We had scenes together," says Pom Klementieff, a Mission superfan who remembers watching the first movie on an old black-and-white TV in her native France. "And I saw him do a scene with another character that is very important to the story, and I was tearing up. It's a beautiful link between the movies."

The Langley Heist

For some, it’s still the signature sequence of the Mission: Impossible series, even though it doesn't involve a life-threatening stunt. Ethan Hunt infiltrates the CIA headquarters at Langley, to retrieve vital information from a high-tech, temperature-controlled computer vault that is seemingly impossible to access. Enter Ethan, gliding down from the ceiling in complete silence, showing perfect balance and poise before making off with the info...

“I was in Japan promoting a film, and De Palma called me and pitched me this. It was Rififi, but how do we do it? I knew this rig and I came back and showed him the rig that I wanted to wear. I was showing him different kinds of equipment and movement, and I would find out, ‘What could I do? How could I move through this space? What looks elegant?’ I would practise to make it look elegant. And we were testing different metals (to hold Cruise in place).

“The first metal I tested was soft, and it broke. If I’m up high and it breaks that's a problem. I’ll never forget that day, because when I go from the computer down to the floor, it was very challenging, physically. We wanted it all to be in one shot. And my face kept hitting the ground as I went down. So I went to the crew guys and said, ‘Empty your pockets’, and put British [bank] notes in my toes, and balanced myself. And I went from the computer down, and didn't hit the ground. I’m holding, I’m holding, I’m holding it, and I was sweating. Everyone’s holding their breath, and then I could hear Brian start laughing. He goes. ‘Alright! Cut!’ And we both laughed and hugged each other.”

It all started with a tweet that caught my eye. It was a shot that featured both the batter and the pitcher, and many people on X likened it to the work of Brian De Palma.

And when you see it, you feel an emotional swell as you witness the inherent beauty of the game.

How did we get here?

Enter Mets Director for SNYtv John DeMarsico, who is a self-described film junkie and who has been putting some of the most insane shots into broadcasts of Mets games. Shots that are so beautiful and cool that they have sort of reignited people's love of the game, and have also encouraged them to explore the movie homages.

DeMarsico tweets with the tag #Baseballiscinema, and he's living up to it. Just cruising through highlights, I was in awe of shots with shallow focus, shots that homage Lord of the Rings, split screens, cross fades, and many more neat ways to edit, cut, and shoot America's pastime.

It really is cinema.

The only downside is that, as a Phillies fan, I hate that the Mets have this guy, and I demand we find our own auteur to step things up.

But that's beside the point.

Honestly, all of Major League Baseball should be lauding these efforts. Sports are often shot in boring and standard ways. But it is a game rife with emotion and tension and stakes, so we should have these edits. We should lean into the story of the game and get different angles.

The touch here is flawless. It doesn't distract, it only enhances. It makes a sport with 162 regular-season games feel important, and it gives gravity to shots that sometimes can bear no weight.

The trailers have not given much away, leading online sleuths to form their own theories about how that on-stage moment in L.A., which Tesfaye has attributed to psychological factors like stress, plays into the narrative. That ambiguity is "very intentional," the singer-turned-actor told Entertainment Weekly in a CinemaCon sit-down with Ortega and director Trey Edward Shults, who, along with Reza Fahim, also co-wrote the script. "With me and Trey, we romanticize the idea of giving out a trailer that doesn't give away anything."

"We never really see that anymore," Tesfaye added of that mystery. "It's always like these three-minute trailers that give out the whole plot because they want people to come to the theater. We trust the audience."

"I also think it's honest to the tone of the film," Shults added. "You can take everything at face value and go on an emotional ride with it, but also, if you want to read things in a deeper layer and infer a lot of stuff, it's pretty rich." In his own personal experience, "the least I know about films, the better," the filmmaker said. "So they can surprise me and I can interact with them."

