Emmanuelle Béart: her fond memory of Tom Cruise

Emmanuelle Béart played Claire Phelps in the first Mission Impossible movie.

In an interview with ""50 minutes inside", she recalls the casting process

To land the role, she has an appointment with Tom Cruise in an apartment for the casting. "I was told to pin this young man against the wall and put a gun on his temple. And since I have a good energy, let's say, I said to myself "Ok, I'm doing it". And so I caught him, but I don't think he expected it, and he said to himself "a little French girl ..." and I was hired immediately. "

Since then, Emmanuelle Béart has had very good memories of Tom Cruise. “I found him quite exciting as an actor, extremely professional and generous. I'd love to see him again, he's someone good. "

https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/118257268.html

Mission Impossible revisited: Brian de Palma’s Mission Impossible

by A J Black | July 3, 2023

1996’s Mission: Impossible has much to unpick in it C not least as it began one of the longest running movie series of recent times. We dig into it here… Spoilers lie ahead… Given the direction the Mission Impossible series has taken over almost thirty years, all the way through to the fast approaching Dead Reckoning Part One, it is easy to underestimate just how impressively Brian De Palma’s 1996 original launched one of Hollywood’s biggest ever action franchises. Tom Cruise swiftly became attached to the revival of Bruce Geller’s beloved 1960’s espionage TV series having been a life-long fan of the series’ brand of escapism, but Mission Impossible is far from an honourable adaptation of the source material. It is interesting from the outset that Cruise does not reimagine himself as one of the original series characters for the modern cinematic age—players such as Barney Collier (who admittedly was black) or Rollin Hand. The only connective tissue to the original adventures of the Impossible Missions Force turns out to be Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps, the team leader of, from the outset, a unit which appears to be a long-standing, well-oiled machine. These people are clearly friends and, in the case of Emilio Estevez’s Jack Harmon & Kristin Scott-Thomas’ Sarah Davies, are on the verge of becoming something more. De Palma’s film establishes a team which could have been copied over from the original series, or indeed the idea that this could be the original Jim Phelps, having matured into a middle-aged operative who created an entire new team around him. The idea of Mission Impossible’s reboot working as a movie sequel was quickly disabused when the original Phelps, Peter Graves, declined the chance to reprise his role for De Palma’s film. His reasons certainly were not about being done with the character; as recently as the late 1980’s, he had been front and centre in a revival of the original series which had been off the air since the mid-1970’s. Graves rejected De Palma’s film, and thereby the chance to tether Phelps and the film to the original series, not just because De Palma chose to implode the idea of the IMF team itself, but have the previously inviolate bastion of all-American espionage, Phelps, turn out to be the villain of the piece. This incensed not just Graves but the original Collier, Greg Morris (who walked out of a screening before the end).

Why did Cruise, his first-time producing partner Paula Wagner, a multitude of screenwriters including Steven Zaillian, David Koepp & Robert Towne, and ultimately Brian De Palma, choose to destroy the very fabric of, what on the face of it, made Mission Impossible Mission Impossible? Because if you watch the film, and compare it with the TV series, they are without a doubt different beasts. Mind you, De Palma fools you into believing it might be a faithful adaptation with his first act, following the opening sequence whereby Phelps, Hunt and the IMF team use a range of theatrics. There are the infamous masks which would become a staple of the entire ensuing franchise, through to a con job using sets, performances and disguises, in order to get what they need from a target. The sixth film, Fallout, pays homage to this in a similar sequence before its own credit sequence, but the difference here is that the audience are in on the performance. De Palma gives us what we expect from Mission Impossible: teamwork, staging and illusion. The credits, which recall the original series too with a reworking of Lalo Schiffrin’s iconic theme and flashes of the mission to come, reinforce De Palma’s own illusion. The longer con is on the audience themselves. Hence why, when De Palma by the end of the first act, kills almost the entirety of the IMF team—including seemingly Phelps himself—during a mission that everyone expects them to succeed in as part of the greater challenge, you are left reeling. This has to be part of the illusion of the narrative, surely? The IMF team can’t all be dead! The clue is in casting Cruise, whose shelf-life as a global cinematic superstar is perhaps one of the most durable in Hollywood history. Cruise is now in his fifth decade as a leading man. Just let that sink in a moment. By the mid-90’s, he was very much established thanks to films from Top Gun all the way through to A Few Good Men. Cruise’s name was above the poster. Cruise was Mission Impossible now. This early on, however, we just didn’t know it. In short, Mission Impossible does not yet understand Ethan Hunt. It presents a very different character to the one Cruise eventually builds. Ethan, here, is the begrudging, vengeful spy betrayed, as far as he is concerned, by his own government after he is fitted up as a mole inside the IMF. The prey of the CIA, in the form of Henry Czerny’s delightfully officious Kittridge. It kickstarts what would become some of Mission Impossible’s most popular tropes, second only perhaps to the mask disguises C the mole and the disavowal. There is not one Mission Impossible film which does not either contain a mole working within American intelligence or Ethan’s loyalty and fidelity being questioned. All of this began in Mission Impossible the moment Ethan Hunt loses his team, because even despite characters such as Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell becoming a loyal ally over successive films, not one picture in this franchise has Ethan working, truly, as the cog inside a functional unit. Ethan is the machine.

