{"id":3071,"date":"2023-06-16T06:55:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-16T06:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=3071"},"modified":"2023-06-16T06:15:06","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T06:15:06","slug":"playing-drafts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2023\/06\/16\/playing-drafts\/","title":{"rendered":"Draft excluder"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Actor Rebecca Ferguson mentioned in an interview recently that the Mission: Impossible films do not have a script. She said, more or less, that they are made up as they go.<\/p>\n<p>With all respect to Ferguson, I heard this and thought aye, aye, another actor. I have heard similar claims about Mission before, but this sounded so like the time the New Tricks cast claimed that they rewrote all that show&#8217;s scripts. If you don&#8217;t happen to remember the two times the whole cast &#8212; and such a good cast &#8212; said this bollocks, it was bollocks.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, that&#8217;s true but unhelpful. The cast of the BBC series said this, the crew said &#8220;prove it&#8221;. Show us one comma difference between the scripts as the writers delivered them and the lines that this cast then delivered.<\/p>\n<p>There wasn&#8217;t one single pixel difference and you knew there wouldn&#8217;t be. Or I&#8217;m suddenly minded again of Lisa Kudrow going on at some length about all the work she&#8217;d done to create her Friends character &#8212; and the interviewee finally giving up and pointing out that everything she&#8217;d said was already there in the bloody script.<\/p>\n<p>Only&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Ferguson was fully and completely correct. Since reading her saying that, I&#8217;ve heard two specific examples to prove it, and to make me choke on a biscuit.<\/p>\n<p>First, if you have seen any of the promotion for the forthcoming seventh Mission: Impossible film, you&#8217;ve seen Tom Cruise riding a motorbike off the edge of a cliff.<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe title=\"Mission: Impossible \u2013 Dead Reckoning Part One | Official Trailer (2023 Movie) - Tom Cruise\" width=\"440\" height=\"248\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/avz06PDqDbM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>We&#8217;ve all done that.<\/p>\n<p>But apparently, when they shot that sequence, they didn&#8217;t actually know why his character was doing this.<\/p>\n<p>And then during the protracted, COVID-delayed shoot, an apparently significant new character was added late in the day &#8211; and not named.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if she had completed filming before the character was given a name, but it was close.<\/p>\n<p>All of which is enough to make my writer-brain stumble &#8212; and especially so because it works. Well, to be clear, these examples are from Mission 7 and that&#8217;s not out yet, but the last few films have apparently been done the same way and they work very well.<\/p>\n<p>(The first Mission: Impossible is excellent, and was also properly written in advance. I&#8217;ve <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailyscript.com\/scripts\/mission-impossible_shoot.html\">read the script<\/a>. Mission 2 is dreadful, Mission 3 is weirdly almost-good-yet-not, and then all the others since have been very good and, I believe, getting progressively better.)<\/p>\n<p>So.<\/p>\n<p>I have always believed that whatever gets you to the finishing line in writing a script is fine. Plan everything or wing it, outline everything or just make it up as you go, it doesn&#8217;t matter. As long as the final script works, whatever it took to get there is fine.<\/p>\n<p>But I do mean the script. I mean the work to get that document done. Mission: Impossible skips all of that writing and just heads out there to fantastic locations with great cameras.<\/p>\n<p>Except.<\/p>\n<p>It really does bother me that this can be true, and it really does seem to me that it works.<\/p>\n<p>Plus I like very much that there is an attention to detail in these films, it doesn&#8217;t end up as slapdash as it sounds like it could do. For just one instance that actually made me happy, there is a two-second long moment in the Mission 7 trailer that precisely re-enacts a shot from the first film. It&#8217;s at 24 seconds in, where Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and Hunt (Cruise) make the same distinctive head movements and are shot from the same angles as in a key scene from 1996. It&#8217;s done for no reason other than it&#8217;s right, and that sings out &#8220;writer&#8221; to me.<\/p>\n<p>And.<\/p>\n<p>Just in talking to you, just in thinking about this excessively and then unburdening myself to you, I think I understand. By which I mean I can reconcile the difference between writing a script and just filming things until they work.<\/p>\n<p>The makers of Mission: Impossible are writing the film in exactly the same way a screenwriter might. When you&#8217;re writing, you might try out characters, you of course think of ways to improve them. You can have a great idea for a sequence and then spend ages figuring out how best to fit it in.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s just that the Mission people are doing all of this on location, they&#8217;re doing it on film. They&#8217;re also spending a mere $290 million to do it in.<\/p>\n<p>But at least they save on not having to buy a copy of Final Draft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Actor Rebecca Ferguson mentioned in an interview recently that the Mission: Impossible films do not have a script. She said, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2023\/06\/16\/playing-drafts\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-Nx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3071"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3076,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3071\/revisions\/3076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}