Total Film Article: This Time It's Personal

A billion-dollar franchise. A sequel six years in the works. An action epic that nearly blew up. How Tom Cruise and a TV genius finally made M:I:III

It almost never happened. The fuse had been lit twice - and then extinguished. Directors and writers had come and gone and a TV brand Tom Cruise had turned into a formidable film franchise was slowly losing its cool.

Bumped and then bumped again from its release date, M:I:III appeared to have been replaced in Cruise's affections by any callaboration with Steven Spielberg (his War Of The Worlds replaced it as Paramount's summer 2005 tentpole). Mission: Impossible was living up to its name. Then Cruise met JJ Abrams. And the man they call Ethan Hunt rediscovered his mojo...

"We just clicked," recalls Cruise, who first met the creator of Alias at a Hollywood party, where he blagged same DVDs of the Jennifer Garner starring spy series. "That show, man," he says. “I started watching one episode and about four days later I'd seen the whole first season! It's great producing, great directing, great writing and great storytelling on every level." Cruise fýnishes his sentence. He's looking healthy and !ively and toothy and, you know, very Tom Cruise. And he 's carrying a gun. A very big gun...

It's September 2005 and Total Film is standing with Cruise on a Los Angeles location as the crew bustle around, readying anather setup on the $150 million production. Carnage surrounds us: overturned cars, ruins and rubble, the result of a missile attack perpetrated by the dastardly Philip Seymour Hoffman. The gun clutched tightly in Cruise's hand is about to see same... "ACTION!"

Cruise bolts into shot.

A helicopter tears through the sky.

The star sprints, leaps, stumbles, climbs onto a car and sprays lead... but to no avail.

"You're out of bullets and you didn't hit the chopper," shouts Abrams from behind the camera, reminding Cruise of the context of the shot. "They've gone and you're frustrated!"

And probably a little lucky. Earlier in the day Total Film witnessed the spectacular central stunt from this key "bridge sequence" action set-piece; a stunt which suggests a level of peril which any man, even 'superspy' Hunt (a man who escaped intact from a John Woo actioner, after all), would be extremely fortunate to survive.

A mammoth, 16-wheeler truck raced down the bridge, aiming for a gap between an iron barrier and same wrecked cars - a rock and a hard place. It didn't make it. The flip, the flight, the sight of a 20-tonne vehicle gliding through the air will stay with Total Film for a long time, never mind the fact that it was closely followed by a chopper whizzing by with the bear-like Hoffman glowering out.

Two months later, we've swapped continents: but are still with Cruise. In Shanghai. Well, a small village just outside Shanghai. The set is guarded by cake-necked security guards, mindful of hundreds of hysterical Chinese fans taking pictures of the action from their bedroom windows. It is a very small village. And they're getting quite a show. Cruise is in Action Man mode again, scampering across a stream and past a string of red lanterns, before sprinting into the distance, a camera tracking him the length of three football pitches.

A billion-dollar franchise. A sequel six years in the works. An action epic that nearly blew up.

"God, he's fast," mumbles the star's stunt double, who has, it must be said, had bugger-all to do all day. Standing idle even as a rooftop chase requires his famous twin to leap over buildings without a wire, the stuntman can only hug himself against the cold.

Cruise feels no such chill. "I love to do my own stunts," he says, nipping over during a rare break in filming. "I do it because I want to entertain the audience and myself." With that, he claps a hand on our shoulder and strolls off towards an exercise bike, intending to keep limber before heading back to the action.

At lunch, Abrams sits down for a quick chat. "This whole scene was originally set in Tokyo," he says between mouthfuls. "But we've seen that dty on screen every now and then. I was just fascinated by Shanghai - it looks like it's out of a science-fiction movie.”

And how is he finding the pressure of marshalling bloody enormous set-pieces on his feature-length directorial debut? "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 pauses, perhaps aware of an unavoidable cliche. "To be honest, making Mission: Impossible III has been a dream come true!'

Which is just as well, because its origin was something of a nightmare.

"The script wasn't there and I'd already fucked up one movie with a '3' in the title," says David Fincher, explaining why he passed on Cruise's third mission, memories of Alien3 still haunting him. The Panic Room director was Cruise's original choice to helm the sequel, once he'd decided each instalment in the franchise should have a fresh director (a good move, given the lukewarm critical reaction to Woo's M:I-2). But pressure from Paramount to secure a May 2004 release date saw Fight Club's genius drop out, deciding if he didn't have time to do it properly, he'd rather not do it at all.

Cruise/Wagner Productions quickly replaced him with Joe Carnahan, the young director whose bruising cop drama, Narc, they'd championed. The new Mission was to be hard-edged and murky. (Total Film understands an early, pre-9/11 script treatment was about a terrorist destroying famous international landmarks.) But then, in July 2003, unspecified "creative differences" saw Carnahan leave the project, mere weeks before production was due to start. Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner flipped through the Rolodex. Soon, Abrams got the call.

"I thought, 'Why is Tom Cruise calling me? Am I in trouble?'"he laughs, sitting with Total Film on the Paramount lot, three months after our sojourn in Shanghai."It just seemed so surreal."

Surreal, and also somewhat tricky. For all his desire to work with Cruise, Abrams had one small problem: he didn't like the script. "The screenplay Joe Carnahan was working to dealt with issues that, in my opinion; were just too big and serious for Mission: Impossible," he explains. "It was cool and incredibly dark, but it had an energy like Narc," says Abrams. "It just wasn't my version of Mission: Impossible.”

"I Knew about JJ's ability to tell stories. I depended on him entirely. I had a total blast making this movie"

Tom Cruise

Which put him in a very awkward position. Here he was, a TV director (albeit critically acclaimed) being given the chance to work on one of Hollywood's biggest franchises. But he didn't want to direct the movie they had in mind to make. "I told Tom, 'I get this, but it's not my thing: He said, 'Okay, let's wait a year and do your thing.'" Abrams is still clearly surprised at this good fortune. "I couldn't believe it”

It wasn't the only shock. Despite the fact Mission: Impossible gives every outside impression of being a Cruise-controlled franchise, Abrams claims he felt astonishing-freedom. He drafted in old friends and former Alias co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to work on the script (the pair most recently had a hand in The Island and The Legend Of Zorro; they are also working on Michael Bay's Transformers) and set about taking part three of the saga in a completely different direction.

"Just because it was Mission: Impossible III, just because it was Tom Cruise, that really wasn't enough in terms of making this movie something I thought was worthwhile,” he says. "I wanted to do a story about a man who was a spy but who would come home and we'd see how that affected him as a person. How does a man live his life undercover? That for me was the way in, telling the story not from a spy's point of view, but from a man's."

Abrams insists Cruise didn't pressure him to mould the third in a franchise around a specific formula. "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, incredulity creeping back into his voice. "This is a guy that could micro-manage every aspect of this movie if he wanted to, but this was my movie and I got to do it with Tom Cruise! Every day I thought, 'This has to be a joke - this is my first movie, why is he letting me do this?'"

(Ask Cruise and you get a straight answer: "I already knew he had the ability to tell stories. So the first thing I said to him was, 'I want this film to be JJ Abrams' Mission: Impossible. I depended on him entirely.")