1996 De Palma’s film is, principally, a deconstruction of what made the 1960’s TV series work. That show was created at the height of the Cold War, with American and Soviet tensions providing a backdrop for the kind of television that would take the post-war austerity of the 1950’s and frame it in glossier, brighter contexts. Mission Impossible came from the same Desilu Productions stable as Star Trek, which premiered the year before and as MI portrayed a unit which using trickery and manipulation to overcome the enemy, Star Trek looked forward to a future in which the hostilities of the Cold War would be a thing of the past in a new American, even globally united, frontier. Both shows even share Star Trek breakout star Leonard Nimoy as part of their casts. Whereas Star Trek permeated and managed a breakthrough toward the tail end of the darker 1970s in the American consciousness, Mission Impossible struggled to bring its brand of theatrical fancy back to a public who had moved on past the anxieties of the Cold War. Its return in the late 80’s, just a couple of years before the end of the century-defining conflict, didn’t last long. By the time De Palma’s big screen adaptation was in production, the Cold War was over. The Russian bear had been put down and, suddenly, American espionage didn’t work in the same way. Despite nasty brush fire wars across the 90’s such as Iraq or Kosovo, Mission Impossible returned in the decade defined by Francis Fukuyama in his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ as the titular ‘end of history’. Koepp and Towne’s eventual, credited script reflects this in Jim Phelps. When he is unmasked as the villainous architect of the NOC List theft, Phelps’ rationale is revealed in dialogue he offers freely to Ethan in outlining the mindset of the villain, Job, he is trying to convince Ethan exists:

You think about it Ethan, it was inevitable. No more Cold War. No more secrets you keep from yourself. Answer to no one but yourself. Then you wake up one morning and find out the President is running the country without your permission. The son of a bitch, how dare he? Then you realise, it’s over. You are an obsolete piece of hardware, not worth upgrading, you got a lousy marriage and sixty two grand a year.

