MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III Behind The Scenes - "Making The Mission" (2006) Action, Tom Cruise

When I first started thinking of Mission 3, I wanted more from the character and the story. We talked about bringing the team together and having that whole field picture and wanting it to have a romantic quality but a toughness and have it be a love story. I got this phone call and it was my agent and he said, are you aware of the discussions about you directing Mission Impossible 3? I said, what? I was working on Mission Impossible and I was up at about 2 in the morning one night and I just said, I'm going to watch Alias. So I just started watching Alias. I was blown away by what he accomplished. His sense of timing, suspense. I thought, you know what? I want J.J. Abrams to direct the movie. The next night I went to Paula Wagner's house to meet her and Tom and I walk in and Tom's there and he just gives me that huge smile and he's like, do you want to do it? I was like, are you kidding me? It's like the greatest opportunity in the world. Ready guys? Ready! Day one. It's not raining. We're in Rome. First day of photography here in Rome on the Tiber River with a high speed boat. Just got in yesterday, got it unloaded and everybody's here, all the equipment's here and we're ready to shoot. We all had sort of near misses where ---- was going to go wrong in this thing but you guys in classic Mission Impossible form pulled it off so it would be nice if there was some either mockery about each other, you know what I mean? Because this is very much a celebration. Let's do it, man. I looked at J.J. and I knew this is his first day of his first feature film. It was actually kind of emotional for me really because here's a man that I have such respect for and who deserves this more than anybody. We have a Zodiac speed boat with four safety divers. Two police boats. One police boat is locking this end of the river. The other boat is locking that end. 11 all cameras. Stoppers 11 all around. Stand by. And roll all cameras please. Roll all cameras. And action! I was a little bit nervous. I had no reason to be. Tom's really good in a speed boat but for an actor who's never worked with him before jumping into a speed boat and being thrown about the river, it was a little bit scary. But it was a really, really easy way to break into doing Mission Impossible because the four of us got to sit in the boat and really bond with each other. It was good. Day one was incredibly surreal because suddenly we were shooting this movie and to be shooting in Rome with Tom Cruise on this boat in the Tiber, it was nuts. I'd never directed a movie before. The crew is huge. I mean there are more people on the crew than I'd ever certainly met in my life. And so it was just, not only was the crew huge, they're so good at their job that they made me feel incredibly safe. It's just right from the beginning I could feel it, it was going well. It'd be impossible for anyone to think that it was his first time on a movie. And then we went down to Caserta, that was a blast. We're at Caserta Palace. It was a palace built just about an hour and a half outside of Rome as sort of a second capital and it's doubling today as the Vatican. Italy, Tom, location, 50 foot wall, top of wall. This stunt is Ethan Hunt entering the Vatican, done a shot of him running up the wall. It's quite an interesting shot. He starts vertical, runs up the wall horizontal, gets to the top. We had to create the Vatican at Caserta and what we did is we built this 40 some foot wall. It ended up actually serving two purposes. We shot one side of the wall for Rome, at the top of the wall we actually shot in Rome. For the reverse we shot in Caserta looking toward Caserta as the Vatican. When he goes down we went back to that first side of the wall redressed to be the interior side. So it's a very scary stunt and when you roll off the edge I promise you it's a leap of faith. There's a lot of people think you can do it standing here and you get to the top and you look. And when you roll off you're putting your life totally into other people's hands. He wasn't stopping fast enough and Tom and I were like, you know, we've got to speed it up. They said well we can't really speed it up because if you speed it up too much it'll bounce. So we're filming the last one and he drops and it's significantly quicker. That's sexy. Oh yeah, are you kidding? He hit the ground. Now I couldn't tell how hard he hit, truly an inch away from a huge disaster. Tom of course just started laughing because he thought it was the greatest thing ever. That's the greatest. Let's shoot it. Well Colleen is amazing. Like Colleen Atwood is the woman but that dress is all her. I knew this scene was taking place in Italy so I wanted to have sort of an homage to the great Italian modern designers like Versace. Mainly Cavalli, Armani. But having to function the way dresses have to function in movies I decided to make it myself. And I wanted it to be a dress that was a head turner dress. Well there was one little incident when Maggie was pulling in her shoe which I think was like this. The heel was like huge. Got stuck in the accelerator and she ended up hitting a car in front of her and she was very embarrassed. So I'm sorry, I'm repeating that. But she did an amazing job. Leave it to me to go from not driving to a Lamborghini. Jade and them are like, oh you can drive a stick shift right? A sports car? Fast? And I'm going, yeah, well I could learn. We had two cars standing by for that. We had the car that we blew up and we actually had another version of the car that was essentially a shell. And we had that actually in a stage at Paramount Studios sitting atop the set of the sewer. What's up? The final thing we wanted to do at Caserta which again seemed a very, very tall order was to blow up the sports car. Apart from convincing the authorities that we could do it without damaging the building in any way. Just how you get that explosion right in that area is incredibly complex. We're in Caserta, we're going to do a stunt. So hopefully everything will go well. We're kind of in a sensitive area here. This building is very old and we don't want to damage it. Every little event has to be orchestrated. You have to cut the roof a certain way so it breaks a certain way. We're going to start scoring the car. So this way when the mortars hit the roof we're going to have the car opening. Shotgun mortars is what we call it. So it's very directional and it'll take and pop this trunk lid and then we have a chain to restrain it. The car will explode and burn. And what we did actually is the cast of the actual floor is a fiberglass. And underneath we are putting actually sand to try to protect as much as possible the place. It's a national monument. Hopefully we'll have at least seven, possibly nine or ten cameras, whatever we can get for the explosion. This is purposely the very last thing we're shooting here. Because if this was the first thing, I don't think we would have been allowed to shoot anything else. Pull the car. It's a nice car. Four, three, two. Do it.