In Focus

April 2006

This article reprinted by permission of the
National Association of Theatre Owners, © 2006.

IMPOSSIBLE

MOVIE FORCE

by Mike Russell
The Creator Of TV’s ALIAS and LOST
Arms Paramount’s Biggest Movie Franchise
Like the resurrected “Superman” franchise — for which J.J. Abrams wrote a controversial, unproduced script a few years ago — “Mission: Impossible III” struggled through a long and abortive pre-production history.

Veteran directors David Fincher (“Seven,” “Fight Club”), Joe Carnahan (“Narc”), and Frank Darabont (“The Green Mile”) all spent time in producer-star Tom Cruise’s offices, trying to figure out how to continue the adventures of IMF superagent Ethan Hunt.

So how did Abrams — the TV strongman who created the teen drama “Felicity,” the sci-fi spy serial “Alias” and the castaway blockbuster “Lost” — get to make his big-screen directorial debut on a $150-million Paramount tentpole?

Abrams, who wrote and directed acclaimed pilots for both “Alias” and “Lost,” traces the opportunity to the distribution of freebies. “I met Tom with Steven Spielberg during ‘War of the Worlds,’” he recalls. “I wasn’t available, because I was working on a version of ‘Superman’ which never happened, and I started doing ‘Lost’ and pilots. It was a great meeting, but I had to tell him I couldn’t do it, and I thought, ‘There goes my opportunity to work with these guys.’”

Flash-forward several months. “I was shooting the ‘Lost’ pilot, and I got a call from Tom. When he left my office, my assistant gave him the DVDs of the first two seasons of ‘Alias’ as, um, swag — and he actually watched them, which is miraculous. And he loved them. He wanted to hang out when I got back.

“I thought ‘Mission III’ was going swimmingly [without me]. He never brought up any issues, but I guess things just weren’t working out. And he asked me if I was interested in directing it. I told him I couldn’t start for about a year — because I was working on ‘Lost’ and ‘Alias’ — and I told him I’d want to start over with the story.

“He said, ‘OK.’”

Abrams laughs. “You know, the odds of that happening were zero. The whole thing was impossible.”
In Focus spoke with Abrams for almost an hour, about “Mission: Impossible III,” “Alias,” “Lost” and related matters. (Be sure to marvel at how carefully he dances around “M:I III” character and plot details.) A transcript follows.

The first “M:I III” teaser trailer seemed to echo the very underrated “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” — what with the agent’s significant other in peril, plus a bulky, well-spoken villain.
Well, not intentionally — although, as a happy by-product, I’ll gladly be compared to anything that's underrated or of any quality. [laughs]

The story — while in no way based on that, and in fact being incredibly careful to avoid “Bond” comparisons — definitely has similar themes. I think you’ll see in [“Mission: Impossible III”] a side of Ethan Hunt that hasn’t been in the films before. Tom gives an unbelievable performance.

I remember one director saying that Cruise told him something like, “You want one more take? I’ll give you a hundred more!”
Yeah, pretty much every day, something would happen where I’d say, “Let’s go again. Are you okay to try something different?” And his response, almost invariably, was, “I’m here to work!”

This is a guy who could get to the set at noon and leave at 3 every day if he wanted to. And the physical punishment — unlike a stuntman, he’ll do physical scenes, and then he’ll have to keep going with emotional and dialogue scenes.

It’s hard to really appreciate the amount of work he does unless you consider what goes into shooting a movie of this scale over this period of time.

You said Frank Darabont is one of your “favorite writers and did unbelievable work on the [‘Mission: Impossible III’] script.” So what made you decide to start over?
I wanted to start from scratch because it wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t my story. It wasn’t the kind of approach that I would take. Not to say that it wasn’t brilliant, or that if Joe Carnahan or Frank Darabont had directed that installment, it wouldn’t have been unbelievable — I’m sure it would’ve been.

Was the Darabont script the one that was rumored to involve Africa and black-market organ rings?
A portion of the Darabont script took place in Africa, in Ghana. It was incredibly well-written — a classic, densely plotted thriller. It was terrific. It just wasn’t the version of “Mission: Impossible” I thought I could do.

