Interview: J.J Abrams & Michelle Monaghan

Interview by Clint Morris

Interview with J.J Abrams and Michelle Monaghan
Stars of the movie Mission: Impossible: III.
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He might be the force behind two of the biggest TV shows on television, Alias and Lost, but creator/writer J.J Abrams is clearly a fan, before he’s a filmmaker. In Australia to promote his feature directorial debut Mission: Impossible 3, the good-natured Abrams explains that he’s still a garrulous manic fan when it comes to crossing paths with celebrities.

Clearly even a bit of a geek at heart (though he jokes that the glasses he wears don’t actually have glass in them – they’re mainly to help him “look smart” in photographs), the bespectacled wonder kid – now one of the most in-demand writers in Hollywood – says the highlight of any day for him, is getting an email from British comics Simon Pegg or Ricky Gervais.

“If I don’t get an email from Simon (who has a small role in MI:3) or Ricky Gervais – who I met through Alias – I get so bummed. It’s like ‘Ohhh’. It’s like my favourite thing,” gushes Abrams, smiling like someone whose just been notified of a raffle win. “Simon is maybe the happiest bi-product of doing this movie for me. He and I email each other all the time now.”

An email or phone call from Tom Cruise, on the other hand, didn’t just excite him – it almost put a swift impede to his heart.

When he was informed that the A-list superstar wanted him to direct the third instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise – the first was helmed by Brian De Palma, the second by John Woo – he was convinced it was a prank. After all, who would want a self-confessed “TV boy” handling one of the biggest movie franchises in the world?

“When Tom offered me the movie, it was the most unexpected thing – on every level,” explains Abrams, who wrote the films Regarding Henry and Roadkill, among others, earlier in his career. “The weirdest thing was, I had gotten to know Tom, we had become friends, and he had never bought it up. I mean…I knew he was getting ready to do Mission Impossible, and I thought maybe he might ask me to help with the script, or something, if they had problems with it, but he gave me the impression there were no issues at all. He seemed quite happy with what was happening with it.”

A short time later, Abrams was out for a dinner with a friend when a call came through from his agent. “[He] asked me ‘Are you aware that Tom wants you to direct this movie?’. I thought it was a misunderstanding, or a prank…. I had just talked to Tom, like a week earlier or something, and he didn’t say anything about it.

Abrams went directly to the source, to find out what was going on. “I walk in [to Cruise’s house] and he just gives me that Tom Cruise smile, and says, like, ‘So, you wanna do it?’. I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’ This is insane. ‘What happened to the guy that was supposed to direct the movie?’”

It was a fair question to ask. Mission : Impossible 3 had been in the works, at the point, for a couple of years. A number of different writers and directors, including David Fincher, Frank Darabont and Joe Carnahan, had been attached at some time or another in the projects development phase.  

When Abrams was asked to come onboard, it was assumed he would direct from one of the existing scripts.

“When I read the script that they had written, I really liked it, it was really cool…I just wasn’t the right person to direct it. It wasn’t the version that I’d be the best director of.

“So I said ‘Yeah, I’d like to do Mission 3, but this isn’t the version that I think I’m suited for’. I thought Tom would say ‘Oh well, we’ll find someone else’. But, he said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’. I said ‘My version would be a more personal version, a more intimate movie, funnier, and it would be more heartbreaking’. He said ‘Well, that’s the version I’ve wanted to do from the beginning’.”

Because of his TV commitments – Lost had just started and he didn’t want to take leave from that so early on in its infancy – Abrams said it would take him a year to put something together. Cruise was prepared to wait.

“It was like everyday… it got weirder,” smiles Abrams, so obviously in awe of Cruise’s kindness. Cruise didn’t stop at merely giving Abrams an elongated deadline – he also told him he had free reign to do whatever he wanted with the movie.

“Tom said from the beginning that he wanted it to be ‘JJ Abrams’ Mission Impossible’. I was sceptical, it just didn’t seem right for an actor or producer of his stature to let me do what I want, but he really did…. he let me just go for it. He even let me cast the movie. For instance, I bought in Keri Russell, who I’ve wanted to work with again since we did Felicity, and I also bought my regular crew over - my editors, my production designers, my composer. He let me make the movie I wanted to make. All Tom had to do was to be a little bit of a jerk, a little less kind or even collaborative, and it could’ve derailed the whole thing.”

Abrams never approached the film any different to he did working on one of his TV shows, because he always shot Alias and Lost like a film – even if the network didn’t show them in the wide screen format that they were shot in.

“I directed in wide screen, as if it were a movie, and knowing it would be on DVD and live on forever, so I never thought of it as TV stuff compared to film stuff.”

