Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie’s partnership is built on the power of “mass entertainment”

The creative partnership between Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is going to be regarded as one of the most fruitful in Hollywood history, both in terms of how much money they’ve made together and in terms of how well McQuarrie was able to help Cruise resurrect his career and embark on a second act that nobody could’ve possibly seen coming. The two don’t have a perfect record, but even with The Mummy and the forgettable Jack Reacher movies, it’s still hard to argue with their batting average together with the recent Mission: Impossible movies, Top Gun: Maverick, and the unfairly maligned Edge Of Tomorrow.

Now, ahead of the release of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, McQuarrie has shared some details on what it was like when he and Cruise first met on the set of 2008’s Valkyrie. McQuarrie was a writer on the film, which was about a German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and he told The Times that Cruise asked him to rework the script when it became clear that they’d need more money to finish production. Cruise’s plan was to make the movie appeal to as wide an audience as possible, with Cruise sharing a philosophy with McQuarrie that has carried both of them to untold heights since then: “I make mass entertainment.”

It’s a simple idea, but it really does seem to sum up Cruise pretty well: He just wants to make movies that everyone likes. It took some doing to figure out how to make that possible, but he did eventually land on the solution, which involves risking his life in increasingly outrageous ways and starring in movies where he doesn’t play a person as much as he plays… the living manifestation of destiny. It’s similar to Simon Pegg’s friendship with Cruise, where if you try to push it too hard it’ll snap, so you just accept it and be happy.