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DESCRIPTION: This is it! We made it to episode 100! And we brought some friends! Initially just a conversation with Christopher McQuarrie about how he’s doing and how the two sequels are shaping up, it soon became much, much more, as Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, and Lorne Balfe contributed to a truly epic Zoom bomb scenario. We learn all about the new movies, including confirmation of returning cast members and some truly tantalizing information about Hayley’s character. Released May 15th, 2020.

SHOW NOTES: Follow Christopher McQuarrie on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Simon Pegg on Twitter.

Follow Hayley Atwell on Instagram.

Follow Lorne Balfe on Twitter and Instagram.

If you want to listen to Lorne’s score for “Mission: Impossible - Fallout,” here it is on Apple Music. It’s also available on Spotify and Amazon...

Here are some amazing Christopher McQuarrie quotes from the interview (transcribed by Bruce Edwards)...

“You don't create a character and then go find an actor to play that role. You create a role and then you find an actor and then you find the best version of that role in that actor. You let the actor find it.”

“The more of a plan you have, the more you're limiting people's creativity; the more you're limiting their ability to bring who they are to the story.”

“That idea of visionary is such a strange word that's used a lot and is bandied about -- to me when I hear it I'm like oh it's some mad obsessive dude that's like knows every single thing that's going to happen well where's the fun in that? It's like yeah I know exactly what the movie looks like in my head--that's not what's gonna happen. Because that's me thinking about the movie all alone. What happens when Lorne hits it from one direction, Tom hits it from another, Hayley at another, a Rob Hardy or a Robert Elswit...”

Then at about the 2:00:00 mark begins a roughly sixteen minute master class in storytelling from McQuarrie:

“We did an anatomy of a scene...people ask us all the time, what is Mission about, what is this one gonna be about, and who's in it and what is going to be their character, and--those things, to us, are secondary to 'how does the movie feel?'. And it took me years to be able to articulate that feelings don't come from how the character's written and what the two characters say to one another, which is what a writer really does, is I write a story and I have these two people interact, and they express emotions towards one another and that should be automatically emotional, right? No, it's not. And what I learned to articulate on ‘Fallout’ when Rob Hardy and I would be setting a scene--Rob would set a particular frame and I'd say...just ask yourself when you look at that, is that information or is that emotion? You can take a picture of an object. You can take a picture of a coffee cup. And in one photograph, the photograph is saying 'that is a coffee cup'. In another photograph if I adjust the lens, the light, the location, I make certain adjustments--suddenly the photograph is saying 'this coffee cup is important. This coffee cup is dangerous,' or, y'know and--so we're always looking now to imbue the frame with emotion. And the introductions of characters, the way we shoot people--that it all--it's all emotionally evocative, but most importantly, not randomly emotionally evocative. It has to be synchronized with the scene you're telling, the location you're shooting it in--and that's why choosing locations, for us, is more important than what's happening in that location.”

Question from composer Lorne Balfe: “Is that a writer's point of view or a director's point of view?”

McQuarrie: “That is a storyteller's point of view. What is story? Story is an emotional journey. That's all it is. And what you're--there's a more clinical definition of it but what you're ultimately doing--I'm taking you on an emotional journey as a storyteller. Now if I'm shooting a scene and I'm doing what I did in ‘The Way Of The Gun’ which was I'm gonna shoot this scene like Sidney Lumet did, I'm gonna sit back from the action, I'm gonna let the action unfold. Sidney Lumet understood what he was doing when he did that. John Sturges understood what he was doing when he did that. He understood through composition, writing, juxtaposition of certain story elements, music, lighting, all kinds of other things--and great acting and great writing--Sidney Lumet was making movies where you didn't need to manipulate any other way. The camera was only going to be getting in the way. And you look at his great films, you look at ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ - he understood the drama and the tension and the environment - the location itself - were all communicating the pressure and the intensity that the characters were undergoing. So he didn't need to manipulate you by putting longer lenses on the camera and doing big camera moves--it was organic. So what I'm doing when--what I'm taking you on is this emotional journey. In ‘The Way of the Gun’ I didn't direct the movie, I shot the screenplay. And there's a very big difference. The director's job - as much as the director's job is to tell the actors what they want, the crew what they want, the camera department what they want - the director's job is to direct the audience. I'm directing your eye, I'm directing your heart. And so everything that I'm doing in the assemblage of shots is not thinking 'well if I put these three things together, you'll feel this.' Or 'if I say these three things in a scene, you'll feel this.' No. If I say these three things in a scene, you will think that, you will not feel it. If I frame it correctly, you will feel it. And if I am in synch with the actor, the location, the lighting, the lens, all the actor has to do is step into that frame and experience it. So all--what I'm after is not scenes, moments, acts, set pieces - I'm after impulses. I've actually dissected the movie down to each moment-by-moment impulse that you're experiencing in the film and maintaining some level of emotional connection for you because the minute it's not emotional, you disconnect. Things become information. Information is the death of emotion. And I have to spend precious energy getting you back into the story.”

Lorne Balfe: “How do you know that when you're writing? Do you know that when you're writing before you film that? Because there has to be an instinct that--there's only so much you can rely that much on the performance.”