There is quite a lot to unpick here. Principally the fact that Phelps’ turn to the dark side, the betrayal of his country and the American values we saw his same character embody in the 1960’s, at the height of the conflict against the Soviets, was fuelled by the lack of a defined ‘enemy’ for the intelligence community to fight. The destruction of his team also represents a pre-millennial fear that the enemy could be anywhere, even within. As opposed to the ideological Communist bloc close in our mind’s eye, but in literal terms far from our homeland. Mission Impossible‘s revival reflects a world filled with shadowy, unknown forces who could strike anywhere, at any time, right at the heart of where we feel safe. It almost prefigures the rise of spontaneous terrorism. Ultimately, Mission Impossible is trying to understand its place in a new geopolitical landscape, as well as in the changing trends and emerging post-modern narratives of the 1990s. Phelps in his soliloquy also mentions ‘hardware’ and this hints at the emergence of technological means in the post-Cold War paradigm that would replace the need for spies in the field doing the heavy lifting. This is in its infancy in Mission Impossible, which feels quite charming in watching Vanessa Redgrave’s playful arms dealer Max trying to upload floppy discs onto a computer system before the Channel Tunnel cuts off her connection. But the point remains that intelligence agencies now no longer need men like Phelps. Conversely, De Palma also wonders if they need the IMF, hence why he happily takes down the team thanks to their insider, and leaves Ethan free and clear to create his own ramshackle group of mercenaries to help him clear his name C primarily in the standout CIA Langley set piece, which remains one of the most impressive, iconic and not to mention tense, sequences in action cinema of the last thirty years. Mission Impossible does not sell Ethan, in this film, as any kind of James Bond proxy. Cruise’s charm is perfectly evident but Ethan is not a seductive, one-man killing machine, or indeed the death-defying nihilist he becomes post-MI3. Ethan here is a touch more enigmatic and distant, which befits the colder stylistics of De Palma’s approach to the material. His lens channels Hitch**** while imbuing the frame with a distinctly De Palma-level of paranoia. Behind the 90s action beats and slicker dynamic, there remains a visible 70s conspiracy aspect to Mission Impossible which is missing from subsequent pictures. It’s as if De Palma didn’t believe in the 60s show, or didn’t believe it could exist beyond the 60s, and intentionally tries to revive the property within a post-70’s culture. One where spooks like Kittridge reflect a government far more willing to sacrifice the lives of spies such as the IMF as part of a bigger, self-interested picture. You only have to look at the strange character of Claire Phelps to see how Mission Impossible doesn’t follow a traditional narrative pattern, particularly for a character like Ethan. MI2, in trying to recast him as an American folk hero spy, immediately gives him ‘the love interest’ who you know will be disposable by the end of the picture (which turns out to be the case), but De Palma never tips Ethan and Claire into any kind of conventional romance. There is sexual chemistry and clear frisson, which almost enters into sexually aggressive territory at one point, but there is only the suggestion that Ethan and Claire may have slept together, and that Ethan may have compromised his own morals in doing so. Yet, in much the way Ethan becomes a tactical master three steps ahead of his enemies, sleeping with Claire may have been part of his plan all along, when ostensibly it seems to be part of Phelps’ rouse. Claire, you see, played by Emmanuelle Beart, is a strangely inert character. She is a spy yet does not seem to have any real agency about her. She is married to Jim yet this almost feels like a technicality, given we see almost no sign of warmth or connection between them. She might or might not have been complicit in murdering the IMF team; during the beautifully executed scene in which Phelps reveals his guilt to the audience yet not directly to Ethan, but which can equally be read as Ethan figuring out that Phelps is Job, Ethan actively imagines and then discounts Claire as the one who blew up team member Hannah’s car. If Ethan does have feelings for Claire, this could be his way of refusing to countenance she could be a traitor or killer, and him trying to protect her, but De Palma keeps it ambiguous. We never quite know for sure, come the end, if Claire was always just in it for the money like her husband. She is also never really defined as a rounded character in her own right.

1996 Phelps certainly seems to believe Ethan slept with his wife and made that connection, given how in their final confrontation he quotes the Bible and the well-known passage: “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”. This plays into the odd level of religious symbolism which underlines Phelps’ extremism; he presents himself to Max as Job 3:14, which the CIA believe is code for an operation but Ethan figures out is the following Biblical passage:

