To be asked to do a franchise where you thought, ‘Oh, you could actually make the best version of that series,’ was immediately like, ‘Oh my…’ If someone had said to me, ‘Do you want to do Aliens?’ I would be have been really freaked out by that because I don’t know how… And yet Jim Cameron came along and did a movie that in many ways is better than the first one, you know? Very different, but like one of the best movies I’ve ever seen – ‘Aliens.’
So doing ‘Mission Impossible 3’ was like, it was a genre I was very familiar with, it was an opportunity to – I’m not saying it was going to be easy – but it was an opportunity to attempt to make a movie that was about the team the way the show was, which I loved. I loved how it was about this great team working together. To do a movie that had great twists and turns that you’ve come to expect from that genre. It was an opportunity to take a franchise that was in a very different place in the world than it was in the beginning and use the baggage of shows like ‘24’ and ‘Alias’ or the ‘Bourne’ films or the Bond movies that have been made since. Where when the first one came out, just doing ‘Mission Impossible’ was cool enough in many ways and it was a very well made film. But if you’re going to make a ‘Mission Impossible’ movie now, you have to have a reason to do it now, as opposed to there’s a poster and a start date and Tom wants to do it. Which, you know, probably is reason enough. But for me, I knew I wanted to make a movie that literally regardless of the name and regardless of Tom, was a movie that I would want to go see and that was the ambition.”
JJ Abrams on Bringing Elements of the TV Series Into the Third “Mission Impossible” Movie: “There’s no question for me that one of the most fun aspects of the TV show, as a kid always loving it, was this team. And even though in many ways that show was sort of the ‘CSI’ of its time in that it was a very emotion-free, incredibly story-heavy show that wasn’t about the inner lives of these people, what I loved about the show is that it was this group and it was how their relationships – even though the relationships were things that you can kind of, you had to sort of intuit or extrapolate based on incredibly subtle human behavior. ‘Oh look, they have a relationship. He likes her. Oh, he’s mad at her.’ You have to figure this s**t out because it’s never text.
I love the dynamic of these people and seeing the roles they would play and often the roles they would play with each other in front of other people. You were in on the whole play of it. There were episodes where there would be one or two people in the room who wouldn’t know that those two or three people were all working together to convince them of stuff. I love that kind of stuff and, look, there were moments of it in like in the first movie. You had moments like that in the very, very opening. Or in the embassy scene, there were moments where you kind of had it. But it never to me…I love when you go, ‘Okay wait a minute. I know what they have to do. I don’t know how they’re going to do it. But I know that…’ And then, ‘Oh my god, the thing they never anticipated goes wrong.’ I just loved that feeling of this group working together for a very specific goal so there was that. I think that, you know, we brought that back passionately because that was a really fun thing.
And the other thing is I loved elements of the first two films. I certainly am in no way knocking them. In fact we embrace them and make reference to a couple of things in this movie. One is an homage to the going down just because I thought like you had to do it almost as a joke. But it’s such a throwaway moment in the movie with everything else - but I wanted to do it just because it was there. And then the other thing is we make a couple of references to some story stuff but it’s very oblique and truly only we will appreciate it. Seriously.”
Page 4: JJ Abrams on Adding Depth to Tom Cruise's Character
