Christopher McQuarrie 'absolutely feels relief' about completing Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning stunts
With the movie including death-defying aerial and water stunts, 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' director Christopher McQuarrie "absolutely feels relief" that no one suffered any major injuries during production.
Christopher McQuarrie "absolutely feels relief" to have got through ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ without any stunts going wrong.
The upcoming action movie features plenty of jaw-dropping sequences and stunts performed by Tom Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt, such as the 62-year-old actor hanging from the side of an airplane and jumping off the deck of an aircraft carrier, and director McQuarrie, 56, is glad ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ was completed without any of the cast members sustaining any major injuries.
Speaking to Deadline, the filmmaker said: "I absolutely feel relief on this one.
"You’ve heard us say it before with every ‘Mission’: This is the most complicated thing we’ve ever done; this is the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done; it’s the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done. It’s always true.
"This is the first time when we did that twice in one movie. The submarine sequence represents something, and the aerial scene represents something, that each, in their own way, is the most complicated, most difficult thing that we’ve done.”
McQuarrie - who has helmed the ‘Mission: Impossible’ films from 2015’s ‘Rogue Nation’ to ‘The Final Reckoning’ - added he is "both astonished and relieved that we’re here" after working on all of the series’ death-defying stunts.
He said: "I thought what we were doing on ‘Jack Reacher’ was the limit, these ambitious car chases, with very little time and very little budget. ‘Rogue Nation’, I couldn’t imagine anything bigger than that.
"Once you’ve done that a few times, you start to realize it’s not that you can’t imagine it, you just haven’t imagined it yet. And particularly where we are coming from, which is a place of getting people to come to the theatre, keeping the big-screen experience alive, showing people something they haven’t seen before.
"Audiences now are very, very sophisticated and they’re very hard to please."
Even so, McQuarrie emphasised that carrying out the many stunts caused "a lot of stress".
He explained: "We had safety protocols on this film that centred around the aerial sequence, which was the first thing we shot for this chapter in terms of action.
"We would have these briefings before every flight, and they were very, very meticulous, very careful."
He continued: "We went over it many, many times with all the pilots. And at the end of every safety briefing, our safety guy would say, ‘Does anyone have any ducks?’ And a duck was anything in your life that was causing you stress, anxiety that was distracting you.
"It didn’t matter if it was on the film or outside of the film, if there were three ducks in a safety debriefing, you didn’t fly.
"I asked the safety guy, ‘Where does the term duck come from?’ And he said, ‘It’s not the lion that eats you, it’s the thousands of ducks that peck you to death.’
"Where accidents happen is when multiple people are distracted by multiple things, it’s never one factor that leads to it."
