Interviewed with other screenwriters for the New York Times, Christopher McQuarrie makes a great point about action sequences:
The best action sequences are free of exposition, with stakes that are established in advance or, better still, self-evident. They don’t ask an audience to think, to process, to remember. Instead, they keep the audience’s collective subconscious focused entirely on one simple question.
The question is not how will it end? If this mattered, there would be no Ethan Hunt, James Bond, Jason Bourne, John McClane, Indiana Jones, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin. We know they’ll come out on top in the end. We count on it. It is a contract, a sacred pact between filmmaker and audience.
The only question that matters is, how can this possibly end well?
McQuarrie just signed on to make two more Mission: Impossible movies. You can hear my interview with him about his transition from writer to writer-director in Scriptnotes episode 300.