There was too much at stake to come in and work on a story that I didn’t feel, in my heart, was sort of my territory. It's not just the money that's at stake: I feel beholden to the franchise that Bruce Geller created — the spirit of the TV shows, the movies, the character that means so much to Tom. He’s incredibly proud of his first producer effort. I was shocked that he was open to starting over.
THE HEAVY HEAVY &
HUNTING FOR HUNT
Well, let’s talk about your version. What’s the story with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character?
On the face of it, if you say, “Phil Hoffman and Tom Cruise are gonna be matched intellectually and physically,” you think, “Tom Cruise will probably kick his ass.” [laughs] But when you see this movie, Phil Hoffman is so imposing and so scary and brutal. He infuses the role with wit and honesty. There’s nothing worse than a bad guy who feels flimsy or arch.

Even though the lines he has in the trailer are wildly over-the-top, that exchange suits him in that moment. I don’t think we’ve seen Ethan Hunt go up against somebody so dangerous.
Can you tell me anything about the character Hoffman’s playing?
Uh … not much. [laughs] I can say that he essentially plays a provider of, um, materials to organizations and countries that jeopardize the stability of the world. This guy is essentially the middleman who gets bad people bad things — and it’s a priority for Western intelligence to find him and take him out. He’s incredibly elusive and sophisticated.

And what begins as a fairly generic story — “there’s a bad guy and he needs to be taken down” — becomes a very specific and very personal story through the movie.

The typical story is that actors love playing juicy villains. Still, I can’t help but wonder if Hoffman, being a serious fellow, found a way to torture himself while playing this nasty son of a bitch.
We laughed all the time. Phil’s sense of humor is wonderful and dry and self-deprecating. I actually met him years ago, just after college. He has incredibly strong opinions about how he wants to play something, but he takes notes and suggestions and incorporates them into what he does. While he’s very serious, he is in no way one of those Actors with a capital A. All he cares about is that what he’s doing is good. It was an incredibly ego-free set.

We hear the movie will deal with Ethan’s home life. Is he married at this point? And what role does Michelle Monaghan play?
She’s a love interest. You’ll see how that relationship works.

To me, the fun of the story — and the crux of my approach to this film — is where the professional side of this super-spy meets the personal and intimate side. The conflict exists for all of us: How do you maintain a home life and a personal life with any real commitment, and maintain a professional life at the level you aspire to?
Well, the only personal aspect of Ethan Hunt’s life that we’ve seen up to this point is him rock-climbing at the start of “Mission: Impossible II.”
And you’ve learned in “Mission I” that his parents died. But aside from those two moments, there’s really not any sense of this person as a person. He’s always a super-person.

The fun of “Mission: Impossible” was always the teamwork. One of the beautiful things in this movie is that we’ve got Maggie Q, Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Billy Crudup, Keri Russell,
Simon Pegg … this credible supporting cast. The teamwork, for me, was always the greatest part of the “Mission” TV series. And in “Mission I” and “II” — with some exceptions in “Mission I” — they’ve really been Ethan-Hunt-as-spy movies.

That isn’t to say that “Mission III” isn’t ultimately Ethan’s movie — it is — but the team has a crucial role in the entire film. For me, what’s fun in the film is watching how these people work together, plan an operation and execute it. The supporting cast is as much a reason to see this film as any of the stunts, or even Tom himself.
CHARACTER
in ACTION
Each director put his own stylistic mark on the first two films, particularly when it came to action sequences: DePalma echoed Kubrick and Hitchcock, Woo echoed, um, Woo. I’m wondering how you’ll be shooting the action in MI:3.
I think the critical thing for me is that we never cross a line and get into physical impossibility.

No wire-fu?
Well, I’m not saying there wasn’t some wire removal in the movie —

Well, sure.
As much as I’m a fan of “The Matrix” and many of Woo’s movies, my fear in this film…. My fear in general is that I have no idea if I have a style at all. But my fear was that any style at all — whomever I was borrowing from, or whomever I might get inspired by — would overshadow the story.
So my decision was to approach it from a standpoint of serving the story, so I never came into something with an aesthetic choice leading the way. It was always, “What are the characters going though?” It was a relief for us, in a way. By constantly focusing on what needed to be dramatized, it dictated its own style.

You’ll see that the action is incredibly hard-core, very fast-paced — but there are equally intimate scenes that are emotionally incredibly pitched.

And the approach to the action, for me, is clarity. In action scenes, there’s often so much freneticism, you get lost in terms of what the hell’s going on. What you’ll see, during our seven substantial action sequences, is that you know where you are.

