Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Director Reveals Help From Edgar Wright on New Sequel

By Jamie Jirak

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is hitting theaters everywhere next month, and it's expected to do well at the box office. The film marks the third in the franchise to be helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, who was the first director to tackle more than one movie in the Tom Cruise series. Previous directors included Brian de Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird. This week, it was revealed that another famous director had a small hand in making Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One into what it is now. In a recent interview with Total Film (via Games Radar), McQuarrie revealed Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright helped him while he was working on the highly-anticipated action film.

"Edgar came to one of the later screenings [of the film], and asked one simple question about a specific sound – kind of an audio cue – and I thought I'd addressed that note. It was so obvious to me. But it wasn't obvious to Edgar," McQuarrie explained. "And when I asked the audience, it wasn't obvious to them either. Nobody thought to bring it up until Edgar did. And that changed the entire movie. It changed the entire movie for the better. You just need honesty and clarity and awareness. No one person, Tom [Cruise] included, can really sit there, and look at the movie 24 hours a day, objectively. Tom and I will just look one another in the eye, and say, 'do we want to change this? Or is this what we prefer?'"

What Does "Dead Reckoning" Mean? 

McQuarrie previously spoke about the meaning behind the "Dead Reckoning", which was revealed during last year's CinemaCon.

"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," McQuarrie told  Light the Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly ... a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One."

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He continued, "And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie? And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which premieres in theaters on July 12th. It's the beginning of the end for the action-packed franchise, as Cruise reteams with longtime collaborator and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie for more death-defying and breathtaking stunts. Hunt and allies Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) attempt to track down a new weapon with the power to tear the world apart. Actors Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales join the cast for the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which is set to wrap up with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two. 

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