with kings and counsellors of the earth, who built for themselves places now lying in ruins. This suggests Phelps is or was a religious man (and given Voight’s own personal leanings, very possibly a conservative), particularly in how he seems to be using Christian scripture to justify the betrayal of his nation. ‘Building for themselves’ references his own attempts to become a mercenary and profit over the deaths of many of his fellow spies still protecting their country, while the ‘places now lying in ruins’ could be how Phelps considers America; a country he does not recognise following the end of a career-defining hostility. There is a fundamentalist extremism at play here which, oddly, presages how certain Middle Eastern organisations would twist Islam to fit their own self-aggrandising interpretations as we entered the next decade. Oddly, though, Redgrave’s Max tells Ethan, when posing as Job, that “Job is not given to quoting scripture in his communications” after Ethan does just that, suggesting Phelps is a false prophet; he doesn’t really know or understand the Bible and it could just be another example of his warped psyche when it comes to America as a nation C using the Christian belief system which underpins the land of the free against it. De Palma doesn’t take these religious notions too much further but Christopher McQuarrie certainly revisits them 20 years later in Fallout; Ethan again poses as a terrorist underpinned by quasi-religious doctrine when making deals with Max’s daughter, no less. This is no doubt an intentional homage to the first film but it does show how Mission Impossible casts a long shadow across the rest of its own franchise. That’s the thing. Mission Impossible has never quite escaped the revisionist deconstruction of the 1960s tropes from Bruce Geller’s original TV series. The next film didn’t introduce more of the original series characters to work around Ethan, and make him part of the tricksy team effort (even try and make him into the virtuous Jim Phelps from the 60s). It didn’t keep Mission Impossible to a stock formula for the next few sequels. It didn’t try and repeat any narratives from the original show, updated for the post-modern 90s. What it did, as a franchise, was ensure its durability for two decades by changing the fabric of what it could be, veering closer and sometimes further away, from the original 60s aesthetic of the series, and always keeping Tom Cruise front and centre as the beating heart of the modern Mission Impossible. The day will come when Cruise, having turned 60, finally realises he’s a bit too old to be flinging himself off the world’s tallest buildings, and that is when Mission Impossible will evolve again. It may well go back to the original 60s team, to the style, and to the kind of Jim Phelps that Peter Graves and the original cast wanted to see updated for modern audiences. That would, arguably, work better now than it may have done in the 90s, when franchises and old-fashioned ideas were attempting to introspectively understand their own alchemy. Mission Impossible, across its sequels, realised that alchemy was Tom Cruise, but for the next generation it will be a different magic. Until we do, however, we should never forget that while Mission Impossible grew in scope, in stature and in style, the reason it has become one of Hollywood’s most consistently entertaining and strong franchises started with Brian De Palma’s skewed, almost nihilistic implosion of what Mission Impossible meant to audiences. The fuse was well and truly lit here and two decades on, the flame has never quite gone out.

https://filmstories.co.uk/features/mission-impossible-revisited-brian-de-palmas-mission-impossible/

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

/FILM 'ORAL HISTORY' OF 'MI' HEIST, w/SCRIPT & STORYBOARDS

NEW INTERVIEWS: CHRIS SOLDO, PAUL HIRSCH, ROLF SAXON, PAULA WAGNER & ASSOCIATE, TOM CRUISE'S STUNT DOUBLE, MORE

Ben Pearson at /Film has put together an amazing "Oral History Of Mission: Impossible's Iconic CIA Heist Scene." Not only is assistant director Chris Soldo one of the people interviewed, but Pearson also shares images from Soldo's personal archives of script pages and Brian De Palma's storyboards. Obviously, you'll want to read and re-read Pearson's entire article, but here are some highlights:

JC Calciano (Production Associate to Paula Wagner):

Honestly, I don't think anyone knows this. I think that five of us who were in this meeting ... I truly don't think anyone else outside of this meeting even knows this. When we were writing the script, we brought in a friend of mine. I had produced a movie in Arizona, and I met this woman who was a CIA agent. She and her husband were both CIA agents. So I brought her in as a consultant to help with the movie. Her name is Sue Doucette, and she came to London to help us as a consultant.

When we were working on the script and talking about the script, she told us that — and this is true — the CIA had a room that was ... I think there was a name for it, but I don't remember. There was no outside connections into this room. So this way, nobody could get to it. This particular room was the most secure room at the CIA. The only way you can get in is by one door with one agent. We wrote this scene based on her notes and experiences on that. She was so great, and she was so helpful. We hired her to be the actress who stands guard at the door for that scene.

Paul Hirsch:

The idea was to keep it as quiet as possible. This is an incredibly difficult chore for the sound editors, who can't stand silence — it just drives them crazy. And there was a closeup of the rope going over a little wheel, and they put in a tiny little squeak, and we had to say, "No, take it out, take it out. They wouldn't go in there with a squeaky wheel. This is 'Mission: Impossible!' They get it right." So we tried taking everything away, and that just didn't quite work. So there's a little bit of air going on.

