In San Francisco for WonderCon 2006 to talk about writing and directing “Mission Impossible 3,” Abrams made himself available for interviews with a small group of online journalists prior to taking the stage. Instead of coming into the press roundtable and taking his designated seat like most ‘talent’ does, Abrams walked around the entire table shaking hands, introducing himself (like that was necessary), and making small talk before settling down to answer questions about “MI3.” He also let a delicious-looking sandwich placed in front of him go uneaten because he thought it was too rude to eat in front of people who weren’t.
Besides proving it’s possible to remain a decent human being and enjoy a lucrative career in Hollywood, the first time feature film director turned out to be an incredibly entertaining interviewee.
Comparing “Mission Impossible 2” to the Visual Effects in “Mission Impossible 3:” “I think most of the visual effects… Some will be obvious because you’ll think, ‘Oh, the scale of this or that,’ but a lot of the stuff is invisible. A lot of the stuff is stuff that we did so you won’t know it’s a visual effect, hopefully. [That] is the advantage of doing something like that as opposed to a ‘War of the Worlds’ or something where you know the alien isn’t real so you’re kind of looking at it and, even if it looks absolutely for real, you’re like scrutinizing it almost unfairly. So the beauty of the visual effects in this even though there are more than twice as many effects shots in this movie than ‘War of the Worlds,’ you’d never know it by looking at it.”
JJ Abrams on the Scale of “Mission Impossible” Versus “Alias:” “Alias” features action sequences that look better than a lot of films and yet Abrams managed to bring them to life with a smaller budget and a much tighter shooting schedule. Asked to describe how it feels to be able to spend more money and time on action sequences for “MI3,” Abrams joked, “Well I think they’re reversed. I think this looks like a TV show, this movie (laughing). I was going for the ‘I Love Lucy’ sort of intimate 4th wall…"
Getting a little more serious, Abrams added, “I’ve got to tell you it was this whole thing has been so hysterically funny to me. This is the most surreal… And I said it before, I keep feeling like someone’s going to say, ‘Dude, you’ve been Punk’d! This is not real. None of this is real,’ because I just can’t believe it.
You know, working on ‘Alias’ and ‘Lost,’ which have both been incredibly rewarding and fun, you’re right, has always been about how do we do this with that. How do you make this with that? And the idea of taking the parameters of TV - the money, the schedule, the resources - and make something that hopefully looks filmic, it was great training. And so working on this movie, even though you think you have 100 days instead of 8 or you’ve got this budget instead of that budget, or you’ve got these sets or props instead of those, ultimately when it comes down to what’s important in doing what I do, it came down to like the person right there and the camera. So that even though it’s definitely massive, I mean the movie is sprawling in a lot of ways, it’s only sprawling in so far as it’s where the characters take each other. I don’t think it’s ever big for the sake of being big.
My only mandate in doing this movie was I wanted to make sure that we weren’t attempting to do anything, any visual effects sequence or any stunt sequence, as a stunt sequence or a visual effects sequence. It was always going to be what is our story so that when we came down to like trying to figure out some of the stuff, whether it’s stunts or chases or anything that happens in the movie, every time we knew that there was a situation where there was an escape or a tense situation or some kind of, we were like, ‘Let’s not even talk about it. We know that there’s got to be something here but let’s not [talk about it].’ We always focused on the story and once we knew we had a solid story – or we believed we had a solid story – we then allowed ourselves to sort of open the door to the toy store and go in and say, ‘How do we make these sequences as much fun as possible?’”
JJ Abrams
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