Tom Cruise is known for his desire to do his own stunts on film, but that dedication resulted in a broken ankle on the set of Mission: Impossible - Fallout. While the injury delayed production for several weeks, it turns out that it was something of a blessing in disguise. Director Christopher McQuarrie says that the forced production stop gave the movie a chance to take another look at the script and fix a few issues they might not otherwise have had the time to do. According to McQuarrie...
What the ankle did was allow us to figure out the holes in the script that we were still struggling with. And so, we didn't rewrite the script to accommodate the ankle, but we finished the script because the ankle gave us the time.
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CinemaBlend's own Sean O'Connell spoke with director Christopher McQuarrie last week in Paris as part of the World Premiere of Mission: Impossible - Fallout and asked about how the production coped with Tom Cruise being out of commission with a broken ankle. The actor was filming a leap from one rooftop to another when a bad landing resulted in the actor spending several weeks on the shelf.
However, rather than simply sit around waiting for their lead actor to be ready to get in front of a camera, Christopher McQuarrie took the forced downtime to make sure everything else with the film was working properly. As it turned out, not everything was. There were some issues with the script itself that the production had apparently not been able to deal with, but the filming delay gave McQuarrie and his team the chance they needed to go back and try to work through the issues.
It seems that they were successful, as Mission: Impossible - Fallout has received rave reviews across the board, something that may not have happened if the script had "holes" in it before the injury took place. Currently, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes is giving Fallout a 93% positive rating, a score on par with the previous two entries in the franchise, which rank among Tom Cruise's best reviewed movies.
In that regard, it does seem like there were some positive results from what likely felt, at the time, like a minor disaster. Between the film production delay, the insurance issues that likely resulted, and, you know, the fact that a guy broke bones, there probably weren't a lot of people seeing a bright side at the time.
The rest of the world will finally get to see the results of the extra script polishing when Mission: Impossible - Fallout hits theaters next week, You can see Christopher McQuarrie talk about the situation with Sean in the video below.
