It's taken a year longer than expected, but Mission Impossible III is finally delivering the action - with a TV series director at the helm. Steve Pratt listens as star Tom Cruise and director J J Abrams discuss the mission that almost became impossible.
FOR a time, it looked as if the plan to keep alive one of Hollywood's most lucrative franchises, Mission: Impossible was living up to its title - impossible. But after losing two directors, the Impossible dream finally became reality after star Tom Cruise approached Lost and Alias creator JJ Abrams to take the helm. Mission: Impossible III opens worldwide this week - a year later than originally planned. The film was postponed, and Cruise went off to make War Of The Worlds with director Steven Spielberg, after director Joe Carnahan left the project a month before the start of principal photography. That old favourite "creative differences" was cited.
Before that, David Fincher had been announced as the director in 2002. Cruise had always wanted a different director for each film in the franchise in a bid to keep it fresh. Fincher should have followed Brian De Palma, who directed the first big screen story taken from the old TV series, a decade ago.
John Woo directed Mission: Impossible II six years ago. Since then the franchise has been in limbo. Fincher - director of Seven, Fight Club and Panic Room - left to be replaced by Carnahan, director of the highly-regarded police drama Narc. He got as far as casting Carrie-Anne Moss, Kenneth Branagh and Scarlett Johansson in Mission: Impossible III before leaving the project. Cruise found his third director after watching a stack of DVDs of the TV series Alias, starring Jennifer Garner. Since then Abrams has had an even bigger TV hit with Lost. "I started watching one episode and about four days later I'd seen the whole first season," says Cruise of his introduction to Alias. "It's great producing, great directing, great writing and great storytelling on every level." Abrams didn't say "yes" immediately. He told Cruise he didn't like the script. To his surprise, the Hollywood star said they could wait a year while the script was rewritten and make the third Mission: Impossible the way Abrams wanted. "The previous Mission movies, as good as they were, never gave any sense of who Ethan Hunt was outside of a Mission situation," explains the writer-director. "It was important for me to see who this guy was in his heart. "All Ethan is trying to do in M:I-3 is be in love and keep his day job. How that plays out is the crux of the film. To me, making this movie was all about showing the impact Ethan's job has on his personal life". You might think that Cruise, one of the industry's biggest stars and a producer of the movie, would want to tell Abrams what to do, in order to safeguard the franchise. Apparently not.
Cruise let him do it his way. "The truth is Tom let me write the movie with the co-writers I wanted to write with, cast it the way I wanted to cast it, direct it the way I thought it should be directed, and cut the film too," says Abrams. The story finds superspy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) menaced by Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian - "a provider of dangerous goods to dangerous people" as Abrams describes him - who threatens not only Hunt but his girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan, last seen in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang).
He was keen to have Hunt's MI team back in action this time. Ving Rhames returns as sidekick Luther Stickell with the cast also including Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Keri Russell, star of Abrams' other TV series Felicity. Britain's very own Simon Pegg, who had a hit Stateside with Shaun Of The Dead, also won a place in the cast. Above all, Abrams wanted to put some heart in the story among all the explosions and stunts. "My dream was to take the spy movie genre and, while it would have mind-blowing action sequences, ensure it had intimacy and character-based story," he says. "To be honest, making Mission Impossible III has been a dream come true."
Cruise is equally nice about his director, saying that "JJ gave me a great character and it's a challenge emotionally and physically. It's a story of extremes, you know, but it's also very personal. It could be reflective of life when you look at it."
The $150m production was filmed in China, Italy, Germany and the US. Despite the packed schedule and the fact that Abrams hadn't directed a feature film before, the movie came in under budget and under schedule. Once again, Cruise insisted on doing as many of the action sequences himself as he could. "I love to do my own stunts. I do it because I want to entertain the audience and myself," he says. He must know that Mission: Impossible III is an important movie for him after a year in which he's made the headlines for his personal life rather than his work.
Jumping on the sofa on Oprah Winfrey's TV show to declare that he was in love was followed by proposing to actress Katie Holmes during a trip to Paris and now, with impeccable timing as far as publicising his new film goes, he's become a biological father for the first time. He must also know that he risks both over-exposure with the public becoming fed up with him. He needs a hit film to remind them he's a movie star, not just fodder for the tabloids. Mission: Impossible III could be just the picture to do that.
* Mission: Impossible III (12A) opens in cinemas today.
Published: 04/05/2006
