That was part of seeking the right tone. When we started to use real language in real situations in the '70s, with the new freedom, it got so abused: In science fiction movies people were swearing. So the coin is debased. I remember as a kid seeing "From Here to Eternity" and thinking, "God, they don't really swear like they do in the military." And then I remember seeing the movie years later and thinking how real it seemed because they didn't swear. Your perceptions change. I think Pauline Kael observed once, as she did so many things: The breaking of one cliché invariably leads to the establishment of another, so you have to break it all over again.

I thought "M:I-2" opened up more possibilities for the series than the other one did; the Hopkins character, for example, is even more inscrutable and harsh than agency chiefs usually are in movies like this.

I had always worried that "Mission" movies would always be over-involved in process and in the technological version of the Feydeau farce, with people pulling those masks on and off. But here I think we managed to use those things as metaphors for character. Part of it is that working with Tom really is a joy. There is no telling what this kid will do: He's getting better and better, and he's sharp. The truth of the matter is he's indecently decent. You think, "Oh shit -- all this and decency too? He is the only guy in his position, who, when he hires you, it's always about, as much as men can gauge such things, what somebody's worth, not what he can be gotten for. That's unusual.

One of the other not incidental benefits of working with that guy is: If you can think it, and if you can talk him into it, it's between the two of you, or in this case, among the three of us, because John, though not very talkative, reacted very strongly when he liked things, and would push them. But as far as the studio goes -- the memos from all the mini-executives are something I never had to see or know anything about. They were the first to admit that they said we'd never get away with the last mask we use, and in fact audiences adore it.

And the masks are better in this digitally advanced age.

They do work much better. I love that moment where his face seems to go slack in just the right way after he's shot and you can begin to see the transformation.

I liked Brendan Gleeson so much as the drug exec I wanted to see more of him. After "The General," it was nice to see him looking relatively trim in a business suit.

We had more of him but what you saw in the final film was all the story would accommodate -- we did give him that aria about the difficulty of making money in the world of boutique antibiotics.

How involved was Woo in the story development?

He was involved every day in what we did; it's just, for the moment-to-moment work, his language skills are not such that he was able to achieve it. We would read to him and refer to him and he would make suggestions. But the actual involvement, in terms of the interplay, was with Tom and me. At the end of every day in Australia, Tom was there. And sometimes he would go up to [producer] Paula [Wagner's] room while I was writing; then he'd come down, take the pages, run back up the fire escape, and, I was told later, read the pages to whoever would listen to him and come back down.

That last mask: He was going to Stanley [Kubrick's] funeral -- he called me from the plane and said we need a new twist at the end; we need some kind of mask thing. I asked, "Can we go to the well one more time?" He said, "Absolutely." I said, "OK, give me a half hour." So I mentioned it to Paula and my wife and they said "You'll never get away with another one." And I said, "OK, but what if I do this?" And their reaction was: You can get away with that. And Tom called back on the phone from the plane and that was that.

Tom is increasingly fun to work with -- there's tremendous growth. And he doesn't refer to anything that's not out of his own gut. He doesn't have anyone else bending his ear. It's what he thinks on the spot.

Were there things you might have done with just a little more breathing space between the big action sequences? A little more with Tom and Thandie, perhaps?

Probably, yeah. There were more scenes with her, but it's tough. The whole thing starts moving at a certain pace, and you kind of sense that if you go slower than that, if you digress, if your character stuff just slows things down too much, what it really affects is not the audience getting bored, but the level of reality. It's like an act of prestidigitation -- you've just got to sort of keep it going, or it seems less real, and you become aware of the artifice.

Thinking back on even the most classic and universally loved of these romantic adventure-cum-suspense movies, they're always team efforts -- whether we're talking about Hitchcock and screenwriter Ben Hecht on "Notorious" or Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman on "North By Northwest."

Yes, and you have to have that teamwork -- you have to work with people so immersed in this world that they can give reality to the romance and adventure and suspense, or else it's all a lighter-than-air fairy tale. You have to ground it -- and to do that you have to help each other believe in it.

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