How to Write An Action Hero

A dialogue between screenwriter-director Christopher McQuarrie, actor and producer Tom Cruise, and the “Aristotelian Stranger"

Jul 14, 2023

McQuarrie (known as “McQ”), Cruise, and the Aristotelian Stranger met at Cruise’s house for dinner. The superstar was relaxed in jeans, a blue cashmere sweater, and boots. Conversation before dinner centered on the most audacious stunt from Cruise’s latest movie, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1, in which Cruise jumps off the Helsetkopen mountain in Norway on a motorbike. Cruise beamed when he was asked by McQ how his day had gone. “It was good,” he said. “I did 29 skydives.”

McQ was eager for Cruise to meet the Aristotelian Stranger, a nickname McQ has given this obscure, indeed mysterious screenwriter who is never without his copy of Aristotle’s Poetics. If Cruise and the Aristotelian Stranger hit it off, McQ wants to invite him to join his next project with Cruise.

Dinner—grilled salmon with asparagus, a beet and goat cheese salad, La Croix water—was prepared by Cruise’s chef and enjoyed on the patio. The following is an excerpt from the dinner conversation.

McQ: When I first met Tom, back in 2006, he told me, unashamedly: “I make mass entertainment.” I knew right then we were simpatico. There is an outsized importance placed on Oscars. Films that not many people are going to see. A wedge has been driven into the industry. Are you an artist or an entertainer? Tom doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive, and nor do I.

THE STRANGER: Shakespeare would not have understood the distinction between artist and entertainer. That’s a modern distinction. As is the companion distinction between “fine art” and “popular art.” Why shouldn’t a big piece of popular entertainment, like Dead Reckoning, also function as art? It comes down to what we mean by “mass entertainment.” What do you say that phrase means, Tom?

McQ (laughing): Here we go, Tom. I told you that my friend likes to ask questions.

CRUISE: If we’re talking about movies, “mass entertainment” means a story that attracts the largest audience possible by offering them the most attractive experience possible: the experience of being on the edge of their seats. For like, the whole two hours. I want an audience to completely lose itself in the excitement of the action.

THE STRANGER: Why is excitement so important?

CRUISE: Who doesn’t like to be excited? It’s fun!

THE STRANGER: I don’t disagree with you. To be excited by a movie is fun and having fun seems to be an end in itself. I just think it’s interesting to think about what it means to be excited by a movie.

McQ: I think it means feeling a heightened sense of life. The Venice sequence in Dead Reckoning, for example—the lovely establishing shots of the city, Ethan and Ilsa on the gondola, the duel on the bridge, all that—shows us life but at a high pitch of intensity. We’re not just looking at shots of Venice, we’re looking at Venice at its most beautiful. We’re not just watching people doing things, we’re watching people fighting to save the world from the Entity.

THE STRANGER: Your metaphor is intriguing: a heightened sense of life…a high pitch of intensity. Excitement seems to be about “going up to the heights.” But what is up there, on that high mountain? Well, on the top of that mountain you get a glimpse of the beautiful—in your example, McQ, from Dead Reckoning, the beauty of Venice. And you also get a glimpse of the good—in the form of the courageous actions of Ethan and Ilsa. The beautiful and the good—along with the true, I suppose—are what we find exciting.

McQ: That’s a big theme in Dead Reckoning: living in the truth.

CRUISE: Yeah. And the thing is, we don’t live our ordinary, everyday lives up on “the heights” of the mountain you’re talking about. But movies give us an opportunity to see what’s up there, what life is—at its best. (Smiles) At its coolest.

THE STRANGER: It may sound strange to say, but the excitement of a car chase or a duel—even parachuting from a motorbike—seems to be a kind of contemplation: a loving gaze at that which is coolest in human life. The ancient Greeks called the amphitheater where the audience sat to watch the tragedy or the comedy the theatron, which is of course the root of our English word “theater.” The Greek word theatron is a form of the word meaning “seeing” or “gazing upon” or “contemplating.” For the Greeks, the theater was the “gazing place” or the “contemplating place.” And so it still is for us.

CRUISE: I like it!

THE STRANGER: But now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to explore the character of Ethan Hunt.

McQ: Good. Tom and I would like to hear your ideas on how we might develop Ethan in MI8.

THE STRANGER: Thank you. Let’s start by considering his name.

CRUISE: His name? You want to change his name?

THE STRANGER: No, just consider it. Ethan “Hunt.” That’s what an action hero is, no? A man on the hunt.

