My Conversation with McQ: Christopher McQuarrie Doesn’t Do Talking - Part One
Speaking with the writer of The Usual Suspects, Top Gun: Maverick, Edge of Tomorrow, and Mission Impossible
{Zooming with the most unlikely silent film enthusiast on record, June 16, 2021. All smiles.}
It only happened because of Covid, and because Tom Cruise wanted to go rock climbing.
Christopher McQuarrie was on location in the UK trying to wrap Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning when a positive Covid test from cast or crew (or both), allowed Cruise to slip away to Lake District National Park in northwest England — most likely to conquer Scafell Pike.
Holed up in his temporary digs in London, McQ (as he’s known), was suddenly in my virtual Zoom waiting room asking for permission to enter.
I, of course, let him in.
In June of 2020, I’d slid into McQ’s DMs on Instagram, long before his social media accounts were set to private:
“Chris - would you Zoom with my Scarsdale HS English class next academic year to discuss a film that I've shown faithfully for 20 years: The Usual Suspects? I have a theory about the dialogue (it's some of the most quotable in cinematic history - but I think that most of it is irrelevant to the plot). Moreover, I have students with real, burning questions about the film that would love to get 30 minutes with you. Regardless, thank you for writing the greatest neo-noir ever made. Your writing, in many ways, launched my interest in film.”
A year later almost to the day, I’d entirely forgotten that I’d messaged McQ when I see it in my inbox:
“Not sure if you’re still teaching, or want me to talk to your students, but I happen to have some free time this week. What about tomorrow? McQ.”
Stephen Baldwin’s zany and brazen character in The Usual Suspects - McManus - has a rare contemplative moment while doing recon for a San Pedro, CA heist that will lead him and his rag-tag crew into certain death. His throwaway line “The news said it’s raining in New York,” is a great source of Redditors’ speculation, a favorite of amateur filmmakers and armchair critics, and Exhibit A as to why McQuarrie’s dialogue matters not even one iota.
He wants to make silent films.
The man who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1996 believes that dialogue is the least important thing in his moviemaking process.
Yet McQuarrie has quite possibly written the tightest script in the history of Hollywood.
I challenge anyone to watch Edge of Tomorrow and not be completely seduced by the magic trick of start, stop, and begin again that gets sustained with Patek Philippe-like precision for 1 hour and 53 minutes. Groundhog Day is 12 minutes shorter but feels significantly longer. There’s waste. Wind-drag. Dead-spots. Too many morals connected to too many subplots. A haggard Bill Murray who doesn’t endear, so much as mug.
But Edge? It’s the kind of story that only a master of pacing and timing could conceivably get right.
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is far more “ambitious” than Edge (actors learning how to fight in reverse - car chases that move backwards and forward simultaneously, etc.), but it’s always either grandiose action or insipid exposition. McQuarrie’s sci-fi LARP has no fat to trim off the chop. It’s as lean and muscular as Emily Blunt (as Rita) in full training mode preparing to square off against the Mimics as United Defense force leader.
And as I attempt to recall my favorite lines from Edge of Tomorrow (which I’ve seen only once), I begin to understand McQ’s belief that dialogue doesn’t matter, and if anything, gets in the way.
We’re in our Zoom session now, waiting for my students to filter into the classroom, when I get a big laugh out of McQ about a shared childhood memory of watching a weaponized steampipe pierce a mercenary’s chest at the end of the 1985 Schwarzenegger film Commando.
Arnold plays retired special forces officer John Matrix. He’s pulled into a foreign president’s assassination plot by way of his daughter’s kidnapping. The finale involves “sticking it” to the arch villian’s main henchman, Bennett, in the boiler room of a private island compound.
“Let off some steam, Bennett,” sneers a shirtless and battle-face-painted Arnold, triumphant, posing like he's back on Venice Beach outside Gold’s Gym.
McQ remembers that character (played by actor Vernon Wells), and the litany of puns unleashed on an audience of young men growing unable to distinguish action films from comedies, guffawing as they watched Schwarzenegger throw a short guy off a steep hillside somewhere on Mulholland and quip: “I let him go.”
We’re about the same age (I’m three years younger than the writer-director), so there is a good deal of cinematic common ground between us: from Stallone’s Cobra to late-era Dirty Harry. We saw these films in theaters without reserved seating or computerized ticket kiosks, at a time when capes were the exception, not the rule.
“I thought you had this amazing ear for dialogue that you really liked to exercise. Even that moment in Mission Impossible - Fallout when Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is flying the helicopter trying to drop the payload on his nemesis and says to himself, Hold this for me, will you? When it’s an epic fail, and he misses, a beautiful subversion of the predictable action hero cliche occurs.”
“And has the exact opposite effect of: Let off some steam, Bennett.”
“It fascinates me that you’ve publicly said, “Dialogue doesn’t matter.”
