Minimoog V 2.0 Review
Arturia's Minimoog V 2.0 is a free update to their acclaimed hardware emulation,... [more]
J.J. Abrams likes to make things. In his downtime, he composes music, creates artworks, draws animation. His favourite T-shirt is one he designed himself. The guy once made a chocolate bar from scratch for his wife.
Mostly, however, the 39-year-old writer, director and producer likes to tell stories. And if you’ve been anywhere near a television set in the last few years, chances are you might have been drawn in by one of them. His shows Felicity (which followed a young woman through her college years) and Alias (which followed a young woman as she travelled the world as a butt-kicking secret agent) have attracted small but devoted audiences, but his most recent program Lost is a bona fide smash watched by millions of viewers worldwide.
The son of a TV movie producer, Abrams was still at university when he sold his first script, and it’s his knack for storytelling and characterisation that has made him one of the hottest properties in television. The high-concept premise – the adventures of a gorgeous spy, for instance, or a band of plane-crash survivors marooned on a mysterious island – might attract viewers but it’s the all-too-ordinary flaws and virtues of the people that keeps them tuned in.
It was this deceptively simple and remarkably effective approach that caught the eye of Tom Cruise, who’d been impressed with the narrative nous evident in the first two seasons of Alias. The third instalment of Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film franchise was going through a troubled development period at the time, with director Joe Carnahan (Narc) leaving the project a month before filming was scheduled to begin. Abrams didn’t know it at the time, but his career was about to shift into a whole new gear.
“The weirdest thing was after becoming friends with Tom and knowing him for a few months, he’d never brought it up,” said Abrams, a bespectacled charmer blessed with a quick, self-deprecating wit and the killer timing of a stand-up comedian.
“Knowing Tom, knowing that he does Mission: Impossible and that he was getting ready to do a third movie, I thought maybe he’d ask me to help out with the script if he had problems. But he made it seem like there were no issues at all. Then I got a call out of the blue one night from my agent, who said ‘Are you aware there are discussions about you directing this movie? Tom wants you to direct this movie’.”
Convinced he was either the subject of a misunderstanding or the victim of a particularly mean prank, Abrams met with Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner the following night and was greeted by “that Tom Cruise smile” and an offer to direct Mission: Impossible III. “The whole thing was off-the-charts bizarre,” laughed Abrams, shaking his head.
Possibly just as bizarre was Abrams’s initial reluctance to take the job. While he admired Shawshank Redemption writer-director Frank Darabont’s screenplay, describing it as “a classic, densely plotted thriller”, it wasn’t the vision of Mission: Impossible he wanted to bring to the screen. “It was really well-written and very cool but I just wasn’t the right director for it,” he said.
Explaining his reasons for turning down the project, Abrams said the Mission: Impossible film he would make would take a much more personal and intimate approach, aiming to be both funny and heartbreaking as well as a fast-paced rollercoaster ride. When Cruise replied that that was the approach he’d wanted to take since launching the franchise a decade earlier, Abrams said that it would take at least a year to get his version up and running. Cruise said he was willing to wait.
“It was like every day just got weirder!” laughed Abrams.
The first two Mission: Impossible movies, directed by Brian DePalma and John Woo, could be described as stylistically elegant but emotionally barren. (It’s rumoured that Mission: Impossible II screenwriter Robert Towne was given outlines of a number of action sequences with the brief of building a story around them.)
Aware that he was not a cinematic stylist the calibre of either director, Abrams realised that his contribution to Mission: Impossible III (or M:I:III, as the publicity campaign would have it) would be the talent that kept viewers returning to his television shows week after week – the juxtaposition of three-dimensional, recognisably human characters with extraordinary, larger-than-life situations. Recruiting Alias writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci as his collaborators, Abrams essentially superimposed the format of his spy series onto Mission: Impossible by delving into the personal life of Cruise’s globe-trotting superspy Ethan Hunt.
