Reshoots and film crews going back and redoing things after the first cut has been tested with focus groups is nothing new, it happens in all major film productions - all the time. However, it's much less common to find yourself without a working key scene and having to reshoot everything in the lead actor's garage. But that's what happened when director Christopher McQuarrie put together the final and most important parts of the current action thriller Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, as he told Empire magazine.
Christopher McQuarrie:
"The focus groups and the test screenings were just not getting the Marie story. And I realized we were just being too clever by half, we're just not laying it out... That entire Mission briefing scene came together in the course of a week and was shot in a day. Except for the inserts, which we shot in Tom's garage in Florida because there was a missing element. First, we raced to shoot the inserts and anything you race to shoot just looks like sh-t. It was the longest day on the movie, it was the last day on the movie. I realized when putting the scene together that I had the key, I had Isla, I had the bounty hunters, and we had been struggling with what those flashbacks to Marie meant...
I was in the editing room. I cut in the Marie footage and went, '30 years ago you were given a choice.' I just laid it out. Stop trying to ask the audience to figure it out and just effing tell them, they want to know. I called Tom and I just went, 'We f--ked up. There's one very important photo that's missing.' I said, 'We need a mugshot.' It's not enough to say it in the abstract. We need this picture. That triggered - once I was shooting one photograph, well, might as well reshoot them all. So we brought a desk and some flooring and that bag and some photos and a gun, all the basic props, and went to Tom's garage in Florida. We had a splinter crew go and reshot everything."
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