Paula Wagner:

As a director, Brian De Palma was really great at creating tension and suspense, because it's all about the setup, and he was masterful at setting up the task and then creating obstacle after obstacle. So the threat had to be taken out of commission. I mean, this is beautiful teamwork on the part of Tom's team. This had to be so carefully orchestrated, so at the right moment, at the exact time, with the right dose, [Claire] had to put the drop in his coffee.

Rolf Saxon:

I was on it for, I think, two weeks, and I was working on [another] picture interspersed with that. I was being taken from one set to the other set, so I worked three weeks solid without a day off. That was great. Not complaining. I loved it. It was fun. But I got a little punch-drunk every once in a while, and I was messing around on set, joking around. The first [assistant director], Chris Soldo, came over and said, "Brian wants to have a word with you." And the look on his face was not good. I thought, "Oh jeez, here we go." [Brian] asked me to come over, I came over, and he said, "You're something of a clown, aren't you? A bit of a clown." Chris had said, "Look at me, and if I shake my head no, don't answer." He was standing behind Brian, and Chris and Brian had worked together for 10 years. Chris is a great guy. We're still friends.

So basically, there was a little bit of back and forth, and [Brian] said, "Can you do that again?" And I said, "I beg your pardon?" And he said, "Can you do that again? Make people laugh like that? Everybody was laughing, and I'd like to put that in the show." And I said, "Yeah, sure!" He said, "OK, after lunch, we'll spend a couple hours and put some funny stuff in." So after lunch, we spent all that afternoon and part of the next morning putting in a bunch of stuff, almost none of it which is still there. But the throwing up is. He said, "Do you want noise to happen?" Brian asked if I wanted noise in the bucket. I said, "No, I think they'll get the idea. My thinking is we don't want to gross people out, we want it to be sort of amusing." And he said, "OK, cool. Fine. Fine. That's great. Good idea," as he turned away.

Chris Soldo:

The closeup of the catching of the drop, that was done by a second unit. Brian's protege, second unit director Eric Schwab, who did all of the plate photography in Ireland for the train sequence. That was one of the shots that was handed off to him.

Keith Campbell (Stunt Double, Tom Cruise):

Catching the drop of sweat from the glasses, that was fun. I got to do that. That's actually my hand in there. But this camera was shooting 360 frames per second and it makes so much noise. I mean, I think you get one take for a roll of film on that because it's just going through so fast. I know I wasn't hanging in wires when we did the actual high-speed camera and the sweat dropping because it was such a closeup on the drop of sweat coming down and the hand coming in to catch it.

Rolf Saxon:

In Donloe's final scene, there was a particular gentleman who said, "And what about him?" and at one point, he ad-libbed, "And what about the geek?" and De Palma cut filming and said, "What did you say?" He said, "What about the geek?" and [De Palma] said, "Don't call Rolf a geek." I think that was the nicest thing he'd ever done to me in the entire two or three weeks. That was just really nice of him to do that.

https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blog/index.blog/1804145/film-oral-history-of-mi-heist-wscript-storyboards/

‘Incomprehensible!’: why the original Mission: Impossible was almost dead on arrival

In 1996, Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma’s reboot of an antiquated spy series was a risk in every sense. How did they pull it off?

Tom Fordy

10 July 2023 3:31pm BST

For the best-known sequence of the first Mission: Impossible movie C in which Tom Cruise dangles from the ceiling in a daring heist of CIA HQ C the filmmakers consulted with advisors from the real CIA. As producer Paula Wagner explains, “There was lots of research done C every conceivable movie, book, idea, and concept. There was a deep analysis of the secret service agencies.”

In the film, Cruise’s gone-rogue spy, Ethan Hunt, must drop into a high-tech computer vault and pilfer a highly-sensitive file. Screenwriter David Koepp recalled asking the CIA what real defences would be used in such a situation. To which they answered, erm, a security camera and a guard in a room somewhere watching the CCTV C the same level of security you’d reasonably expect at your nearest Tesco Metro. “Let’s just make up our own sCCC, it’s not a documentary!” Koepp recalled saying to director Brian De Palma, recounting the story on the Light the Fuse podcast.