McQ: In his book Theatre, David Mamet says something like—wait (picks up his phone from the table), I copied the passage into my Notion app—here it is: “Man is a predator. We know this because our eyes are in the front of our heads [prey animals have eyes on the side of their heads]….As predators we close out the day around the campfire with stories of the hunt. These stories, like the chase itself, engage our most primal instincts of pursuit. The story’s hero is in pursuit of his goal—the hiding place of the stag or the cause of the plague on Thebes or the question of Desdemona’s chastity or the location of Godot”—or, in Dead Reckoning, Ethan’s destruction of the Entity. That’s what a story is: a protagonist “on the hunt” and encountering a progressive series of obstacles along the way. Mamet goes on: “In the hunt story, the audience is placed in the same position as the protagonist: The viewer is told what the goal is and, like the hero, works to determine what is the best thing to do next….This is the apparent paradox of dramatic writing. It is not, though it may appear to be, the communication of ideas but rather the inculcation in the audience of the instincts of the hunt.

CRUISE: This adds something to what we were saying earlier about excitement. What makes our movies exciting is that the audience is in the same position as the protagonist, wondering what will happen next, in suspense as to whether the bad guys will be defeated and the goal achieved.

THE STRANGER: Interesting. So part of what gives us the “heightened” experience of excitement is a kind of pumped-up wonder or curiosity about how things will turn out for the protagonist. We’re not just contemplating a good already achieved. We’re contemplating the preciousness of a good that might not be achieved at all.

McQ: Mamet calls this experience of the audience “the thrill of the communal hunt.” It’s an exercise of the primal, hunting instinct in human beings. It’s also a “suspension of the analytical faculty,” the kind of suspension, Mamet says, that is also experienced in “the falling-in-love portion of mating, in gambling, in combat, in sport.”

THE STRANGER: I agree with Mamet that the thrill or excitement of the communal hunt that an audience experiences in watching a film like Dead Reckoning suspends analysis, in the sense of the mind’s ability to “ratiocinate,” to break big ideas down into parts and to compose and divide the parts in various ways. But this doesn’t mean that in the “communal hunt” in the movie theater our mind isn’t active. The more intuitive, contemplative activity of our mind is still very much engaged.

CRUISE: Right. If contemplation does occur as people watch Maverick or Dead Reckoning, it’s a more visceral thing. It’s not like doing your math homework.

THE STRANGER: May I explore the character of Ethan Hunt a little further? Thinking about him reminds me of something the philosopher Iris Murdoch says about Kant.

CRUISE: Whoa! Okay. Go slowly. I did 29 skydives today and I’m already a little light-headed.

THE STRANGER: Here’s what Murdoch says. (The Stranger takes from his shirt pocket a small notebook.)

McQ: You’re totally analog, man! You learned something by contemplating Dead Reckoning!

THE STRANGER (smiles and then recites the passage from Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good): “How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in [Kant’s] Grundlegung (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy….He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal….He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage.” Do you recognize this Kantian man-god?

McQ: I can see Ethan Hunt in there, yeah. He’s free, lonely, powerful, brave. And he’s the ideal citizen of the liberal state because he alone seems to know what’s best for it.

CRUISE: And he’s certainly a warning held up to tyrants. That’s what Ethan Hunt is all about—taking down tyrants.

McQ: So, what’s your point with this passage?

THE STRANGER: Murdoch, I think it’s fair to say, would see Ethan Hunt as a paradigm of the modern man she describes. Ethan Hunt also is stripped of what Murdoch calls an “exiguous metaphysical background.” He lives in a world without God, without any reality that transcends the human agent. It is fundamentally a world of “choices,” as Dead Reckoning more than once reminds us. Ethan Hunt’s entire life is shaped by his fundamental choice to live in the shadows of the IMF. It is also a world of global political forces, some more powerful than others. It is, finally, a scientific-technological world, one that not only alienates human beings from their own creations—the Entity, after the fashion of Frankenstein’s creature, takes on a life of its own—but also alienates them from one another and from the entire universe.

McQ: But hold on. There are still values in the MI world. Ethan says in Dead Reckoning that he values his friendships more than he values his own life.

CRUISE: He values humanity more than he values his own life.

THE STRANGER: This is true. I stand corrected. But that leads me to ask: What is the source of these values? If Murdoch is right, they come from the judgment of Ethan’s conscience, the voice of his own reason. Doesn’t Ethan say as much to Kittridge in an early scene?

McQ: So, what’s the problem with Ethan having a conscience?

THE STRANGER: Well, conscience is a matter of moral judgment. But on what basis does Ethan make his moral judgments?

CRUISE: Wait. What do you mean?

THE STRANGER: A moral judgment must be based on something, some principle, some guideline, some sense of what is ultimately good and best.

CRUISE: But I said that. Ethan Hunt’s judgments are based on his love for humanity.

THE STRANGER: And Ethan’s nemesis, Gabriel, bases his judgments on his love of death and destruction. Who is right?

CRUISE: Ethan is right.

THE STRANGER: Why?

CRUISE: Because humanity is a greater good than power, death, destruction.

THE STRANGER: Says you.

CRUISE: Says everybody.

THE STRANGER: Really? Does everyone put the fate of humanity as such over their own particular desires, or the desires of their country, or their party, or their tribe? That’s not the world I read about when I read the newspapers.

McQ: But that’s why Ethan Hunt is, I daresay, a meaningful character. He gives us a model of selfless devotion to the greater good.

