you don’t make movies for yourself, McQuarrie said.
When writing “The Usual Suspects,” McQuarrie said that after he came up with the title and then the poster, he first created the ending or as he referred to it, the punch line. McQuarrie said by having this end goal in mind, he was able fill in and dictate the film around what was needed to pay it off. For the twist involving the identity of Keyser Soze, McQuarrie said that he is not the one who fools the audience, but it’s the audience who tricks themselves. To accomplish this, he actually wrote the film for the second viewing, encouraging audience engagement to go back and gain a better understanding of the film.
Thirteen years after “The Usual Suspects,” McQuarrie said he was about to quit the industry and only took a job as the producer and writer on the 2008 film, “Valkyrie,” with Tom Cruise, to pay off his debts. The two would later work again and again over the years, but in the panel, McQuarrie jumped right to his experience on “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” McQuarrie said because he knew exactly what was needed to craft a “Mission: Impossible” film on the page with nothing but a list of characters and locations for action sequences, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” was simple-ish since he understood this franchise on both ends.
As his work on the series continued into its climatic two part finale, McQuarrie became a veteran on how to make these movies. When he pitched the idea of a two-parter to Paramount, they responded with a release date, McQuarrie said. So production began the next day – until it was shut down by COVID-19. The writer said he utilized this time to wrap up automatic dialogue replacement reshoots on “Top Gun: Maverick,” he was still in the movie-making state of mind by the time production on “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” and “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” got under way again.
Not only was working on these massive franchise installments mentally a pressure cooker, McQuarrie said, but challenged him physically as well – or at least Cruise did. McQuarrie said that in order for him to write a scene with actors in high g-force, Cruise strapped him into an F-18 to give him first hand knowledge – the writer said throwing up with a beard is never fun. Similarly, when it came time to direct Cruise for the biplane stunt finale in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” the actor gave McQuarrie a 20 minute crash course on wing walking and sent him into the atmosphere, clutching to the side of the vehicle.
Filming two “Mission: Impossible” movies and writing the sequel to “Top Gun” amidst the chaos of a global pandemic, an actors strike and a writers strike, McQuarrie said it was like surfing a tsunami into another tsunami while being chased by a tsunami. Getting his first break in about six years, McQuarrie said he is finally able to write for himself again – a pleasure he’s been solely deprived of.
However, because of this pressure cooker, McQuarrie said he learned the difference between swimming and drowning. Fear is what separates the two and fear is a wasted emotion on set and in the industry at large, McQuarrie said. Not only does it get in the way of filming Cruise in a metal gimbal inside the world’s biggest swimming pool, McQuarrie said, but is wrongfully shaping how the industry sees artificial intelligence, or AI. McQuarrie said that humans will evolve past it and the guild’s refusal to discuss the issues links to a writer’s responsibility they often fail at – being confrontational.
While McQuarrie isn’t saying to fully submit to AI in Hollywood, he did say that we are living in the yet – AI can’t write a movie … yet. In this phase, people have new opportunities to train the programming that may write the future and out of those opportunities, new jobs will arise and humans evolve past it.
Living through the time of the unknown, of the yet, McQuarrie ended his panel by reminding his audience to be confrontational, don’t panic and swim, don’t drown.
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Featured Image Courtesy of Austin Film Festival