By Chris Hewitt | Posted 16 Aug 2017

If you’ve been on the internet (film division) over the last few days, you’ll no doubt be aware of the brouhaha brewing over on the London set of the latest Mission: Impossible film. On Saturday, Tom Cruise injured himself while doing a stunt on location on Baynard House in Blackfriars. The incident, which was captured by a nearby amateur videographer, shows Cruise, once again playing IMF busybody Ethan Hunt, leaping off one roof and onto another. Only he doesn’t land on the roof, instead smacking into the side of the wall and, after carrying on with the take, sinking to his knees in apparent distress. And that distress was real — Cruise did, in fact, break his right ankle.

But speculation is as speculation does, and already rumours are sweeping the internet that Mission: Impossible 6 is going on indefinite hiatus and will miss its release date of July 27, 2018. So we decided to go straight to the source, and spoke to the film’s writer/director, Christopher McQuarrie, for the full skinny, including the revelation that the film is going on hiatus, albeit not an indefinite one. He also explains that it wasn’t a stunt gone wrong. If anything, it was a stunt gone right. This message will self-destruct in etc. etc.

First things first: how’s Tom?

Tom is great. He’s in very good spirits. He’s feeling great about the movie. Very excited in general. When I went to see him, the first thing he said when I walked in the room was, ‘dude, my ankle’s broken’. Without missing a beat, I said, ‘there’s a silver lining to this cloud. We just don’t know what it is yet.’

In what way?

You never stop working. I’m on the backlot at Leavesden right now, getting ready to shoot an insert out in the field. You simply rearrange the order in which you were going to do certain things on the movie. This in fact gives us an opportunity to go into editorial and look at what we’ve shot and reassess the movie, which is a luxury you don’t normally have because you’re on a train that just doesn’t stop.

How long had you to go?

I think it was seven or eight weeks to go.

Are you shutting down completely? You’ve been shooting this week. Are you shooting around Tom for as long as you can?

We’ll assess what there is to be shot. And what we can shoot, and then what we’ll do is once we’ve shot through that we’ll go on a hiatus and then I’ll shift my attention over to editorial. We’ve already shot a huge chunk of the movie so you’re just taking a big chunk of post-production and moving it up sooner. Then we go back to shooting when the hiatus is over, which is to the full benefit of the movie. It’s similar to situations I’ve had on other movies where, for whatever reason, you go on hiatus and you’re able to look at the movie in a way you normally couldn’t and reevaluate. The lesson I learned on Valkyrie, which had its share of difficulties in production, and we always used to say ‘disaster is an opportunity to excel’.

So you’re going on hiatus. For how long?

The hiatus itself is unknown. We’re still figuring that out. Nothing that we’re looking at right now is going to affect the release date.

I’ll move heaven and earth to get that shot in the movie.

What happened?

The speculation was that Tom had somehow missed or fell short. The truth is that the stunt was never designed for Tom to jump from rooftop to rooftop which a) would have been pretty boring and b) when you see the actual shot you’ll understand how it was designed. Also, when you look at what was posted on the internet, you can see Tom do the same stunt multiple times. He was always supposed to slam into the side of the building. That’s what gives the stunt its energy. He was completely safe the entire time he was doing that. He was padded. What happened is a matter of coordinating what Tom is doing with what the camera is doing, which means you have to do it a number of times. And on the fourth try, he hit the building at a slightly different angle and he broke his ankle. He knew the instant that he hit the building that his ankle was broken. You can see it on his face. We had four cameras rolling on it, and you can see it on the video that’s on the internet. He knew in that instant, ‘well, we’re not coming back here. We’re not doing this again today’. So he got up and powered through the shot, and then he got off-camera and as soon as he knew he was off-camera he went down. He knew that was the only way to preserve the shot. I don’t know that I would have the wherewithal to do that.

What went through your mind when you realised what had happened?

When we all watched it, none of us immediately realised what was happening on the monitor. Tom got up and hobbled off-camera and we looked at it and went, wow, he really sold that one. It looks like that hurt. It turns out him breaking an ankle is almost indistinguishable from him pretending to break an ankle. My immediate concern was, how is Tom? What is the extent of his injury? Today, we got the full prognosis and found out that it was actually fine, could have been much worse. And everything was ok. I’m not at all concerned about what this is going to do to our release date. The good news is, Tom is going to make a full recovery.

You’ll want to make sure he’s ready before he comes back.

Absolutely. You’re evaluating everything based on that. We don’t want him to come back to work on day one and jump off that roof again. We have plenty of stuff he can do. There’s so much action in this movie compared to the last Mission Impossible, and a lot of that is behind us. What we have in front of us is less complex, except for one sequence that is really intense. Fortunately for us, the one that’s really intense doesn’t happen to be intense on his ankle. We’re not worried about that. That’s the last part of his body we’re worried about when it gets to that sequence.

Which ankle was it?

It was the right ankle.

Is this a case of time telling Tom, who’s 55, to slow down a bit?

Absolutely not. He is in better shape and better form than I have seen him on any of the movies we’ve worked on in the last ten years.

You’ve strapped Tom to a plane. There’s an Alanis-level irony of a small stunt being the one to put Tom out of commission.

It goes to show you that there is no such thing as a small stunt. After Tom does a stunt for the first time, I watch it and evaluate it and go to him and say, ‘tell me what it is you’re going through’. It’s very easy as a director to get carried away and say ‘do it again, do it again, do it again’. When you look at this particular stunt, the impact his body is taking is incredibly hard. The first time he did it I thought, ‘oh my God, are you ok?’ He said, ‘no, I can do it. I’m alright’. It wasn’t as punishing on the body as it looked. And on the fourth time he nailed the stunt and the camera caught it perfectly, it all intersected and unfortunately that was also the take where he broke his ankle. But the first thing he said when he came back was, ‘did you get it?’ He was laying down with his foot up and I brought him the shot and he looked at it. As only Tom Cruise can do, with an icepack around his ankle, he said, ‘that’s a pretty cool shot!’

Will the shot be in the movie?

I now have to move heaven and earth to make sure that the shot is in the movie. We went to all that effort to get it. It’s a pretty fantastic shot.

Mission: Impossible 6 will be released on 27 July 2018.