McQuarrie: “Well I know now that if I'm relying on the performance, I'm not writing the movie, or directing the movie. I'm giving an actor information and expecting them to turn it into emotion. If I've written correctly and I frame it correctly, the actor just has to experience the emotion expressed in that scene. And if you create the situation properly and frame it correctly the actor doesn't have to work to communicate it. They're doing all the effort--and if you do it incorrectly, the audience is doing the effort. And there are a great many films that understand that aesthetic can supplant story. And that aesthetic is a form of manipulation. Social justice is a form of manipulation, your libido is a form of manipulation--I can use all of those things to buy us your feelings towards my story, to create the sense that you're experiencing something emotional when in reality I'm using your emotions against you, and I see that as a kind of theft. And there are movies that you can watch and if you really dissect them, if you take out their aesthetic, if you take out how gorgeous it is, take out all production design value and everything else--just tell me the story. And when you tell me the story, don't tell me from orbit. Don't tell me this story and go 'oh it's this cool thing where all happens and like--' no no no, tell me the journey. Tell me the main character's journey. And when you're telling me the main character's journey. is it a compelling story? And now let's go a level deeper--what is that character? What events is that character responsible for? Not commitments, not duties, not promises they've made--what things have they done in the movie that they are responsible for? And do they acknowledge that responsibility? And if they don't acknowledge that responsibility, how do they choose not to acknowledge it? And you can take a movie and you can look at a movie through that prism and say alright it's a great, gorgeous, amazing-looking movie, it's got spectacle and action and this that and the other thing, and just look at the character with all that shit taken away and go--did this person actually do anything in the movie? Did they affect anything in the events around them or did they just look cool? Was I attached emotionally to the character, or am I just fascinated with the actor playing that character? Am I involved with the story, or am I more just wishing I was in the world in which that story took place? That's a video game, that's not a story. That's not a narrative. And that's how we think about things. And it's taken me 25 years to articulate it - I understood it on a fundamental level, but understanding it doesn't give you the tools you need to create that in others. And it wasn't until I reached a point that I recognized: emotion is not an element to movies, emotion's the entire point. That's why we're doing what we do - moment by moment, cut by cut, note by note, and word by word - and you'll notice I said word last because the word - the written word - is vastly overrated. Language in cinema is vastly overrated and it's treated as story when in reality it is to me - it's an indication that characters are interacting. It's the music of how people interact with one another. I don't view dialogue as the primary storytelling tool anymore. As the guy who wrote ‘The Usual Suspects’ it was all dialogue, and it was the love of language-now I look at language as a necessary evil. It's the very last element you add even after music. So what I'm trying to do with each successive movie I'm making is to create a movie that exists silently. You can watch the movie and understand the language without a single word being explained to you. And Lorne and I struggled with this. When you watch ‘Fallout,’ and when you watch--we released the movie you can go on the extras and you can see--you can watch Fallout with just the score. And not any dialogue. There's an isolated score version. You watch it like a silent film. Go to the scene where Ethan gets the mission at the beginning of the movie--‘Good evening, Mr. Hunt.’ And watch it with no dialogue. The scene is infinitely more compelling without the dialogue. And you understand...you understand the mission. On the most--in the most fundamental sense, you understand it emotionally. What you will also notice is that when you take the dialogue out certain shots are just a little too long. And certain shots linger too long and there's a weird shift in the music - those things are there because they have to be working in support of obligatory dialogue that has to be in the movie, but doesn't really want to be in the movie. And you suddenly feel - and at no other point in the movie are there these false edits. You'll see them, you'll feel them very consciously like-there's a shot looking at Ethan where he's facing the camera and the projector is shining right - it's sort of a slide across Ethan - the shot is too long. Well the reason it's too long is because all this fuckin' exposition needed to be in the movie. And we couldn't cut until the guy finished talking. That to me is the principal lesson of how dialogue, like temp music, is a deceptive element. There is a--I'm rambling about all of this and I'll shut up.”

Lorne Balfe: "Have you ever read a script where the narrative was totally correct but then the director messed it up?”

McQuarrie: “I can't say what it is but yes I have. Not that he messed it up, he didn't mess it up--he didn't understand what made something emotional, or how it could have been moreso. He cut out things that were in some cases the point of an entire scene, or the point of an entire arc. It still did a very good job and it performed very well but yes I've also-look-I will tell you that myself, Tom, every filmmaker I've ever worked with and anyone you think is a god of cinema--we all get tunnel vision. We all get tunnel vision at some point because of budget, time...acts of god, ego, exhaustion--you get tunnel vision and you get focused on stuff and you lose touch with what the real rules of the narrative are. There are no rules until you write them. We create all the rules ourselves, and we forget that we made them up, and then suddenly down the road we're going well I can't do this, because this happens. Well who says that has to happen? You wrote the screenplay, you can unwrite it. But going back to what I was talking about in terms of dialogue, and the biggest discovery I made over the course of writing the last movie I wrote--there's a difference between perception and comprehension. You can say a line of dialogue to the audience-if you don't say it to them in just the right frame, they won't hear it-and more importantly, they won't absorb it and they won't process it emotionally. They'll hear it but they won't apply it to your story. And when you throw dialogue at an audience instead of serve dialogue to them, you're actually asking them to track it all down. You're asking them to hold onto it and put it together for you. And I guarantee you there are movies you can watch where you're watching an action scene where you're going-'I know what the director wants me to think is happening-I'm not really-that's not-I can't tell what's going on, but I kind of get what's going on. You're doing the work. You're doing the job. You're doing the job of the editor, you're doing the job of the filmmaker. That, to me, again is a kind of theft. The whole job to me is - lay back and experience this movie. Experience it subjectively in the point of view of the main character-you should not have to do anything. You should not have to do any adding whatsoever, and that's the journey for me, that's the quest for me, is...ideally my last movie will be one you watch and the credits come on, and the next thing you know [snaps fingers] the end credits are rolling and...a minute of your life has passed by. And you've had a completely emotional experience in which you never once thought about your reality--you're thinking about, and engaged in, our reality. I say that-not my reality-I don't make a film for me, and I don't make a film alone, the most important storytelling element - more than a camera, more than music - sorry, Lorne - more than dialogue, more than cinematography - the most important element is the audience. That's my number one storytelling partner.

[end 02:15:58]