And indeed they did make up their own defences: retina and voice scans, multiple security cards, and alarm systems inside the vault that are triggered by minuscule increases in temperature, noise, or pressure on the floor C even just a bead of sweat dropping from Tom’s face. Not only designed to guard the vault, but to crank up the ever-ratcheting tension. (See also: a rat in the vent; a dropped knife C both threatening to give the game away.)

For all of Cruise’s stomach-lurching stunt work in M:I sequels C including the latest, Mission: Impossible C Dead Reckoning C the CIA heist is still the series’ most enduring moment. It’s also the truest to the 1966-1973 TV series: a seemingly impossible mission, pulled off via intricate planning, crafty deceptions, and teamwork.

It’s stunning craftsmanship from Brian De Palma C a true master of suspense, demonstrating the same precision-perfect execution as the Impossible Missions Force. The tension De Palma squeezes from a single bead of sweat is incredible.

Cruise did the stunt work, naturally, beginning a trend that has intensified across the sequels. Dangling upside down for a few hours seems like small potatoes compared to clinging onto a plane during take-off. But it was punishingly hard to do. Attempting to hang parallel to the floor, Cruise kept tipping forward and bashing his face C so he stuck 1 coins in his boots to balance himself out horizontally.

It was De Palma who came up with the sequence, inspired by a similar set-piece in the 1964 heist movie, Topkapi. De Palma filmed the heist in near-silence C another nod to Topkapi, and a deliberate reaction against the sheer racket of other blockbusters. “All the action films coming out were so noisy!” says Wagner. “What could be done that was different? Silence. You couldn’t have a sound in that sequence. Nothing could disrupt the flow and ambiance in that room. That was unique unto itself C the concept of silence.”

Indeed, the 1996 Mission: Impossible was a different kind of blockbuster C a complex thriller with perspective-shifting rug-pulls C and markedly different from what the series is now. Not that modern M:I isn’t good stuff. It’s the most consistent and wildly inventive action series around. But even Dead Reckoning C out now C has tipped its hat and rubber mask to the first movie.

Tom Cruise on the set of Mission: Impossible with director Brian De Palma Credit: Alamy

Mission: Impossible was the first film that Tom Cruise produced himself. It was also his idea. “The conversation I remember most clearly was Tom calling me and saying, ‘We’re going to do Mission: Impossible C I love the series!’” says Paula Wagner. “And I loved it too.” Cruise and Wagner would also produce Mission: Impossibles 2 and 3 together. More recently, Wagner produced the Pretty Woman musical C on tour across the UK later this year.

Back in the 1990s, there was a Hollywood gold rush on old school TV properties. Between 1993 and 1999, there were also film versions of The Fugitive, Maverick, The Saint, The Avengers, and Wild Wild West. It preempted the current blockbuster formula. Almost 30 years on, every blockbuster is essentially a re-run. “This was early in taking a TV show and making it a movie,” says Wagner. “Now it’s done all the time. And this was before all the Marvel franchises. I think we were pioneers out there working out ‘What is this? How does this work as a movie? What are the elements that you keep? What are the things that you change and evolve?’ It was more than making a movie. It was bigger than that.”

But unlike The Fugitive et al, Mission: Impossible hadn’t been off screens all that long. Paramount had made attempts at an M:I film in the 1980s and brought back the TV show in 1988, with original series star Peter Graves. When Tom Cruise whipped off the rubber mask for the first time, M:I had only been off air for six years.

Cruise met Brian De Palma over dinner at Steven Spielberg’s house. The actor went home and studied De Palma’s films that same night, deciding De Palma was the right director to lead the mission. De Palma now seems like an unlikely choice to kick-start what the series has become: a Bond-like, all-action franchise, built on Cruise’s appetite for laughing-in-the-face-of-danger stunts. But the first M:I belongs to De Palma’s strand of meaty genre pictures C Scarface, The Untouchables, and Carlito’s Way. De Palma readily accepted the directing gig. “Because I was determined to make a huge hit,” he said in a 2015 documentary about his films.