Ortega, who also executive produces the film, did her best to tease what audiences can expect, calling it an emotional tale with themes of self-interrogation. "Speaking from Ani's perspective, she feels very neglected and unseen," Ortega said. "And she knows that she cares deeply about Abel more than anyone else ever could. It's frustrating when you feel like you're almost talking to a wall of somebody who's so unwilling to look at themselves in the mirror. And that's kind of what the film is about: the fear of having to deal with yourself and open up to yourself."

Expect nods, albeit unintentional ones, to the 1974 rock horror Phantom of the Paradise — about a disfigured composer who sells his soul — and the 1966 thriller Persona — about a famed stage actress who suddenly goes mute. "As things were evolving, we'd start connecting it to certain movies," Shults said.

"We weren't really [looking for] references for the film, it kind of just came to us," Tesfaye added.

Ultimately, Shults said, "the goal was to make something that feels fresh to us and different and unique."

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.

Cruise talked a little more about his quest for cinematic motion during an on-stage conversation yesterday at the British Film Institute, according to The Independent's Greg Evans:

“ I love the theme music,” Cruise joked. “ I thought it'd be interesting to take a Cold War TV series and turn it into an action movie.  I wanted action and suspense and lots of motion. I studied silent movies, Fantasia (1940) and musicals. How do you utilise motion?

“ I was constantly working and developing my abilities and developing technology.  It was such early days that the harnesses that I was wearing were very new and the cables were very new and we were all experimenting.

“ I remember the scene where I got blown from the helicopter to the train and there were pipes from the camera rig sticking out and I was like: ‘Guys, I might impale my skull’. No one had thought about stuff like that.”

Mission: Impossible [Brian De Palma, 1996] was your first film as producer.

Yes, with Sherry Lansing, who was the first female head of a studio-Twentieth Century Fox. I met her when I was doing Taps. And she was always a huge supporter of mine. And when she moved to Paramount, she came and said, Look, please start a production company. And I looked at the landscape, and I wanted something that was exploring motion in a different way. I wanted to go make a film foreign, it was always my passion to go to different countries. And I said, "Look. I will take Mission: Impossible, and I want to produce this as my first producing gig. And I remember, at that time, people were like, "What are you making a TV series for, into a movie?" You know what I mean? I remember. I was like. "I think it's gonna be cool, you know, we'll see what happens!"

I'm fortunate that my first time that I produced a film was with Brian De Palma, an incredibly skilled filmmaker. He started his career in the 60s and the guys that he was training with, some of them were from the 30s and 40s and 50s. So, that wealth of knowledge, that craftsmanship that has been passed down to me, that's stuff that I very much value.

Although Norton had said she was fired from the movie Tron (1982), she shared an Oscar nomination for her work on that film with Elois Jenssen. The Variety obit by Pat Saperstein highlights Norton's work in designing "Sissy Spacek’s iconic prom dress for Carrie:

“We had no money,” she recalled in a video interview about “Carrie.” She found many of the prom outfits in a store in the Valley that was going out of business, she said. But she had Carrie’s simple pale pink satin dress custom-made by a seamstress after changing the color from the original red in the book to create a more striking contrast with the blood that is splashed on Spacek.

“At the time, prom dresses and bridesmaid dresses and things were very fussy. They had all these ruffles and detail and I wanted to do….a bias cut dress and I wanted it to be really simple and look as if she could have made it herself,” she told Birth Movies Death. “It didn’t have a lot of ruffles or detail work. It’s sort of a classic 1930s bias cut dress. I wanted her to look different from everybody else but beautiful at the same time, and all the other girls, they looked like teenage girls wearing these sort of ruffly, fancy, gathered dresses.”

Other films included Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Airplane! (1980), Airplane II (1982), RoboCop 2 (again with Nancy Allen, in 1990), Cisco Pike (1971), and The Stunt Man (1980).

Brian De Palma's AMBROSE CHAPEL gleefully blends thriller tropes with farce, virtuoso set pieces, and a meta-awareness of cinematic history.
Mind control.
Repressed trauma.
Virtual reality.
Political manipulation.
Gendered power dynamics.

May 26th.