He’s taken you undercover on Alias, marooned you on Lost and even gotten you all gooey inside on Felicity. And the new mission J.J. Abrams chose to accept was to break out of the small screen in the biggest way possible, as the writer-director of a big-time, big budget motion picture—the sequel Mission: Impossible 3—starring a big-profile, big-money movie star—Tom Cruise—with all kinds of big questions— Abrams has never helmed a feature film before, let alone one of this mega-proportion. But, as his TV hits have proven, Abrams has a way of answering questions in ways that both surprise and delight, so Hollywood.com debriefed him for our own M:iIII dossier.
Hollywood.com: M:iIII is a pretty major undertaking for a first-time film director–forget the expectation of Paramount and Hollywood and all your TV fans: did you ever doubt yourself at any point in this process?
J.J. Abrams: The opportunity to do this movie was so remarkable. I can’ think of anyone else who would let someone who’d never directed a feature before take the reigns of something that was on this magnitude and scale and was this expensive, and yet Tom [Cruise] did. He believed in me and never wavered from that for the entire experience. I do think that there were moments where I was in shock that I was given this opportunity, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to do this all my life, and the pressure and experience of doing television seemed to continually confirm that doing a movie was something that was certainly possible. I didn’t necessarily think that the first movie I would get a chance to direct would be something as large as this one, but the crew was so incredible. Tom and his producing partner Paula Wagner were so supportive from the beginning and I believe the whole crew always felt incredibly supported and safe which always allows, for me, creativity. So the whole experience was great, and I honestly never doubted that I could do it. I actually felt incredibly comfortable doing it. It was a fun challenge.
HW: Audiences have gotten pretty familiar with both Tom Cruise and his character Ethan Hunt—what were you looking for when creating and choosing the other characters and cast members to play off him?
Abrams: I wanted to make sure was that we were casting actors and writing parts that were as strong as they could be, because when you’ve got Tom Cruise he’s got blinding star power. You can’t put him on screen with someone that can’t play at that level or they will get drowned out and the movie won’t have a spark. So you bring in actors like Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, certainly Philip Seymour Hoffman. And you find people like Michelle Monaghan and Maggie Q—and I got to bring Keri Russell back who I had worked with on Felicity. And so it was incredibly important to me not just as a team, but for all the supporting actors to be not just wonderful actors, but have a certain level of that charisma. It was also great to see Tom with all of these actors, because I’m sure he could feel that same energy coming from them and I think that it only made him better. And I think that it certainly makes the film better, populating it with people who are that compelling to watch.
HW: In this film, you go out of your way to lift the curtain a little bit to show how the team accomplishes their missions—what that a particular element you wanted to include?
Abrams: That kind of stuff to me—it was so easy not to do that stuff. Part of the fun of Mission Impossible, the [original TV] series, for me was always not just the what and the why, but the how. And I just loved watching this team using the kind of equipment, and using it with such a precision that I wished I had that kind of equipment. I wish that I knew how the hell to do that stuff. It’s easy to skip that stuff and go right to the end game and get to the point, but I feel like part of getting to know and love the team is seeing them do their job and appreciating why they have been chosen to be out in the field as they have. All of these little details were to me the things that I felt when I watched the show respected the audience and their ability to track the sort of machinations of that kind of operation. I just feel like if you lost that stuff, you’re not sort of getting to really see details that matter. So it was really important to me to do that stuff.
Did any of the ideas for action sequences or stunts or anything come from what you always wanted to do on Alias, but couldn’t do for various reasons?
Abrams: There were so many things that we wanted to do on Alias that we could never in a million years afford, and one of the things that we did in this movie was the Vatican break-in sequence. A sequence like that requires so many pieces, and it’s a very visually intricately told sequence. And in television you never have the kind of time and the pieces that you need to really sort of tell it properly. Clearly sequences like the one on the bridge, the helicopter chase, the whole factory sequence, the Shanghai jump, the race—each one of them, in a strange way, was a version of the kind of thing that we might conceive of doing on Alias, but never have the time or budget to properly execute.
HW: We see a lot of people thrown out of windows or falling off of buildings. Were these sequences an intentional homage to the original film’s famous wire fall?
Abrams: Well, to me the fun of the movie is in same movie having the crazy, larger-than-life moments and also the incredibly relatable, intimate character moments. So part of that stuff—repelling down or falling down, which was obviously a nod to the first films—to me was just showing the extreme measures that Ethan has to go to either pull off a certain mission or rescue the woman that he loves. It’s classic, old school, physical thrills, but those don’t really thrill us anymore, unless we have characters that we can relate to. So the goal is to try and do both.
HW: You broke from the formula of the first two films by adding a lot more romance and comedy into the mix.