De Palma brought in David Koepp, who’d also written Carlito’s Way. Koepp C a fan of the M:I show as a kid C recalled De Palma phoning while he was having dinner at a restaurant. There was no offering “your mission, should you choose to accept it.” De Palma got to the point. “Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise,” he instructed Koepp. “I have to see you in the morning.”

Writing the script was almost impossible itself. Koepp was let go and replaced by Robert Towne (writer of Tom Cruise’s racecar macho-fest, Days of Thunder). “It was like walking through the wilderness and carving out a new path,” says Wagner about the tricky development. Koepp was then brought back. At one point De Palma had the two writers in two different hotels, both working on the script at once C and sets were being built without them knowing for sure what material would actually be shot.

One of the major challenges, says Wagner, was “How do you reinvent a Cold War television series for a film in the mid-1990s?” Critics asked the same thing ahead of the film’s release. The original IMF team operated in the shadows of the Cold War. Regular targets included dictators and shady governments in made-up countries. Jon Voight’s IMF leader, Jim Phelps C the character played by Peter Graves on TV C comments on his place post-Cold War. “One day you wake up and the president of the United States is running the country without your permission. The son of a bCCCC, how dare he.” Phelps admits that he’s now just “an obsolete piece of hardware not worth upgrading.” GoldenEye, released just six months earlier, had similarly repositioned Bond for the 1990s C “a relic of the Cold War”.

Other changes were needed. The TV series had been about a team operation, with Phelps selecting his preferred agents at the start of each episode C each of whom had their own special skills to carry out their part of the mission. De Palma was not only subverting the conventions, he had to make M:I a star vehicle for Cruise, too. “The first thing we have to do is kill off the whole team,” said De Palma.

The film begins like the classic episodes: Phelps receives his mission (which he naturally chooses to accept) via a self-destructing tape, then assembles his team and plans out the mission. They have to seize a list of CIA agents from a target in Prague. But it’s a set-up. The team C including Emilio Estevez and Kristin Scott Thomas C are murdered one by one. Its rich De Palmian stuff: a dizzying swirl of trickery and kills, and shrouded in a thick fog of treachery. “You set the rules up and turn them on their head,” says Wagner. “You think you have your mission team, then they all die in the beginning! Just when you think it’s gonna turn out a certain way, it doesn’t.”

Martin Landau, who played master of disguise Rollin Hand in the TV series, declined a role in an earlier version of the film because the team was set to perish. “Why volunteer to essentially have our characters commit suicide?” he said in 2009.

Hunt C seemingly the only survivor and framed as a mole C goes on the trail of the real traitor. He assembles a new team of disavowed agents played by Jean Reno and Ving Rhames. Rhames’ character was supposed to die but he asked Koepp, “Why the black guy always gotta die?” Rhames saved his character, the hacking expert Luther Stickell, and secured himself a starring role in another six films.

The shocker, revealed later, is that Jim Phelps C team leader since the TV show’s second season C is in fact the traitor. The decision to make Phelps the bad guy caused some grumbling among the cast of the TV version. Peter Graves, however, was gracious. He said he wasn’t offered a role, but, if he’d known that Phelps was the villain, he wouldn’t have accepted anyway. “I don’t think I could have brought myself to play him as a bad guy,” said Graves. The Phelps betrayal was covered by outraged columnists, blowing both Phelps’ cover and the film’s big twist C the kind of thing that would cause a no-spoilers-please meltdown in 2023.

The 1996 action now seems relatively low-key C in contrast to Cruise trotting around the Burj Khalifa at 2,700ft, at least C though the film still hangs on three stunt sequences: the CIA HQ heist, a fight on a high-speed train, and Cruise jumping away from an exploding aquarium C a neat, watery twist on the standard jumping-away-from-an-explosion set-piece. Cruise performed the stunt himself, leaping away from literally tons of water, which required precision timing.

But Mission: Impossible is an unusually smart action film. In the later sequels, the trademark deceptions and confidence tricks are played like set pieces C usually punctuated by a punch-the-air mask rip. In the first Mission: Impossible, the deceptions are the fabric of the whole film. It wrong-foots viewers at almost every turn C a constant unraveling of misdirections, springing one reveal after another.

