What Action Sequence Gave Abrams the Most Trouble in "Mission Impossible 3?" “That’s an interesting question. What gave me the most trouble? Let’s think… You know the thing is, everything on this movie…there are seven arguably eight set pieces, like big sequences. And we pre-vized, computer pre-vized, three and half of them – four of them. I storyboarded or sort of sketched out on my own the others and worked with another storyboard artist for some.
The thing is that going to the set everyday, one of the things I realized really early on because at first I got there and I was like this is my first movie and there are more people working on the movie than had ever seen ‘Felicity.’ I was like, ‘This is crazy!’ And so I immediately started to try and figure things. Once I realized after the first few days this is a marathon and the fun of doing this movie was being able to approach it the way I would approach making movies when I was nine, which was you look at a place, whether it’s your backyard or down the street or a store, whatever, and you kind of figure out where’s a cool place to put the camera. You just get lost in trying to be creative, like you do with anything. By being too overly prepped or something, it actually gets in the way of that creativity because you go there and you go, ‘This is what I’ve decided it’s going to be.’
I realized I needed to take my own advice. When I was doing ‘Lost,’ Evangeline Lilly said during the pilot, she took me aside after the first week or so and she’s like, ‘You know, I’m having a really hard time because I go home and I rehearse these scenes and then I come to the set and you have a different approach.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean you rehearse them?’ And I realized that she would go home and she would prepare the scenes completely and then go to the set and be like thrown. I realized she’d never done this before, it was her first time. I was like, ‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t make this clear. Make sure you learn your lines but that’s all. Just come and we’ll figure it out.’
I realized I had to take my own advice and like not rehearse it in my head to the point where I’d come to the set and be closed to the things that were happening. So almost immediately I started to like just open up to, ‘Okay, I know we have to do this thing and I know what the sequence is going to be. I know the reasons for all this stuff but like let’s just have fun. Let’s just do it.’ So I’d come to the set and figure out where would I put the camera if I were eight. I literally would do this thing [getting out of his chair and backing up while squatting down] and I’m always going low because I remember when I made movies when I was little [and] I was shorter. And so I would literally always try and figure out where the cameras would go and stuff, and just sort of let creativity happen.
In fact, that one shot in the trailer on the bridge where he gets slammed into the car, there was a version of that in the previze and Tom and I – it was on a Friday – were like, ‘Let’s do something crazy. Let’s change it up.’ So we had this idea to have him run and hit the thing. It was a little bit different than the pre-vize. We did it on that Monday a couple of days later, and it was the ability to just be open to ideas that made that stunt possible.
To answer your question – and I don’t mean to be so long-winded – but the answer to your question is there really wasn’t anything that was incredibly hard. The hardest stuff was some of the more emotional and intimate scenes where it was really intense stuff. Like the bigger shots were some of the most oddly effortless shots because they were planned, or it was the sort of stuff that you could plan. But when you’re doing something that really is about who the characters are and the emotional stuff, even if it’s with the greatest actors in the world and we have some of them in this movie, you just have to work and work and work and roll 40,000 feet of film to make sure you get what you need in the scene.”
Page 3: JJ Abrams on Making "Mission Impossible 3" Something Fresh and New