Abrams: I didn’t think going into this that I wanted to copy the first movie or the second movie. What I thought was of my dream version of Mission Impossible and that it still hadn’t gotten made, which was a version that allowed us to see these character as people and not just as spies. I loved exploring the idea of what it looked like when Ethan Hunt went home. Not just what his home looked like, but who is there–and if there is a woman in his life, does she know what he does? My guess is no. If not, how does he live with himself betraying this woman the whole time, and he must know that these two worlds are going to collide. It’s going to happen. So that became one of the themes for the movie, and it wasn’t a question of messing with success. I actually felt that the first two films would’ve been even better had they spent some time investing in the characters and the people. In a movie like Jaws when Roy Scheider is sitting at a table and this kid is mimicking him and his wife is watching, you could have lost that scene in that movie, I suppose, and told the same story, but it wouldn’t have allowed you to invest in the people as much as you do. And that’s my favorite thing that the great blockbuster type movies have done. Yes, they have the thrills and the action, but the critical thing is that they invest in character.
HW: Do you think the film will be helped or hurt because of the all of the publicity surrounding Tom‘s life in the last year?
Abrams: I’m sure that you could find evidence that any publicity is good publicity and also find evidence equally valid that having him go on Oprah is not a good thing for him. You could probably find evidence to support either point of view, but my feeling is that what I control, what I can do, is try and make a movie that’s entertaining—and hopefully one where you leave a theater feeling better and more empowered than you did when you got there. I’m hoping, and I believe, that the audiences who will see this film are smart enough to differentiate the two, the actor and the character. I think that at the opening sequence of the movie is very purposefully shocking and terrifying. I wanted to see this character as vulnerable and as frightened as he’s ever been. It wasn’t because of any publicity stuff. It was because just simply having Tom Cruise in a movie, he’s such an icon that I wanted to have him from the very beginning of the movie not playing a cool guy, but rather having him play an absolutely vulnerable, relatable man who we relate to. I have to tell you that, knowing Tom as well as I do, I see every day who this guy is as a real person. He’s funny and self-deprecating and he’s smart and he’s easygoing and he’s kind—not just to me, but to everyone who worked on the crew. He is a good person. So I wanted to see a little bit less of an icon and a little bit more of us, the Everyman, in this character, and I think that this audience will see that.
HW: What was the most challenging aspect of making this film for you?
Abrams: The most challenging thing was probably the logistics of filming in the United States, in Los Angeles and Virginia, and shooting in Italy in two cities, and in China in two cities, in Berlin and having all of the visual shocks. There are many, many visual FX shots in this movie and special FX and stunts. It was really just logistically preparing this, and a lot of that credit goes to the producers of the movie who helped schedule and setup the production of the film. But we were incredibly responsible, I think, making this movie. We finished ahead of schedule and under budget, and for me it was totally the result of having a crew that was just hard-working and dedicated and great at what they do. And my TV training has gotten me used to limited time and budget. The hardest thing, truly, was just in every scene where people are talking making sure that you believed that those people hate each other, or that those two guys are great friends, or that the couple is in love. It was always the stuff that was the most relatable stuff, the most mundane that ultimately I think people just know rings true or not. So the stunt work was always a cool and exciting challenge, but the hardest stuff was always the most unexpected, kind of small character work.
HW: You’ve some television finales coming out—the season finale of Lost and the series finale of Alias: With Alias ending a little earlier than a lot of people hoped, is it hard to tie all of the threads you had going up?
Abrams: Not really. I have to say that on Alias, this was something that we have been anticipating for a while. I think it’s definitely the right time to end the series. It’s obviously bittersweet for a lot of reason. It’s a great cast and crew and we will miss them, but I hope to work with all of them soon. But in terms of the end of the year, the end of the series, it’s actually a really good finale. It’s incredibly satisfying and it connects all these pieces that have been in the Alias universe from the beginning, and I’m really proud of the work that all the amazing writers have done on the show—and not just this year, but building up to the finale, which has been a really, really fun and exciting process.
HW: Thoughts on an Alias movie?
Abrams: I think that at the moment Alias is sort of going to rest in just the right way. I think it’s the right way for it to go out.
HW: Will there ever be a Lost movie?
Abrams: I think that we make one every week. I honestly don’t know what else we would do. There have been discussions of sort of all different types of things with Lost, but it looks to me like the ambition at least in the production of that series is to try and make a little movie every week.
HW: With Lost do you have to come up with a season cliffhanger that will top the hatch of the last season finale?
Abrams: I can tell that they have done just that. The ending of this year, of Lost, blows the ending of last season out of the water. It’s an incredible finale.
HW: Last year the hatch was sort of the dominating element, and now suddenly there are so many plot threads in play. Just tell us—how does it all come together?
Abrams: You’ll see what happens, but I can tell you that a lot of it has been there and building from the beginning of this season. It’s not out of the blue, but what happens at the very end of this year, for me, it’s the greatest show ever.
HW: Ethan Hunt, James Bond, Jason Bourne, Sidney Bristow—in the mother of all spy battles, who comes out on top?
Abrams: Who would win? Well, I always think that what would probably happen is that if they started to fight against each other, the cool thing would be if suddenly they all realized that there was another enemy and they have to work together to take them down. That’s the way that I like to think about it.