The labyrinthine plot wasn’t for everyone. After the film’s release, De Palma called Koepp and told him there was a one-word buzz about it: “Incomprehensible!”

In its smartest scene, Voight’s back-from-the-dead Phelps tries to sucker Hunt with an elaborate lie about how the botched Prague mission played out. Phelps narrates his version of events, but what we see is something completely different C Hunt figuring out what really happened. He knows that Phelps masterminded the double-cross. “If you look at De Palma films, his characters aren’t quite what you think they are C often appearances belie who the characters really are,” says Wagner about that sequence. “That was another aspect that Tom and I as producers really appreciated and supported. Not only the sleight of hand in terms of the action, but none of the characters were exactly who you thought they were.”

The film abandons the smarts for the final showdown. Phelps and Hunt fight across a train as it races through the Channel Tunnel C while Jean Reno gives chase in a helicopter. The new M:I film, Dead Reckoning, also stages a train fight C one of the seven-quel’s numerous nods to the first movie.

The original train showdown is still a thumping bit of action. It somehow puts you right onto the carriages C the feeling that you’re holding on for dear life just by watching it. When the classic Lalo Schifrin theme kicks in, and the helicopter rotor blade misses Cruise’s throat by a matter of inches, it’s undeniably thrilling.

Cruise and De Palma debated about whether to include the train-helicopter sequence. Cruise and Robert Towne, said De Palma, were pushing for the film to end with a mask reveal in the boxcar. De Palma would later deny reports of a rift between them, though they had a robust creative relationship.

“Tom is a very smart guy, and he had very strong opinions about things,” De Palma told Premiere magazine. “We would argue, but he always said, ‘Whatever you want to do, Brian.’ I made all the final decisions. We were deciding whether we needed the helicopter chase at the end. Tom thought about resolving the scene in the boxcar. I was pushing for the helicopter chase. I said, ‘We’re making Mission: Impossible here. We better have some wham-bang ending.’ I argued strongly about why I thought this would work, and he ultimately, I think, made the correct decision.”

Cruise certainly had no qualms about getting on that train. He clambered aboard the carriages at Pinewood Studios, in front of a blue screen, and was blasted by industrial-strength fans. “That’s really Tom standing on a train car with the wind coming in his face at hundreds of miles an hour. Trust me,” says Wagner. “It was very dangerous having to jump from one moving vehicle to another with the wind coming straight at him. We did it on the largest stage at Pinewood. It was very challenging. He would have been on a real train the whole time if he could.”

De Palma achieved what he’d set out to do. Released on May 22 1996, Mission: Impossible was the biggest hit of his career C $450 million at the global box office. “It’s better to make them at the end [of a career] rather than at the beginning,” De Palma told Wade Major about making a hit film.

Wagner credits its global success, aside from M:I being a great piece of cinema, to its international cast and clever promotion. “We treated Mission Impossible as a worldwide event,” she says. “This was an innovation in worldwide marketing because we focused on individual foreign markets rather than treating international box office as a monolith. We approached the rest of the world with the same fervour as domestic.” Paramount sent out a booklet of promotional ideas to cinema managers, which suggested C quite brilliantly C to put on helicopter rides or have sky divers dropping into cinema car parks for some extreme, gimmicky PR. (I must have missed that at our local Odeon.)

The idea for initial sequels was that each one would be made by a different director, and specific to their style. Mission: Impossible 2 C directed by John Woo C is undoubtedly a John Woo film. Cruise’s partnership with Christopher McQuarrie (who co-wrote Ghost Protocol C ie, M:I 4 C and has written and directed every Mission: Impossible since) has turned the series into perhaps the greatest spectacle in action cinema C the only series to ever give Bond a true run for his money.

But like Tom Cruise at CIA HQ, the first Mission: Impossible hangs stealthily at the centre of it C the brains and cunning of the operation. “Making Mission: Impossible was for us an impossible mission,” says Paula Wagner. “But we accomplished it!”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/mission-impossible-tom-cruise-brian-de-palma-original/