George Lucas’ secret contribution to ‘Mission Impossible’: “Where’s your spaghetti scene?”
Famously, when the group of young directors who would come to define the ‘New Hollywood’ era first burst onto the scene in the 1960s and ’70s, they all pitched together to help each other with their movies. George Lucas’ contributions to the films of his pals Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola were many and varied, for example, while Coppola initially wanted Martin Scorsese to direct The Godfather Part II.
Amazingly, though, this energy carried through for decades after these directorial titans had become household names. Lucas and Spielberg teamed up on the Indiana Jones franchise, and Spielberg dropped out of Cape Fear because he thought his buddy Scorsese would do a better job. Then, when Lucas paid a visit to the set of 1996’s Mission: Impossible, directed by another member of their friend group, Brian De Palma, he made a suggestion that dramatically improved the finished film.
When De Palma signed up to direct the first instalment of what many consider the greatest modern action franchise, he wasn’t exactly known for his action chops. De Palma specialised in lurid, darkly sexy thrillers (Dressed to Kill and Body Double), and ultraviolent crime pictures (Scarface, Carlito’s Way). In fact, before Mission: Impossible, De Palma’s most significant commercial hit was the gangster epic The Untouchables, which came out nine years before Tom Cruise’s debut as superspy Ethan Hunt.
Despite this, Cruise felt De Palma was the right man to update the classic ’60s television series for the big screen, and he was proved right. De Palma delivered an old-school spy thriller filled to the brim with intrigue and tension. Still, he also didn’t skimp on the action quota, with particular highlights being an explosive aquarium explosion and a scintillating helicopter chase through a train tunnel.
When Lucas was shown an early cut of the film by De Palma, though, all of these pyrotechnics meant little to the Star Wars helmer. Why? Because he didn’t have a clue why any of it was happening. During an appearance on the Light the Fuse podcast, De Palma revealed that a frustrated Lucas told him, “There’s no setup to this thing. You’ve got to set this thing up! ‘You’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do that.’ You’ve got to have that scene where they’re all sitting around the table and everybody gets their instructions.”
A shocked De Palma realised his friend was right; he hadn’t included a scene in which Cruise and the Impossible Mission Force team were briefed about their first improbably dangerous task. This meant the film launched almost immediately into a sequence with everyone except Cruise being killed off during a botched mission. However, Lucas didn’t know who anyone was and had no grasp of their personalities or importance to the team, so he didn’t care as much about their deaths.
Amusingly, when Emilio Estevez, who cameoed in the film as one of Hunt’s ill-fated team members, was asked about Lucas’ timely intervention, he claimed the director gave it a considerably more unusual designation. Estevez said Lucas asked, “Where’s your spaghetti scene?” which only bemused De Palma. “You know, the spaghetti scene where the crew’s sitting around and they’re eating pasta and talking about what’s gonna happen next?” Lucas continued, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We get to know them over spaghetti.”
So, with Lucas’s pasta protestations in mind, De Palma took his pal’s advice and shot a new opening sequence with the crew eating dinner while subtly conveying exposition and ingratiating themselves to the audience in the small amount of screentime they had. It worked brilliantly, heightening the shock of seeing them bite the dust barely a few minutes later – and De Palma likely never forgot to add a “spaghetti scene” in any of his future films.
