NOTE: This article contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. If you haven’t yet seen the movie, you’ve been warned.
I love listening to podcasts. Whether I’m driving across town, going for a run, cleaning my house or relaxing on the couch, you’re likely to find me playing a podcast to help score the scene. Some podcasts are better than others, but if you enjoy learning about movies and everything that goes into making them I encourage you to check out “The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith“, in which the titular host sits down with actors, directors and writers to discuss what it takes to bring a film to the screen, from both a business standpoint and a creative one. Together they break down scenes, give background, tell stories and lend perspective on a film that listeners might not otherwise hear.
Goldsmith’s most recent episode is one hell of a fun one to listen to, as writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and producer-star Tom Cruise sit down to discuss Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. It plays like an interview and an audio commentary at the same time, touching on things we already know from other interviews and news stories but also providing a lot of interesting tidbits and information we haven’t heard before. Cruise and McQuarrie share a great dynamic, making for a really fun and insightful 110-plus minute affair.
I already listened to the podcast over the weekend but I went back and listened to it again, taking notes, transcribing certain segments and jotting down factoids and other bits in order to cull them together for an article, which is what I’ve tried to piece together semi-coherently below. If you haven’t seen the movie I suggest you go see it or otherwise read at your own risk, as spoilers abound; if you have seen it and want to know more, read on and maybe give Goldsmith’s show a listen here, it’s well worth it.
With all that boring introductory stuff out of the way, let’s begin, shall we?
Perhaps the first thing to note is that there are a number of homages and Easter eggs in the film, some of them entirely intentional and some less so. One of the most notable Easter eggs in the movie is the rabbit’s foot keychain Ilsa Faust (Rebbeca Ferguson) carries and uses to help Ethan Hunt (Cruise) escape upon his capture early in the film. The item’s inclusion here is a small nod to the MacGuffin from Mission: Impossible III, and at one point the camera cuts between Ethan and a close-up on the rabbit’s foot to help make that connection with the audience.
Speaking of MacGuffins, Alfred Hitchcock has always been one of the franchise’s biggest influences, and that is no different with Rogue Nation. Brad North by Northwest as the two Hitchcock films that most directly influenced their project, in terms of theme and motif as well as story. Hunt’s sharply-cut suit from the movie’s opening set piece — in which Cruise hangs off the side of the plane during takeoff — is a nod to Cary Grant‘s suit in North by Northwest. As McQuarrie tells it, “We were working so fast, it was so crazy, there was never a moment for me to even discuss with the costume designer what Tom was wearing in that sequence, and he shows up in this suit … and I go, where have I seen that suit?”
But the Hitchcock references don’t end there, even when they’re accidental. Many critics have noted the opera sequence in Vienna is a clear homage to or riff on a similar scene from Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), but McQuarrie hadn’t even seen the classic Hitchcock thriller before shooting the scene.
“It was only as we were editing this sequence and the editor showed me [the scene from The Man Who Knew Too Much], and I see the chancellor getting shot in the arm with the red and white sash. I was like ‘Oh my god, this is so horrible. I should have watched this first.’ I wouldn’t have changed anything but at least I would have known who I was ripping off while I was doing it.”
McQuarrie was actually riffing on a short film he watched on YouTube called The Key to Reserva, which you can check out above. Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Key to Reserva is a long form advertisement for Freixenet Cava champagne and sees Scorsese riffing on both the Master of Suspense and himself. The short centers on Scorsese as he finds three-and-a-half pages of an unproduced Hitchcock manuscript and, as part of his film preservation work, decides to film it as Hitchcock would.
Set to Bernard Hermann‘s score from North by Northwest, “It’s an homage, it’s a love letter, it’s a sendup of Hitchcock,” McQuarrie says. “There’s not a single word of dialogue in it, and it’s really effective. I showed it to Tom and I was like, ‘This is what [the opera house] sequence can be, and we can make this bigger, we can really go for it.'”
Still, there are more Hitchcock connections to be found in Rogue Nation, from the twisty film-noir feel of the film’s final sequence to the female character at the center of the film, played superbly by series newcomer Rebecca Ferguson. McQuarrie spent a lot of time writing the character, and he and Cruise went down-to-the-wire searching for someone who could play Ilsa in the icy cool manner of the pair’s shared obsession, Ingrid Bergman — star of Hitchcock’s Notorious.
There is, of course, another Bergman connection in the film, an Easter egg that sits plain as day among all the rest. Ferguson’s Ilsa is named after Ilsa Lund, Bergman’s character in Casablanca. Also worth noting: Ethan and Benji (Simon Pegg) actually track Ilsa to Casablanca at one point, and one of the film’s major action set pieces takes place in the city’s narrow streets.
