Breaking Down a Good Action Sequence: The actual question put to Abrams was, “What’s your philosophy on making a very good action scene?” Abrams fidgeted a little before answering, “The only philosophy I have and when you’re asked a question that way the response can seem pretentious just as soon as you start talking, so I don’t want to make it sound like I have any kind of philosophy about anything that I do, really. But I would say that I asked myself that question at the beginning because I thought, ‘I don’t know what style I have as a director – if I have one.’
All I know is that I wanted to figure out how was I going to approach these scenes – and there are a lot of them – and how do you do them so that they’re as exciting as they can be, so they’re not redundant, so they don’t feel too overly staged and it was really a concern of mine. For all that people say about things in the second movie and you know there are some fantastic moments of action in it. For all that you say about almost any action that you love, it’s like you can get a sense of sort of how when they work there is an approach, and what was my approach? I was trying to figure it out and what I just came to, and it was like one of those things that I had to just embrace not even knowing exactly what it meant, was I just had to be true to the characters at all times.
The most important thing was that I tell the action sequences as if they were scenes of people talking. That you always knew where you were and why. A lot of times people say, ‘Oh, the geography of certain action sequences are hard to follow,’ or whatever. I think one of the reasons that that’s the case is that sometimes the action supercedes character and story. It becomes about the moment, the stunt, the thing that you know they were planning for weeks and weeks and weeks and did tests and all that kind of stuff then they put 9 cameras down and filmed it and cut it together.
I just felt it was really important that there be a sense of spontaneity to the action and that you’re always following who your character is. I think that you’ll see in this little snippet that we’re going to show [at WonderCon] – this bridge sequence, one of the scenes in the movie – that as much as there is a lot of stuff going on and it’s crazy, you don’t lose track of Ethan Hunt and the rest of the team.
This one’s much more about Ethan for story purposes. But the approach was… Or the answer to how do you make a successful action sequence is the same answer to how do you do a successful scene in a bedroom. It’s like you need to know what the motivations are between your characters and you need to track that so that from the beginning to the end of the scene, you know the machinations of why those clever comments or the retorts, the things you kind of go, ‘Oh that was smart,’ or ‘I see what he’s doing. I know what she’s up to,’ that those things are equally as important. They [the stunts] just happen to be louder and bigger and far more expensive.”
JJ Abrams on Making Ethan Hunt More Human and Less of an Action Figure: “You never saw him do anything outside of be a spy in the first two films, except for mountain climb in the beginning of the second one (laughing). So the answer is that anything that we did outside of that world was 100% more than had been done before. You know what I mean? We focused on that.
Anyone who pays to go see ‘Mission Impossible 3’ is not paying to go see a relationship drama. Having said that, when you see the first ‘Die Hard’ film you appreciate that a half an hour was spent investing in that character before any gun was fired. You appreciate that kind of emotional connection with characters is rudimentary. We all know that. It’s Storytelling 101. But you think ‘Mission Impossible 3’ and you think, ‘Let’s get to the stuff people want to see.’
The truth is what people want to see is a good story and I don’t know how you tell a good story without investing in the characters. So the idea was that we see him at home, and the idea is he’s a man. He’s like 40 years-old so what does a 40 year-old man… What is that life? How do you exist as a real person and do the stuff that he apparently does? And that, to me, was the approach of the movie. That was the way in for me and it was the crux of what makes his life complicated, which we can all appreciate which is how do you balance what you do professionally with who you are personally.”
Page 5: JJ Abrams on Working with Tom Cruise - Actor/Stuntman
