#‘Mission: Impossible’ Stars, Director on Latest Film’s “Very Timely” Villain: “People Are Scared”

[The following story contains spoilers from Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. The below interviews were all conducted at the Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One U.S. premiere in New York on Monday, July 10, prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike.]

In Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise and his Impossible Missions Force face off against an all-powerful rogue form of artificial intelligence, known as The Entity, which has the ability to manipulate people, weapons and various defense systems.

In the film, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team of Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and newcomer Grace (Hayley Atwell) try to keep The Entity from falling into the wrong hands, going after various power brokers who want to acquire and control this dangerous technology.

And Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters at a time of great concern about the real-world threat posed by AI, including in Hollywood, where restrictions around what the technology can and cannot be used for in film and TV are at the heart of ongoing labor disputes between striking writers and actors and the studios and streamers.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the Dead Reckoning U.S. premiere in New York last week, prior to SAG-AFTRA going on strike on Thursday, director Christopher McQuarrie, who co-wrote the script with Erik Jendresen, as well as stars Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson, indicated they were surprised at how the film went from tackling what seemed like a sci-fi threat to dealing with a potentially dangerous technology now very much in the public discourse.

“I remember [McQuarrie] talking about it early on, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a really good sort of science fiction-y idea.’ Mission: Impossible has always had that edge of sci-fi, you know, because the tech is always way in advance of where we are. And I felt like this is really on point. This is a clever idea,” Pegg recalled. “Of course, the conversation about AI has been amplified in the time that we’ve been making this movie. So it’s coming out in a time when it’s in the social discourse. So, it feels very timely.”

McQuarrie was aware of the threat posed by “information technology” when he started working on the seventh Mission: Impossible installment in 2018, but he admits he’s concerned about how it’s evolved.

“It was something that was transitioning from being an abstract idea to being something that people understood,” he said of AI in 2018. “What it’s evolved into is — I’m a little freaked out. … To be watching as the movie and the technology were evolving at the same rate is something else.”

Ferguson admits that while she was working on the film she didn’t realize the onscreen adversary would be such a real-life concern as she now recognizes it to be.

“AI is obviously something we’re battling,” Ferguson said, referring to the writers strike and what was then a potential actors strike. “And people are scared. We’re living in a world where AI is going to be merged into our world, and we have to see where we fit in and how it works and that it doesn’t just walk over our jobs.”

Esai Morales, who plays a human adversary in the film, joked that he has a special connection to AI with the letters “a” and “i” in his name, before saying, in all seriousness, that the technology is “something we have to be very careful about.”

“It can be a blessing, but it’s like fire, right? How you use it is all,” he said.

Dead Reckoning Part One is also hitting theaters after a multi-year filming process that took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with the cast and crew dealing with at least five shutdowns due to the virus, which both Cruise and McQuarrie contracted.

After the challenges of making the movie, Cruise and Co. were happy the film was finally done and ready to hit theaters.

“It’s such a relief that we finally get to share it with everyone,” Atwell told THR.

“It was a challenge making the film, but, in some respects, the nature of that challenge was channeled into the movie itself,” Pegg told THR. “I feel like our determination to make the movie is reflected in the movie. Tom saw the pandemic as an existential threat to cinema and decided to take it on and not allow it to finish us, and I think that was absolutely the right thing to do. We went into it with intelligence and care, and we figured out how you make a film in a pandemic.”

Saying it was “surreal” to see his years of work come to fruition, McQuarrie said, “It was just about focusing on the work that was right in front of you and assuming that one day we would be standing here talking. It’s kind of amazing.”

Despite dealing with the contemporary challenges of AI and the pandemic, Dead Reckoning reaches into the Mission: Impossible past, bringing back Henry Czerny’s Kittridge for the first time since the first film in 1996, a request that the actor said he initially thought “was a joke.”

“I got my first call in 1995 — I was in Brazil — that they wanted me to come do their Kittridge. And [this time] I was in the middle of doing my Los Angeles errands as any middle-class person would, and I got a call from my rep saying they’d like to bring Kittridge back, and I thought it was a joke. Then, two days later, I’m talking with Chris McQuarrie about his plan to bring Kittridge back, and we’re going to give him some gravitas, and we’re going to give him some weight of the 25 years that he’s spent in Washington, and we want to see that relationship between Ethan and Kittridge. Will you do it? What do you say to that?,” he recalled, speaking at the July 10 premiere. “Anything other than ‘yes’ with an exclamation mark would put you in an insane asylum.”

Working with McQuarrie, Czerny experienced the director’s somewhat improvisational approach to filmmaking, which he called “fantastic” but initially “disconcerting.”

“I’m used to, you know, you get three takes. We’re going to do a master, medium, close up or some variety, and it’s great when they do that variety. The camera’s going to do half of the work for you or a lot of the work for you,” Czerny said. “With Chris, he allows, he encourages the actor within the scope of the scene to bring whatever they want to it, and he’ll deal with it in the editing room, and by deal, I mean respect it. He wants it. He’ll actually alter character arcs depending on what people might bring to the franchise, to the installment.”

Mission: Impossible 7 is just the first part of a two-film story that will continue with the eighth movie in the franchise, Dead Reckoning Part Two, which had been in production prior to the actors strike.

Teasing the eighth film, McQuarrie said, “I can say with confidence it’s even crazier,” while Czerny said he’s told the upcoming film “will be even better” than the seventh installment.