Mission’s progression from spy craft to death-defying action with Cruise at the center of every stunt started almost by accident. Brian De Palma says that after watching the disappointing returns of Carlito’s Way, he needed a hit, and when Sydney Pollack pulled out of Mission to direct a Sabrina remake, super-agent Mike Ovitz pounced. De Palma had never watched the original television series, but he came recommended to Cruise by Steven Spielberg, and so, the match was made. And De Palma had a radical plotline: “The first problem was that Tom wanted Mission: Impossible to be about five guys doing impossible tasks. First thing I said was, ‘We got to kill all the other guys so we can start with Tom as the leader of a new group.’”

Paramount tried to hire the original TV actors, but Peter Graves, the incorruptible lead operative Jim Phelps in the show, reacted angrily upon learning he would become a turncoat in the movie. “I had nothing to do with that,” De Palma says. “Who knows what [co-producers] Paula Wagner and Tom were doing? Feeling out different actors for those parts? I had no knowledge of the original series, never saw an episode. All I knew was there were four or five guys with different specialties that did something on each mission. No characters, just technicians.”

De Palma had other problems. He’d cracked the script after convincing his Carlito’s Way scribe David Koepp to write it with him. “I got Tom finally to commit to the script David had written, and then Paula called me the next day and said, ‘We’ve gotten a go from Paramount, but we want to fire David and hire Bob Towne.’ Paula and Tom thought he was going to bring something more to the script, but that became a big problem.” Luckily, De Palma kept the fired Koepp close at hand. “I had two screenwriters in different hotel rooms in London while I was building sets, each working on their script. David used some of Towne’s ideas in the script he rewrote, and that became the movie.”

As for Cruise and those notorious stunts, De Palma recalls exactly when his star’s fuse got lit. A scene in which Hunt flees after exploding a giant fish tank in a restaurant didn’t look right with the stuntman. “I said to Tom, ‘You’ve got to do this to make it really work.’ I remember when we were just about to shoot it, he came over to me. There was going to be so much water coming out, and glass, and this was really scary. He walked over and said, ‘I’m just an actor.’ I said, ‘Tom, you gotta try.’ And he did it. I think he got into doing all the stunts himself when he realized he could probably do it better than a stuntman.”

By the end, Cruise executed the signature spider web scene where he drops into a vault full of alarm sensors in the CIA’s headquarters, strung from a wire. “He worked out a way to be still when he was so close to the floor, and when we lowered him, he’d flip over, but he figured out that by putting some coins in his shoes to balance his body when held on the rig, he didn’t flip. It was his genius that finally made it work. And then he put his body in quite dangerous situations with the train stunt.”

That “train stunt” is the climax where a speeding train, with Cruise hanging off the side, is chased into the Channel Tunnel by a helicopter. “The wind is blowing by him, at god knows how many miles an hour. You had to tie people down or they’d fly off the set. Then Tom does this flip, and we didn’t get it the first time. So, he did it again.”

De Palma showed a rough cut to his friend George Lucas. “I was mixing at the Skywalker Ranch, and showed it to George,” he says. “We had a very complicated setup scene with Jim Phelps [Jon Voight], having to do with him going to Chicago and setting something up at the hotel. George says, ‘Where’s the scene where they’re all sitting at the kitchen table and Phelps is telling everybody what they’re supposed to do?’”

So, De Palma brought back the cast. “That was a great advantage when our group of directors would look at each other’s movies and say, ‘Wait, you’ve forgotten something.’ Our group was George, Steven [Spielberg], Marty [Scorsese] and myself, and sometimes Francis [Coppola]. I wish that tradition was carried on.”

A romantic angle between Hunt and Phelps’ wife (Emmanuelle Béart) was also scrapped. “This plot was complicated enough,” De Palma says.

De Palma and Towne had a harsh disagreement over the climax. The director favored the train action scene, while Towne wanted a character-based conclusion between Hunt and Phelps, inside the train. “We got into a knock-down drag-out argument in front of Tom that ended when I said, ‘You want to play this scene out in the boxcar? Fine. I think it stinks.’ Tom called me up and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I think we should do the helicopter chase.’ Tom ultimately made the decision, and he’s a very smart producer. He went with what he thought would be more effective, and fortunately, it was the idea I had come up with.”

The movie grossed $457 million worldwide and De Palma was invited back for the sequel, but he could see it would scale more toward action, and outside of The French Connection, he’s never seen a car chase he admires. “When Tom asked me to direct the second one, I said, ‘Are you kidding? Who wants to do another one of these things again?’ I accomplished what I wanted, which was to make the biggest hit I ever had. And I have no belief you should spend your time making sequels.”

Wagner was involved with the first three films but has obviously kept an eye on, from afar, the subsequent five Mission: Impossible pictures. She’s “thrilled,” indeed “absolutely thrilled” about its success “and to see what Tom has done with this and his team, and Chris McQuarrie.”

She’s rightly proud of the work Brian De Palma did on the first movie released in 1996, and she still gets excited by his vision of it, as do I!

“All the twists and the turns, and it was the first three, which were the ones I was involved with, where it was really finding itself. What is this we asked ourselves? We know it’s something amazing, but what is it and what are the concepts? And who is Ethan Hunt? That was always a big question. And I’m proud of everyone that has taken this series to make it what it is today.

“It’s a movie, and it was always designed that way to bring people into the theater, get them out of their houses into the theater.” she adds.

I mention the stellar lineup of actors cast for the first Mission: Impossible movie. Vanessa Redgrave, for starters!

“What happened,” Wagner explains, “is her agent called me and said, ‘Do you have any male roles for Vanessa Redgrave to play? She always likes to play things kind of out of the box that aren’t the obvious.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ I said, ‘Let me talk to Tom and Brian.’ So we all conferred about this. And the idea came up to have her play Max, the villain in Mission 1. So that role was originally a man … but when Vanessa Redgrave wants to play a male role in your film, you go for it,” she shrugs.