In the same sense, he also didn’t feel pressured to bring in huge stars to co-star opposite Cruise in Mission : Impossible 3. He cast the film as he did any of his TV shows – simply signing those who were right for the part, and for the most part, all fresh faces.  

“Michelle Monaghan’s character [Cruise’s on-screen love interest] is a good example. I didn’t want people to necessarily know the actress, and go ‘Oh, that’s so and so from so and so’,” says Abrams, whose responsible for giving both Jennifer Garner and Keri Russell their big breaks on his TV shows, Alias and Felicity, respectively. “I remember when I saw Jerry Maguire with my wife - then girlfriend - and I believed the relationship between Tom and Renee Zellweger. It was because we didn’t know Renee Zellweger at the time. I believed that she really was this woman somehow…. it wasn’t like ‘Oh, look, its Demi Moore in that part’, you know?"

Monaghan was just as shocked as her director was when she was asked if she’d like to be involved in the movie. She had good reason though – the only thing Abrams had seen her in was her audition tape for the film Constantine – a film she was ultimately cut out of!

“He saw my audition tape, and called up out of the blue and asked to have a meeting. He wanted me to audition with Tom!”, says the animated young actress, who first gained attention in last year’s action-comedy Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.

“So, I met Tom on the set of War of the Worlds, so not only was I meeting Tom, I was meeting Steven Spielberg! I just thought ‘What am I doing here?’ A year ago, this Easter Sunday, I was told I got the job. I started crying. J.J was like ‘What? Is there a scheduling conflict?’ I was like ‘No, I just got the job’. He was like ‘Don’t cry about it, my god!’”

And was Tom Cruise exactly how she’d imagined he’d be?

“I already had my own perception of what Tom was going to be like. I thought he probably won’t talk to me that much, and he’ll probably spend all his time in his trailer. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I almost wanted to call him another name – like Harry, for instance [laughs] – because it’s as if there’s Tom Cruise, the entity, and then this other guy. ‘But you’re not Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise is this’ I’d tell him.”

What Abrams wanted to do with this sequel was to make it a little more human, and not necessarily a straight-up action film.

“The first movie was so much about plot and suspense, the second movie is so much about action, and this movie, I think, takes a more realistic approach than a stylistic approach,” says the director. 

“Whilst this is a movie that’s full of action – more than the first two combined, when you count the sequences – it’s not an action movie. It’s a love story, and there’s a lot of comedy and heartfelt stuff in it too. Die Hard is a good example of a movie that was a great movie that just happened to have action in it, but I don’t think of it is an action movie. The reason that film was so effective, and the reason you tune into it whenever it’s on, is because of the characters.”

“I don’t think you knew anything about Ethan Hunt other than his parents were killed,” adds Michelle Monaghan. “What’s appealing about this film…is that you do care about him. It really sets the scenes for the super spy’s private life – what does he tell his family? – and it really explores interpersonal relationships.

“Everything is really character driven, and you’re so invested in these characters. Unless you care about them, you don’t really care about all the blowing up and all those special effects,” she says. On a personal level, the actress was also relieved to discover that her character, Hunt’s fiancée Julia, wouldn’t be your typical clichéd damsel-in-distress.

“Yeah, I don’t like to be that girl!” laughs the actress, who claims she had to play one such character in the film North Country. “As a woman in Hollywood, you don’t always want to be that damsel in distress or that victim. There is a point in [the film, in] which she is threatened, but this is the thing - J.J really likes strong female characters.”

While Abrams eagerly awaits the world’s response to his first film as director (“It’s like I’ve got this secret, and I just want to share it with all of you”), he returns to the world of TV. The first thing he’s doing there is saying goodbye to Alias, which comes to a close shortly.

“It was the right time [for the show to end], but it was also bittersweet. It’s so much better to be here than for the network to get to the end of the season and say ‘OK, that’s it’. We wanted to end it right,” he says, adding “The ending is fantastic…it’s really, really good.”

Monaghan, on the other hand, is going straight into another project. She’ll play a lead role in Ben Affleck’s directorial debut Gone, Baby, Gone, based on the book by Dennis Lehane.

“It’s going to be set in Boston and it’ll star Casey Affleck and Ed Harris. I play a private investigator….kinda like a low-rate private investigator and something really serious happens in South Boston.”

Until rehearsals for that start though, she’ll spend some time in Australia with her Melbourne-born husband. “We’re going to the football on the weekend. I’ve really wanted to go to a game for a very long time. He’s not a big footy fan, but I said ‘someone better join me, or it’ll be just me and the VB’”.

Mission: Impossible III is in cinemas May 2006.

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