We didn’t design any of the action sequences first — I didn’t want the action scenes to be dragging the characters through them. I wanted the characters to be driving all the action. What the actors are attempting to achieve makes the action exist.

To me, in the most exciting action movies — “Die Hard,” “The Fugitive” — each sequence, big or small, was completely connected to what the characters wanted, and why. I was aspiring to a movie that was fundamentally a character piece — even though it happens to have more action than the first two “Mission”s combined.
People always forget that it was 20 minutes before the first bullet was fired in “Die Hard.”
It’s actually, I think, more than 20 minutes. Look at “Back to the Future”: It took over half an hour to really set up everything before he went back in time. Or look at “Tootsie”: They spend at least a reel of the film, if not more, setting up who Michael is, who his friends are, how desperate he is — so that when he’s walking down the street as Dorothy Michaels, you’re so engaged in that story….

Now, that isn’t to say that you don’t want to start a movie off with a real punch. And I think we do. But it’s critical that you invest the audience in the characters — especially in a sequel.

When you look at the “Indiana Jones” or “Die Hard” sequels, as successful as they are, there’s something about those movies that doesn’t invest as much in the characters. You can’t assume, “Because the first one or the second one worked, you know who he is. Let’s just get to it.” I think every minute you don’t spend investing the character makes it that much harder to care about what he or she is going through in any action sequence.

Sure. And of course, you had the granddaddy of all TV fight scenes at the end of one “Alias” season. [I’m referring to the epic Sydney-Evil Francie kitchen fight at the end of Season 2.]
The two women?

Yeah. I know people who swear by that action scene as one of the best they’ve ever seen on TV.
[laughs] That’s very sweet. There’s actually a scene in “M:I:III” that that fight scene in “Alias” was training for.
What did doing years of doing spy television teach you about doing a spy movie?
Doing “Alias” and “Lost” — beyond the fact that I never would have gotten this opportunity if it weren’t for those shows — was undoubtedly the greatest training ever. Knowing how to work on the timetable that television requires. Getting to understand the genre as shorthand….

Tom had an uncanny ability to discuss the conventions of the genre with such ease that it felt very much like a meeting with any of the “Alias” writers. We both knew the kind of second- and triple-guessing we needed to do in order to tell some of these stories.
It was important in terms of combining a pulp genre with true emotional situations. It was important in terms of action sequences — I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the editing room with action sequences I have or haven’t directed, getting a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

So when I was on the “Mission” set, I had this bag of tricks I knew I could pull out if I needed to. And I had a comfort level that allowed me to show up on the set and try and be as creative as possible — the way I used to when I was a kid, and I would go on vacation with my parents and walk through a hotel lobby and go, “How could I film a chase scene here?” I’d always look at every place I went as a location for some kind of action sequence. Had I not done “Alias” or “Lost,” I’m sure I would have been far more insecure about what choices to make.
‘MISSION’
RESTORATION
The “Mission: Impossible” TV series was born in 1966, the same year you were, and was out of production before you entered the first grade. Did the TV series have any influence on how you approached the movie?
Well, I became familiar with the TV series when I was very young, in reruns — but I also re-acquainted myself with it during the early “Alias” years.

For me, the most critical thing in approaching the movie was not borrowing from the TV show — with one major exception, which I’ll tell you about. It was more that I wanted to bring the spirit of the show’s teamwork to the movie. The fun of watching a group plot and execute some kind of mission was something I didn’t feel was as critical to the other “Mission” films as I would have preferred. This was an opportunity to not be the Monday-morning quarterback, but rather to make the movie that, for better or worse, I want to see. And the teamwork is part of that.
I’m sure if I heard it, I’d know it. [J.J. Abrams starts humming “The Plot”] Oh, yeah yeah yeah!
I mean, literally — they’ve never used it in the movies.
That’s a crime.
And that’s the theme that was most often used when you were watching the team do their thing — it spoke of that IMF spirit. As much as the main theme song gets your mojo working, “The Plot” was the heart of the series. And the fact that it was never used in the movies was ludicrous to me. I get to bring that back. Michael Giacchino is composing for the movie, adapting Schifrin’s work.

