At the 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' premiere, screenwriter Erik Jendresen chats with THR and describes there being more stories to tell in the 'Mission: Impossible' universe. Plus, he describes working with Tom Cruise, calling him the "most delightful collaborator" he's ever worked with.
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00:00Is this the final reckoning?
00:02Got to see the movie.
00:03And who knows?
00:05Who knows what the future will bring?
00:06Do you feel like that there is more story to tell here?
00:09Is there always more story to tell when it comes to Mission Impossible?
00:12Of course there's always more story to tell.
00:14I mean, I think that what we set out to do was to tell a story about the ultimate villain
00:23and who happens to be, I think, fairly relevant to what everybody's going through today.
00:28And, yeah, I mean, it's up to our imaginations if there's going to be something beyond this.
00:34I'm not really sure.
00:36When you're both crafting the screenplay, obviously a big thing that everyone talks about is the stunt work in this.
00:43When you're crafting the screenplay, do you have the stunt as the jumping off point
00:48or are you crafting the story first and then inserting what would be the great stunt second fitting?
00:53Frequently, Chris and Tom sit down and they say, what do you want to do?
00:59I want to do this.
01:00I want to wing walk.
01:02What do you want to do?
01:03I want to do something on a submarine.
01:05And it sort of begins there.
01:08It's not that we're retroactively retrofitting the story, but it's, okay,
01:13so if these are going to be sequences in the movie, how do we tell the story that we want to tell around those?
01:20And it's always about interrogating how organic it is to the story and how emotionally resonant it is.
01:28We're constantly interrogating ourselves and what we're doing to make sure that it is the most truthful and emotionally relevant, I think,
01:38to bring it to the screen.
01:41Obviously, that's a very collaborative process.
01:44How would you describe Tom as a collaborator?
01:46I've never experienced anybody quite like him.
01:48He has a supernatural sensitivity to emotional truth, not just of characters,
01:56but of circumstances and basic story structure itself.
02:00So he is the most delightful collaborator I think I've ever worked with, and a non-writing collaborator,
02:08but the three of us are constantly coming up with a story, and that's what it's really all about.
02:14No, I've really never encountered anybody quite like him.
02:16He's got this very highly tuned barometer for sort of emotional relevance and truth, and it's really valuable.
02:25It's a gift.
02:26Do you have an all-time favorite Tom Cruise stunt that he's been able to pull off?
02:32The stunt I would love to see him pull off is to sit still for 60 seconds.
02:39I think that would be amazing.
02:42That's the true mission, impossible.
02:44Exactly.