The director who “didn’t allow” Tom Cruise to kick him off their movie: “He couldn’t do that”
With very few exceptions, when you make a movie with Tom Cruise, you’re making a Tom Cruise movie.
You could argue that there’s no difference between those two things, but you’d be wrong. Alejandro G Iñárritu has recently made a movie with Tom Cruise, and for all intents and purposes, the actor has allowed himself to be moulded into the director’s vision for the first time in a long time.
On the other hand, Christopher McQuarrie makes Tom Cruise movies. He might be the screenwriter, director, and/or producer on most of the star’s output over the last dozen or so years, but make no mistake; there’s only one man who wields the most power on those productions, and it’s not him.
Most of Cruise’s filmography from the last three decades can be split into those two camps: Magnolia is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Eyes Wide Shut is a Stanley Kubrick movie, and Collateral is a Michael Mann movie, but the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, Knight and Day, Top Gun: Maverick, and most egregiously, The Mummy, are all Tom Cruise movies.
When one of the biggest stars in Hollywood is also the leading man and producer, they’ll have plenty of input, but Cruise takes things to another level. He works on the script, develops the action sequences, devises his latest death-defying stunts, and is so hands-on that it might explain why his collaborations with big-name auteurs who are used to total autonomy have become so rare.
Even though he’d made several of the greatest action movies of all time, and he was a world-renowned filmmaker in his own right, when John Woo signed on to make Mission: Impossible 2, he wasn’t the top dog. His job was to make the sequel look good, which he did, with the film’s many shortcomings in the script, character, plot, and making sense departments being somewhat outside of his control.
In fact, Woo admitted that once principal photography had wrapped and it was time to enter post-production, he was almost out on his arse. When asked if the rumours were true that Cruise had tried to lock him out of the editing process on the second instalment, the Hard Boiled helmer didn’t deny it.
“Actually, he couldn’t do that,” Woo replied, insinuating that he’d tried, only to be shut down. “After the movie finished, he went to Australia for vacation, and then he wanted to put a camera in the cutting room to see our work, because he wanted to know what we were doing, and we didn’t allow him to do that.”
As a result, Woo and Mission: Impossible 2‘s credited editors, Christian Wagner and Steven Kemper, were free to finish the picture without his interference. Had he gotten his way, though, it sounds like Woo would have been gone, and he’d have been spying on the editing suite from the other side of the world.
