Tom Cruise appears ageless in his films. But Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie was close to de-aging Cruise as a gimmick in the new film’s opening sequence.
The process was recently seen in the latest Indiana Jones film, where 81-year-old Harrison Ford had the odometer rolled back. At age 61, Cruise still is safe from that. But the sequence where it would have been used would have happened more than 30 years ago.
McQuarrie told GamesRadar he decided against it for Mission: Impossible because the process produced inconsistent results. Worse, he was distracted by seeing a younger version of the Ethan Hunt character.
“Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989,” McQuarrie said. “We talked about it as a cold open. We talked about it as flashbacks in the movie. We looked at de-aging.
“One of the big things about [the de-aging] I was looking at while researching, I kept saying, ‘Boy, this de-aging is really good’ or ‘This de-aging is not so good.’ Never did I find myself actually following the story,” he said. “I was so distracted by an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person.”
On this film, de-aging wasn’t right. But McQuarrie isn’t scrapping it forever. McQuarrie claims he is open to revisiting the de-aging process again in the future. “I cracked the code – I think – on how best to approach it,” he said. “By then, we had kind of moved away from it. We may still play with it. We never say never.”