“Mission: Impossible 7” Director Christopher McQuarrie Reveals He Considered De-Aging Tom Cruise for a Scene
While you might consider Tom Cruise essentially ageless, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie admits he considered de-aging the ageless superstar for a scene.
McQuarrie was talking to Total Film about the seventh installment in the venerable franchise and revealed that he had a certain sequence in mind that would have required a younger version of Cruise’s Ethan Hunt.
“Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989,” McQuarrie said. “We talked about it as a cold open, we talked about it as flashbacks in the movie, we looked at de-aging.”
The reason that McQuarrie ultimately decided against it was that despite the technology’s vast improvement, there was one thing he couldn’t shake about it.
“One of the big things about [the de-aging] I was looking at while researching, I kept saying, ‘Boy, this de-aging is really good,’ or, ‘This de-aging is not so good.’ Never did I find myself actually following the story.”
Then, when McQuarrie actually went through the process of testing the de-aging technology out on his longtime collaborator, he found himself too mesmerized by it. “I was so distracted by how an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person.,” he told Total Film.
We just saw a younger Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny after VFX artists de-aged Indy by nearly 40 years for the opening sequence. Ford’s not alone. Brad Pitt did it. Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro did it. Samuel Jackson and Will Smith did it, too.
So, while there will be no younger Cruise in Dead Reckoning Part One, the research process opened the doors for a potential peak at a younger Cruise on a future project, McQuarrie said.
“In researching that [technology], I cracked the code – I think – on how best to approach it,” McQuarrie told Total Film. “By then, we had kind of moved away from it. We may still play with it. We never say never.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters now.
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Mission: Must Watchable – 10 of the Biggest Remaining Summer Films
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Featured image: Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
