Brad Bird Talks Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

EW got a chance to talk to direct Brad Bird while he was promoting the release of Pixar’s The Incredibles on Blu-Ray, they took the chance to talk about his upcoming live action directorial debut Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and working with Tom Cruise.  And what might be his next film, 1906 (a disaster film about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.)

How’s Mission: Impossible gone so far?

It was a very challenging shoot. It’s a big film and we had to move around a lot. We were doing a lot of physical effects live — we weren’t using special effects. And so it was physically a real challenge.

Did you come across situations where you wish it was an animated film?

Yes and no. The wonderful thing about animation is you have absolute control over every frame. The nightmare of animation is that you have absolute control over every frame. Literally, you have to decide upon everything, and you don’t get anything for free. You can’t go to a location and simply say, “This looks good,” and shoot there. You have to discuss what kind of trees, is it a railyard, how wide are the tracks, are the tracks new or old? The amount of planning you have to do is just jaw-dropping.


So that part of it I’m not sorry to be away from [laughs]. But there are pleasures to be had in both mediums. With live-action, you’re trying to catch little moments of lightning in a bottle. In animation you’re trying to do that too, but you’re doing it one volt at a time.

I’m looking forward to seeing Tom Cruise dangling from that Dubai skyscraper [the Burj Khalifa].

[laughs] He did dangle! That’s not a special effect.

And it wouldn’t be the same with animation…

You could do it, but there wouldn’t be any life and limb being risked.

Or YouTube videos of Tom waving to people inside the building. Real quick, after Mission: Impossible, is 1906 [a disaster film about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake] your next project?

I don’t know. It’s all about getting the story to work, and the canvas is so big on it that it’s easy to bust down its movie-sized walls and go rampaging throughout the countryside. The problem has always been scaling it and containing it in a movie-sized length. It’s really a movie that wants to be a miniseries. But if you did it as a miniseries, then you’d have to do it for the small screen, and the story demands to be told on a big screen. So we’re still working on it.

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