Giacchino’s a great choice — he already did such a wonderful job weaving Schifrin [and John Barry] into “The Incredibles.” He’s a phenomenal composer.
And his storytelling skill’s as good as his compositional skill. He has an inherent understanding of character and story and rhythm and pace. Throughout the years, working on “Alias” and “Lost” with him, he’ll constantly suggest story adjustments or cuts or things that don’t quite ring true. He’s an incredible resource.
‘ALIAS,’ ‘LOST’
& JAMES BOND
When “Alias” concludes this May, will we finally learn why we zoom through one letter in the name of every city Sydney Bristow visits?
[laughs] You may or may not learn why. But ultimately, it really is just a convention of the show, as opposed to it having any sort of big answer.

We’ve discussed, along the way, various ways to play with that and kind of put it to rest. But we have sort of bigger fish to fry, in terms of concluding the end of the season and the series.

Will Milo Rambaldi play a significant role in the “Alias” finale, or has that ship sailed?
There will be a Rambaldi component to it. We would have actually gone there far more — and in greater detail, as we originally conceived it — if the network had been more amenable to that. But they were always very anti-Rambaldi, so we kind of had to pull back.

Did you ever consider a circumstance that would have necessitated casting Rambaldi?
We actually have. In a flashback once, you actually saw a piece of his hand, but you never actually saw who he was.

[brief pause] We actually have — yes.
Once “Mission: Impossible III” hits cinemas, do you see yourself taking a more active role in guiding “Lost’s” third season?
I’d love to become more involved in “Lost” next year — which, in many ways, would be almost anything, given how time-consuming the movie’s been. I’m incredibly grateful to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse for running the show this year and doing such a great job. But I’d love to direct an episode. I miss those guys like crazy.
Everyone seems a little stunned that your bounty-hunter pilot “The Catch” didn’t go to series at ABC. What happened there?
I honestly think the show just wasn’t what ABC wanted on their schedule. To be honest, I think it was an uphill battle from the beginning — because the people who green-lit it to begin with were just no longer at the network. We did three pilots last year. One of them’s gonna get picked up. We’re doing another pilot this year called “Six Degrees” that’s terrific.

“The Catch” starred Greg Grunberg, whom I’ve worked with on “Felicity” and “Alias” — he was the pilot on “Lost,” and he has a small role in “Mission” — and he was terrific in the show. In many ways, I wish it had happened. In other ways, given how much I had to devote myself to the movie, it would have been difficult to do the pilot and then run.

As someone who straddles both worlds, what’s your perspective on working in television versus working in film?
My perspective is that any way you can tell a story and reach the audience is exciting and worth doing.

There’s a level of sophistication now — even in little kids — about story. Unconsciously, they understand the setup and anticipate the payoff of storylines. Maybe that’s because of the vast number of entertainment opportunities available now — they’re just besieged by stories.

So you have to really think: What is the reason you’re telling your story? What makes your story worth anyone’s time — to go to the theater, to turn the channel? You need to keep people from feeling like they’re watching something they can anticipate or predict. There’s too much out there that’s too well-done to assume that — because you have a star or a title — the movie’s gonna get the audience’s attention.

And the Internet allows for word to spread immediately about how something may or may not be worth your time. I think people are now gauging the consensus of what’s worth doing and what’s not. Even if the official newspaper and magazine reviews are good, if the online consensus is “Don’t waste your time” or “It’s a good rental,” you’re dead. If you’re seeing an increase in sophistication, whether it’s in television or in film, my guess is that’s it’s a reaction: “Oh, we have to make really good stuff, or people won’t come.”

Our ambition with “Mission: Impossible III” was to make a movie that’s good that just happened to star Tom Cruise and be part of this franchise.

You’ve spoken often of your love — some might call it a nerdly love — of the James Bond franchise. If Sony approached you to make a Bond movie, could you refuse, or did “Mission: Impossible III” scratch that itch?
If they did — and I can’t imagine they would — while it would be hard to refuse an opportunity like that, James Bond is such an iconic series, I almost can’t imagine being part of that. I need to be the audience for that — you know what I’m saying? It’s almost sacrilege to imagine working on those.

And from everything you’ve said, it sounds like you feel very strongly about authorship — and authorship is tough to pull off with something that established.
I think that’s true. That was the beauty of “Mission.” Unlike so many producers and actors who have a very rigid view, Tom literally said, “What’s your ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie?” I hope when you see the film, you feel that energy. And if you don’t like it, I’m 100-percent to blame.  

This article reprinted by permission of the National Association of Theatre Owners, © 2006.

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