Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part One New Look Released

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One showed off a brand new look today. In a feature from Entertainment Weekly, director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise walked the publication through the massive train stunt at the heart of this movie. It’s not an exaggeration that massive set pieces have become the bread and butter of the Mission: Impossible franchise. The filmmaker told EW that Cruise asked for the mesmerizing train sequence from the first days of working on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. So, they had a North Star to guide them. However, wrecking a train after a big fight is pretty hard to do, even if you know what you’re doing. 

“At the start of this movie, I said to Tom, ‘What do you want to do?‘” McQuarrie remembered. “He said, ‘I want to drive a motorcycle off of a cliff. What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to wreck a train.’ We’re enormous fans of Buster Keaton, John Frankenheimer, David Lean, all of these filmmakers who at one time or another had a fabulous train wreck. I thought, I’ve earned that, I want to wreck one too.”

“A 70-ton train, yes,” McQuarrie added. “I think the energy that went into developing it, designing that, building it, and then making a sequence that justified its existence was probably the biggest challenge of my entire life.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s Big Stunt Focus

Empire Magazine also caught up with the director to talk about Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One‘s signature stunt. It’s clear the cast and crew are so proud of that sequence.

“We’re making a movie that involves sequence that they just don’t shoot practically anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time,” McQuarrie told the publication. “The sequence that we’re shooting right now is no exception. And like most things on Mission: Impossible, if we had known what the challenges were when we started, we would never have done it.”

“There’s a whole class of action movies centred around awe,” McQuarrie added later. “For me, awe is a condiment, not a course. I have an actor who will drive a motorcycle off a cliff. Now the hard part is, I gotta make the audience care about that.”

Are you excited to see this stunt in the new Mission: Impossible? Let us know down in the comments!