By focusing on the relationships with Hunt’s Impossible Missions Force team and giving Hunt himself a fiancee (played by Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’s Michelle Monaghan) unaware of his secret life, Abrams aimed to add extra dramatic heft to the hero’s pursuit of Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman, a longtime friend of Abrams’s), a ruthless, vicious villain described as “the middleman who gets bad people bad things”.
If the stakes were raised by helming a mega-budgeted blockbuster in his first venture as a feature-film director, Abrams wasn’t especially concerned. After all, years of Alias had given him a solid understanding of the ins and outs of espionage and intrigue. His star, it turned out, was no slouch either. “Tom had an uncanny ability to discuss the conventions of the genre with such ease that it felt very much like a meeting with any of the Alias writers,” said Abrams. “We both knew the kind of second-guessing and triple-guessing we needed to do in order to tell these stories. It was important in terms of combining a pulp genre with true emotional situations.”
And providing a bigger bang for the studio’s buck didn’t faze the director either. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the editing room with action sequences I have or haven’t directed, getting a sense of what works and what doesn’t. I had this bag of tricks I knew I could pull out if I needed to. And I had a comfort level that allowed me to show up on the set and try and be as creative as possible, the way I used to when I was a kid. I’d always look at every place I went as a location for some kind of action sequence,” he said.
For Abrams, telling a story is telling a story, regardless of the medium. “When I’ve worked in television, I’ve never thought of it as television. I just thought of it as storytelling. I never thought of TV stuff as opposed to film stuff. It’s awkward talking about yourself and what you do from the outside in but while this is a movie with a lot of action – more than the first two combined, actually, when we count the sequences – it’s not an action movie in my mind,” he said.
“It’s a love story, it has a lot of comedy and it also happens to have action in it. I keep pointing out Die Hard as an example of a movie that I thought was a great movie with action. It felt like that’s how it was approached, even though it’s kind of casually tagged as an action movie, but to me the reason the action feels so remarkable and why people want to see it again and again is because of the characters and the story. Whereas Die Hard 2 was more like a series of sequences designed to elicit a response, as opposed to what the story demanded to have happen.”
Given the opportunity to reinvent the Mission: Impossible franchise according to his own vision, Abrams still couldn’t help but be somewhat sceptical about the degree of control he would have over the project. After all, this was Tom Cruise’s baby – well, his other baby – that Abrams would be overseeing.
“Tom said from the beginning. ‘I want this to be your Mission: Impossible; I’m your actor’. But, okay, he’s the producer and he’s Tom Cruise,” said Abrams. “I had friends warning me to be careful and I was thinking to myself, ‘Let’s just see how this goes…’” Cruise proved true to his word, however, allowing Abrams to hire many of his regular crew members from Alias and Lost, cast Felicity star Keri Russell in a key supporting role and generally ceding creative control.
Perhaps as a result of this, any attempt to rake a little muck about the increasingly capricious Cruise proves unsuccessful. “He facilitated everything,” said Abrams. “He was respectful and deferential to me, and I think everyone who was thinking ‘Okay, TV Boy, let’s see what you’re going to do’ saw that. During my first meeting with all the heads of the various departments, and it was a huge meeting – it was like every meeting I’d ever had in one meeting, it was more people in one room than had ever watched Felicity – I said, ‘I want this to be movie we’re all proud of, but even more than that I want this to be a respectful set. We’re all lucky to be in this position’. That was really important to me.
“And it was a happy set – I kept getting them home on time and we weren’t working on the weekends. All Tom had to do was be a little bit of a jerk or a little less collaborative and everything would have derailed. But he was so good, focused, professional and dedicated to making the movie better that we finished ahead of schedule and under budget. I think he set the tone.
“One of my best friends, Michael Giacchino – the composer of Alias, Lost and this movie – said the other day after we finally wrapped everything, ‘You know what the best thing about all this was?’ And I thought he was going to say using a 112-piece orchestra or something. He said, ‘Watching Tom and Paula support everything you wanted to do with this movie’. I felt that every day but for someone else to see that and say it… what can I say, if you don’t like the movie, it’s 100 per cent my fault.”
Mission: Impossible III is in cinemas now.
