AND HOW REWATCHING THE TITLES IN DE PALMA'S FILM GAVE HIM SOME IDEAS
Moviefone's Phil Pirrello asks Christopher McQuarrie how he selects which clips to use in the opening titles of his two Mission: Impossible movies. "That's a really good question," McQuarrie responds. "If you look at the first Mission: Impossible -- Brian De Palma's -- he shows you every one of the characters that dies in the movie, in the order in which they die."This is not exactly true -- De Palma's opening credits appear to mimic the opening credit sequences of the TV show it is based on, with the purpose of settling the audience into the idea that these characters are ours, the IMF, the team we are going to follow throughout the film. Little does the first-time viewer (especially in 1996) suspect that the film is going to pull that rug out, devastatingly, fairly early on. All that said, there are key shots included in De Palma's opening titles that do show the death-blows in close-up (the knife stabbed through the gate, or the computer keyboard stroke that controls parts in the elevator shaft), shortly after showing the respective characters that fall victim to those blows. It's not exactly in the same order in which they die in the movie, yet I think what McQuarrie is getting at is that the opening credit sequence cleverly shows these details without giving anything away.
"Yeah," McQuarrie continues to tell Pirrello, "if you watch it you'll see there's actually a storytelling motif going through it. I only noticed it around the time I was making Rogue and we were rewatching it and looking through those credits.
"I remember when, on Ghost Protocol, Brad Bird... he had a whole idea of shooting misdirections within his titles. Getting shots specifically for the opening titles that were slightly different -- from a different angle of a piece of action. And you learn very quickly you don't have time to get those. You're racing very quickly, always trying to beat the clock, and you run out of time. And what I did when I came to it was -- we found these guys called Filmograph -- an amazing video effects house in Los Angeles -- and they came and sent us two concepts for the titles [for Rogue]. And I liked both concepts so much, I said: "You know what? We're gonna use both concepts. One at the beginning, and one at the end." And they absolutely nailed it. They did it so well, they got two jobs out of it. And out of that, that's where we developed the 'curtain call.' The idea of seeing the characters come back at the end of the movie. And that was something unique to Rogue and then Fallout. In fact, it's the only connection -- stylistically -- that Fallout has in common with Rogue.
"So what we do -- [Editor] Eddie Hamilton and I -- we say to Filmograph: 'You tell the story back to us [in the opening titles].' And we give them the whole movie. And they take little clips and they throw things at us and we throw things back at them. And we more or less feel our way through it by the energy the images are giving off. And how they are juxtaposed. And we like to do at least one giveaway in the credits. We like to do one thing where we are tipping our hand a bit. If you're paying attention, there's a little bit of a spoiler in there."
Updated: Tuesday, December 4, 2018 10:41 PM CST
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