Finished the 3 hour Empire podcast with Chris McQuarrie at work today, essential listening! Some bits I can remember:
- McQuarrie has a couple hilarious anecdotes about Ving Rhames. I didn't know that Luther was originally going to die in MI:1 and he complained to Cruise about it, essentially saying "why does the brother always have to die?" It's thanks to Cruise that he survived, and has been in every subsequent sequel.
They briefly considered killing him off in this movie. Then McQuarrie floated the idea to Renner, he'd only need a couple days away from the Avengers to shoot a death scene, but Renner was like "nah" lol. Ultimately, Alec Baldwin's death was his own idea, he told McQuarrie he wanted to die in this movie saving Ethan.
The funniest moment while talking about Ving, is when McQuarrie describes Baldwin's death in the movie, and how Ving was telling McQuarrie how Luther barely interacted with Hunley and couldn't give a shit. Meanwhile Baldwin is lying on the ground, quipping how if they're ever in a scene where Ving plays a character that's dying, Baldwin's gonna look at his watch in boredom, lol.
- McQuarrie had a tense moment with Rebecca Furguson while directing the scene where she's looking at Ethan meeting Julia in Kashmir. She couldn't get what McQuarrie was asking of her, leading to rising frustration. His description of his conversation with her is really fascinating. Ultimately it kinda boiled down to her worrying that he was making her character out to be a 'girl', and he promised her he would never write Ilsa as if he was writing a girl or a man.
- This podcast is McQuarrie's first official explanation of the whole Henry Cavill moustache debacle. The podcast is pretty humorous throughout but he gets pretty serious during this segment, because he genuinely tried to help Warner Brothers out, but the circumstances couldn't allow it.
- Sean Harris hated the idea of being in a blockbuster franchise and was pissed off they didn't kill his character in Rogue Nation, lol. The way McQuarrie talks about it is hilarious.
- Lots of excellent points by McQuarrie on the story choices they made, and justifications on plot points or why things were cut out of the movie.
- Bit of banter about Cavill reloading his arms, very funny stuff. McQuarrie said he watched reaction videos of the trailer, and people are just watching the action scenes with no comment, but when Henry 'reloads' his arms they go wild, which bemused him. "Tom almost killed himself flying a chopper but you're going wild at Henry cocking his arms!?"
