Interview [Written]: Christopher McQuarrie

A stellar Empire Online interview with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, The Edge of Tomorrow).

You’ve worked with Tom [Cruise] several times and you’ve said that on Valkyrie (which you co-wrote and produced) that you learned from him what you’d “been doing to alienate the film business” — what was it?

The first thing I was doing to alienate the business was holding grudges. People are gonna fuck me in this business. There’s no two ways about it. And the first thing you have to realise is that they’re very rarely doing it because it’s personal. The truth is they’re not thinking about you enough. What I want to tell those people that get so frustrated and so bitter about the business is: “No one knows who you are to care enough to deliberately screw you out of anything. You’re not crossing their mind when they’re doing whatever destructive thing that they’re doing to you. They’re thinking about themselves!” That’s the way it is. They probably don’t even know that they did anything wrong to you. And the magical thing about this business is it has no memory. People will screw you over and, next day, if they need you, they’ll pick up the phone and call you and you’re best friends.

The other thing was that I was trying very hard to make their movies the way I would make mine. And not make their movies the way they wanted them made. If I could distil it, that would be it. And I believed, naively, things that had been told to me by my first agent, which proved to be blatantly untrue. The biggest one being: “If you write a good script, you’ll be delivered.” That’s a lie. The more correct statement is: “If you write the movie they want to make, you’ll be delivered.” I don’t want to be disillusioning in that statement. I don’t want to say to people: “Don’t write the movie that you feel you should write.” You should always go with your gut. You should always write the movie you believe in. But don’t be surprised when you write a script that you know is good and nobody buys it. And nobody wants to read it. Because no one’s interested in making your script. They have a huge mandate on their table: all this product that they have to generate and they need people to help them do it. And so I stopped being a person who looked at them as if they were people who were not giving me a chance and started looking at them as people who were terribly lost and desperately in need of help. And I had a certain set of skills that could be used for that. And by looking at them and saying, “You have a movie to make, how can I help you make it?”, my entire life changed. My career changed. My position in the business changed. My financial prospects changed. Does that make me a happier filmmaker? No. Am I more fulfilled? No. Now I’m working a lot more and a lot more is getting made. But am I getting closer to having the power to make films that I really want to make? No.

And you don’t think that’ll change?

If it changes, it’ll change because of circumstances beyond my control. It will come not from the movie I am most proud of, but probably from the movie I’m most convinced is going to end my career. And then that movie will make $750m dollars and I’ll have hit the fucking lottery, because I’m just focused entirely on execution and not on result. You can’t control success anymore than you can control failure. You just have to keep making movies.

And you can’t compare yourself to other filmmakers — which I do all the time. I do it every day. I’m doing it right now. I’m looking at those filmmakers that have the career I wish I had — even if they’re not making movies that I want to make — but the career I wish I had, which is: “I made a little movie and I got to make a slightly bigger movie and a slightly bigger movie…” And now they make their kind of movie, which is not commercial, and yet every hot actor wants to work with them and they get to keep making movies the way they want to do it. That’s enormously enviable. I know how to do that now. But I’d have to start over. You don’t get to just suddenly move onto that track. You’re where life has brought you.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

You may follow McQuarrie on Twitter: @chrismcquarrie.

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