The Mission: Impossible franchise has always tried to up the ante with special effects, intense action sequences, and finding new ways to put Tom Cruise’s life in danger. That said, there’s been recent reports that Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie wanted to blow up a bridge for Mission: Impossible 7, which has caused a stir among some, claiming it’s a historic bridge in Poland. Now, the Mission: Impossible 7 director has responded to the controversy.
Christopher McQuarrie wrote a statement published in Empire, hoping to set the record straight and address rumors that he wanted to destroy a Polish monument for entertainment. According to the director, they had vague plans to partially destroy a bridge but didn’t think it would be possible until Polish authorities said they had a bridge they wanted to remove. Here’s what he said:
Mission: Impossible has come to be known as a franchise that does as much as humanly possible without the use of digital effects, which allows us to create moments in a way audiences have never seen before. At the very start of the film’s pre-production, we had a rough concept for a sequence involving a bridge over a body of water, ideally one that could be (spoiler alert) partially destroyed. While we doubted such a thing would be possible, a broad search was initiated in the unlikely event that any country anywhere in the world might have a bridge that needed getting rid of.
The bridge in question is an old railway bridge that runs in the Silesia Province, suspended above Lake Pilchowickie. It was first built in 1909 but has since been decommissioned in 2016. In response to Christopher McQuarrie’s search for a bridge, some people from Poland seemed eager to help him. Christopher McQuarrie continues,
They just happened to know of a non-functioning railroad bridge in an area that suited our purposes. And, better yet, the area in question was eager to promote tourism. Local roads being what they are, their best chance to do this rested in revitalizing an outdated rail system. This included replacing the main decking of the bridge in question, which engineers had deemed structurally unsound. The bridge was not built entirely in 1906 as has been reported. That bridge was partially destroyed by the retreating Germans during the Second World War before being rebuilt (the current bridge is, in fact, one of two very similar ones in the area, neither of which is a protected monument). Bottom line: to open up the area to tourism, the bridge needed to go. And we were only too happy to help out.
Though Poland's Ministry of Culture and National Heritage seemed to want to help out in an attempt to revitalize their roads and economy, there have been some who have pushed back against the proposed action to blow up the bridge. The Silesian Monument Conserver reportedly wants to list the bridge as a monument and The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage has appealed to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to have the bridge preserved.
Oddly enough, Christopher McQuarrie believes an individual that wanted a job on the production, but they deemed unqualified, decided to retaliate against them through public and online harassment. Here’s what he said later in his same statement,
After harassing members of our production publicly and anonymously on social media, as well as privately, this individual misrepresented our intentions and concealed their personal reasons for wanting to penalize us. They even tried to have this condemned, unsafe and unusable bridge landmarked in the hopes of preventing it from ever being removed and rebuilt (which we understand would be to the detriment of the area’s economic needs). Then they reached out to us to gloat about it. In short, this individual manipulated the emotional response of the people in a move that has now compromised our ambitions to bring our production to Poland.
It's hard to say if Christopher McQuarrie will continue to pursue blowing up this bridge. By the end of his statement, he sounded open to help Poland remove any bridges they don’t want to have around, but also made clear they have no intention of destroying cultural landmarks and monuments. And the situation happening in the public eye no doubt further complicates things.
Mission: Impossible is renowned for blowing stuff up. From the helicopter explosion in the first movie to the explosion of the Kremlin in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, they aren’t shy about finding new things to destroy. Of course, many of those special effects are done digitally, and in this case, Christopher McQuarrie wants to pull a Christopher Nolan and do it for real. After all, Tom Cruise jumped out of a plane for the last one.
Mission: Impossible 7 was originally scheduled to release on July 23, 2021, but has since been pushed back due to current events. It is now expected to release on November 19, 2021. For more movie news, stay tuned to CinemaBlend.