“I was a big lover of Mamet and Chayefsky — writers who were very much recognized for their overtness. Writers who were known for their voice. And I grew up believing - along with a lot of other myths and suppositions - that it was how you made your mark. And that was one marker - catchy dialogue. I started to realize that dialogue was part of a bigger problem that writers are taught: that information matters, and it’s not so much that I think dialogue doesn’t matter, it’s that information matters a lot less. It’s about learning to separate information from emotion, and how to express emotion. It’s a big part of what I now observe, which is, you see a lot of films that are praised for their acting and their writing because they deal with a lot of emotional extremes, and we’re taught that it’s great acting/writing, and my frustration with a lot of that is that I’m not actually feeling anything while I’m watching it except admiration for the actor. Which to me is not a cinematic experience - that’s a cinema nerd experience.”
“I feel that way while watching The Score (the Robert De Niro / Ed Norton film), there are some moments that make me appreciate what you’ve just described.”
“Yeah, they’re acting so hard, and there’s a lot to be admired in that craft, and there was an era in which going to movies meant that you went to see a Dustin Hoffman film because of the Dustin Hoffman performance, and Meryl Streep or Marlon Brando, same thing. I’m somebody who cannot invest myself in the artificiality of an experience no matter how technically great it is. So there are a lot of films that come out now that people really admire and have a fervent passion for that I do not understand in the slightest — beyond their technical achievements. I don’t feel anything in the slightest, beyond how impressive it is that they actually made that movie. What interests me more is one that grabs me on an emotional level no matter how many times I see it. The Natural is a far more effective movie despite the fact that it has a high level of artifice to it. It’s a mythic film, and something of a fable. And if you’re watching that and saying - that’s not real - I kind of feel bad for you because there’s such a great emotional experience to be had, and it works every time. It’s so effective, so meaningful and impactful every time. There are other movies that people love, but if I were to give you my analysis and what my criteria are and how I look at a movie and say: this is not a movie I feel and here’s why; or here’s a movie that you enjoy because you’re doing the work and not the filmmaker, I’d ruin a lot of your favorite movies for you.”
“No, I think we’re on the same page about that. I remember watching The Usual Suspects for the first time about 15 years ago with my girlfriend at the time - she was a film person and I wasn’t nearly as much of a film person as I am now. I remember not really understanding what was happening, but feeling I’d never seen anything like it before, and being completely caught up in (of all things) the surprising Stephen Baldwin performance. I think that the story is so compelling, and the temporal distortion works very well to disorient, but to be completely honest with you I still don’t entirely understand it, and I think that doesn’t matter because it makes me feel and it makes me think. Just as I don’t entirely understand Memento. And you spoke about The Natural as a fable, and it made me wonder about The Odyssey being used as a frame story for Fallout. Hunt receives his “mission” inside of a classic hardbound edition of Homer’s tale. It seems both obvious - and not - at the same time. I don’t know if he’s trying to get back to Ithaca (so to speak). If it’s a reboot of the franchise. He’s kind of an epic character.”
At this point in the conversation, McQ relocates to another part of his London home because his wife requires the space he’s currently occupying. He checks in with me to ask how long my class period runs for. He says he can give me an hour, which is (technically) more than I need.
But I’m delighted to witness a reductive craftsman sprint through his intimate space - holding a laptop as he broadcasts - to make way for his wife’s early evening activities. McQ is both humble and happy to be alive - and good natured laughter just emanates from him at every literal turn of the corner.
There’s something remarkable about an artist who can write the script for a (still) unknown film like Public Access (1993) that never gets significant distribution (it’s not currently streamed or available anywhere in the world that I know of), but just three years later beat out Toy Story at The Academy Awards, and - in-between writing Edge of Tomorrow - take complete creative control of a stalled franchise that some of the most successful directors in history couldn’t make work nearly well enough (John Woo, Brian DePalma, and JJ Abrams all swung and missed). And should we talk about McQuarrie (and Cruise) single-handedly saving Hollywood with Top Gun: Maverick?
McQuarrie has become a legit auteur. He wrote, directed and produced every Mission Impossible film after MI:4. You can’t watch Ghost Protocol (MI:4) and Fallout (MI:5) back-to-back without noticing a sea change in the product. It’s not unlike how Martin Campbell and Sam Mendes EpiPenned James Bond.
To my knowledge, Cruise won’t make a movie at this point without McQ’s involvement. We saw what happened when he doesn’t — Jack Reacher: Never Go Back comes to mind. It’s a near flop with a 38% RT critics’ score, while the first Reacher is nearly twice that. In all ways, Never Go Back feels like a made-for-TV movie, in part because it co-stars How I Met Your Mother’s Cobie Smulders. It peters out so badly at some point that it’s more Adventures in Babysitting than badass tale of undomesticated lone wolf. Put indelicately: Jack Reacher 2 is on par with Amazon’s Reacher Season 2.
A year later, when I’d email McQ congratulating him on the tremendous success of Top Gun: Maverick and his putting the twinkle back in Tinseltown, his waxed:
“I was just there when the wheel went round,” suggesting that his association with Cruise is what has made him what (and who) he is, and that he’s not so much talented — as lucky, consistent, and tireless.
End of Part One