THE STRANGER: I don’t deny that he is a most impressive character—far more admirable, of course, than Gabriel and even his own government leaders. My question, however, is whether Ethan’s devotion to his friends and to humanity as such amounts to the recognition of a principle that transcends human choice. Because if it is simply Ethan’s preference to be a hero, as he defines “hero,” then his choice is no more reasonable than that of Gabriel. It’s just a preference. Murdoch also says the following about the Kantian man-god: “In fact Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.”

CRUISE: You’re saying Ethan Hunt is Satan? Gabriel is Satan.

THE STRANGER: If that’s so, then there must be a reality in Ethan’s world other and beyond his independence, his power, his rationality, his bravery. There must be something more than just his choices and preferences—something that justifies them.

McQ: I don’t think Ethan’s devotion to humanity is just his preference. I think it is based on something transcendent: the inherent dignity of human beings.

CRUISE: Agreed.

THE STRANGER: All right. But then we need to press further and ask: What gives human beings their inherent dignity? We cannot answer this question by saying that our dignity is founded upon our independence, power, rationality, bravery, et cetera, or else we will find ourselves right back in our earlier conundrum. Dignity will simply be reduced to our ability to assert our preferences.

CRUISE: So, what are you looking for here? You want an action hero like Jim Caviezel in Sound of Freedom?

THE STRANGER: I haven’t seen that movie yet. I’d have to see how Caviezel’s character is drawn. Clearly, though, we can say that Caviezel’s character has a moral compass: he wants to stop child sex trafficking.

McQ: How is he different than Ethan Hunt, then? Ethan’s got a moral compass, too.

THE STRANGER: He does, no doubt. Again, I’d have to see Sound of Freedom before saying more about whether Caviezel’s character is any different from that of Ethan Hunt.

CRUISE: Knowing Caviezel and the producers of Sound of Freedom, his character is probably a pretty religious guy, a Christian.

McQ: Wait a second. Are you saying that an action hero has to be a Christian or else he’s Satan?

THE STRANGER: Not a Christian necessarily. But without devotion to a principle that transcends human choice, the action hero is just one more force in a world of forces.

CRUISE: I still don’t get what devotion to a “transcendental principle” adds to an action hero.

THE STRANGER: It adds a dimension to reality that he does not make. It adds something to be faithful to that is not just the hero’s preferences, however noble they may be. Without such a dimension, we can no longer rationally distinguish good from evil.

McQ: At the beginning of Mission Impossible: Fallout, what was the self-destructible message that Ethan receives at the beginning of the film embedded in?

THE STRANGER: It was a fake book.

CRUISE: Homer’s Odyssey.

McQ: In making that allusion to Homer in the script, I was attempting to place Ethan Hunt in the tradition of great epic heroes. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, is devoted to his family, just as Ethan is devoted to his “family” in the IMF.

THE STRANGER: A brilliant touch, too. The evocation of Homer puts us back in a world of the gods and a transcendent dimension to human beings. Odysseus’s family is a common good that is no mere preference of his. It is a divinely sanctioned community in which human beings are made to flourish, one that must be protected at all costs. The thing is, Ethan’s “family” looks rather “thin” compared to Odysseus’s family. Ethan’s family has no divine sanction. In fact, it is only metaphorically a family. No children are produced. It’s not connected to any wider social worlds, much less a political community. It’s just a handful of alienated people who have decided to band together because the world is in peril.

CRUISE: That’s not nothing.

THE STRANGER: No indeed. It’s not nothing. But it’s “thin,” as I say, compared to the loyalties of the great epic heroes. Part of the thinness of Ethan’s “family” is that we don’t know why they all feel such a deep commitment to humanity at large. It’s just a posited as a given.

McQ: So how would one try to make Ethan’s loyalties less “thin”? How would we introduce a more robust transcendent dimension to the MI world? Have Ethan get religion?

CRUISE: And lose half our audience? What about somehow reuniting him with “Jules,” his wife? That would be kinda Homeric.

THE STRANGER: Now we’ve moved from a metaphysical discussion to, let us call it, a “poetical” discussion, a discussion of the storyteller’s craft. But as we’ve begun to see, not even screenwriting can excuse itself from metaphysical questions.

CRUISE: I’ll put on a pot of tea and we can keep talking. You may have heard, Stranger, that I don’t do regular desserts. But chef makes these dates filled with peanut butter that are killer.

THE STRANGER: They sound scrumptious. But while you wait for the kettle to boil, consider this: maybe one reason that the MI films are so popular is that they already show us something important what it means to be loyal to something beyond one’s preference. What they show us might be a rather “thin” good, but in the modern environment described by Murdoch, one has to start somewhere. The character of Ethan Hunt offers us a protagonist in a heroic act of “unselfing” (to use Murdoch’s word), and moviegoers clearly appreciate that. Now the question is, as McQ says, how to make the good to which Ethan is loyal even more robust.

THE COMIC MUSE

Discussion about this post