Tom gave some of these ideas to somebody -- maybe to more than one writer. But he or they didn't really carry it to any length. The first four or five writers were making the movie something else. I think there were about seven writers in all -- it was an amazing number. I didn't read all their scripts -- basically, there was no point in it. What I was guided by were John's storyboards. I tried to work with John's stuff, and he tried to work with mine. For example, we made the car chase between Tom and Thandie a little less frenetic -- we pushed it toward courtship. John is actually a lovely man, and a gentle man.

The first two drafts were a nightmare, trying to back into the action sequences. But by the time I got to Australia and was working on the third draft, something happened. I remember 25 pages into it, I thought, I don't know where we're going to end up with this thing, but I suddenly felt the tingle that in its own way this script was beginning to be organic. I will tell you I never tried anything like this before. It was difficult.

Well, as you've written, "It's not Mission: Difficult -- it's 'Mission: Impossible!'"

There you go.

It must be satisfying to come up with a catch phrase that everyone will be saying for a couple of months.

It's so surprising: I didn't think that was going to happen. And I injected some chicken-shit misogynism into Anthony Hopkins' remarks, just to be politically incorrect. There's an interesting thing about audiences today: I guess that's one of the few ways to shock people. Cruise says Thandie doesn't have the training [to act as an agent and go back to her evil ex-lover, Scott], and Hopkins says, "She's a woman -- to go to bed with a man and lie to him, she has all the training she needs" and you hear, "Oh, oh my goodness! Wow!" Time was when you had to have a really scatological turn of phrase to get this kind of response.

I'm not particularly a John Woo fan. For me, this had enough else going for it so I could appreciate what he does and not let his mannerisms drive me nuts. Even the ludicrous introduction of his trademark doves in the climactic action scene actually works for the film, in a backdoor way, since it is an expression of personality -- of something beyond the hardware you usually get in these movies.

And Tom leavens certain things I usually don't like in martial arts movies -- and I almost realized that after the fact. When others wanted to cut out the mountain-climbing sequence, and the high dive from the helicopter, Tom and I went crazy, and I didn't know exactly why. But then I realized that for Tom, a "Mission: Impossible" movie is not about confronting some arch-villain or some enemy; it's about taking risks, it's about the joy of confrontation with self. That's ultimately what the mountain-climbing sequence is about.

Even when I was writing that line about how, instead of taking a ground route, his character, Ethan Hunt, "would rather engage in some acrobatic insanity," I didn't realize the overall implications -- that this is what distinguishes these movies from all the "Die Hard" films and things like that. It's about this kid who likes the fun of masks on and off and taking huge risks -- taking them himself.

He did those stunts himself. And I assure you, it's even more impressive than you may have heard. I remember being on the set at Bear Island one day, where the exchange is meant to take place between Brendan Gleeson [an avaricious drug-company executive] and Dougray Scott, and Tom said, "Man, I'm getting tired of doing that stunt," and I said to myself, "You know, for the money you're getting paid, you could probably do it." And then I saw the stunt: He runs dead at the camera, does a flip in the air unaided by CGI or wires or anything else, fires three blanks while he's upside-down at the camera and lands on his back. No CGI, no wires, just this kid. And he does this 20 times. I think the audience senses his sheer love of doing it -- I think the audience knows this thing is really happening.

A lot of Tom's appeal essentially hearkens back to an earlier form of American hero: Yankee ingenuity, "We didn't fire the first shot but we'll fire the last." The kind of blood-lust you got in the "Rambos" is not there. Instead, there's this other stuff, along with a sense of fairness, and I tried to arrange most of the violence that is visited on the villains so that they are hoisted on their own petard.

We once discussed how the classic Robin Hood was a great hero not because he was great at everything, but because he was great at how he interacted with a team. Does some of that enter into Ethan Hunt in the "Mission Impossible" movies?

Robin Hood was not necessarily more skilled or stronger than his band of merry men, but he recognized and appreciated their skills, and they followed him because he saw their worth. I always felt his skill as an archer was emblematic of his larger vision as a leader. This character is not the same, but in a strange way there is an element of that appreciation in his makeup. So if you're going to do these things in this increasingly Circus Maximus interactive atmosphere of movies, this is a better guy to focus on. And I can't help but respond to that. I'd rather have people identify with this guy than with someone dropping somebody off a cliff or any of the brutal stuff we see in other films.

You describe the series as being about the test of self. I know there's going to be a lot of debate going on about the differences in the two films because you have these two powerful directors, Brian De Palma and John Woo. But the consistent collaborators in both films are you and Cruise. And the second film refines devices from the first film; for example, those trick masks now serve as metaphors for a false self and a true self.

You see that in the con job on the Thandie Newton character, where I think most of the audience is kind of fooled.

You also take a leap there that's more typical of the first film: Alert viewers will feel that there's a bad jump because we've seen the guy who figures in that sequence just previously, in another setting. But this "jarring cut" is the preparation for the surprise.

Exactly. I like this film. I certainly had more of an opportunity to inject a storyline into it than I did in the first one, where the story was more set and I was working on more individual scenes. Here it was an ongoing collaboration with Tom and John. I think most people -- fairly overwhelmingly -- prefer this to the first film. The story is more follow-able and I think the story is fun.

And there are just dumb things that I like, like that moment of Dougray's when he says "I want you to try on some clothes" in that netherworld "Gatsby" way of his. When she slips out of what she's wearing, his eyes glaze over -- it gets a laugh in a good way in the audience, because the guy is so hopelessly enamored of her.

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