Mission: Impossible 6 Will Be 'Very Different'

For the first time in the history of the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, the same director will helm two installments in a row. But Christopher McQuarrie said Mission: Impossible 6 will feel like it's taking the series in a whole new direction.

The director, who previously teamed with Tom Cruise for Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, opened up about the upcoming sequel on the Scriptnotes podcast (via Collider), and he discussed his plans to give the movie a less hectic feel than Rogue Nation. For starters, it won't jump around the world so much.

"I was determined, unlike the last movie, to spend more time in one location," he said. "I went back and I looked at the first movie, which started in Prague, and realized that they're in Prague for the first half of the movie. So, I sort of pulled back a little bit on the globetrotting. I think in Rogue Nation, I think we might have been in six countries in the first ten minutes of the movie."

McQuarrie also explained that he wants a more emotional story for Cruise's character Ethan Hunt. "The problem with something like Mission, [is that] the action is dictating the narrative. And I was determined to change that on this movie," he said. "And I started with that. I started with more of an emotional story for this character and more of a character arc within it. It's definitely more of an emotional journey for Ethan Hunt in that movie."

But that doesn't mean we won't see Cruise doing those huge stunts he's known for in the series. He reportedly trained an entire year for just one stunt.

"There's a sequence at the end of the movie which is fabulous," McQuarrie said. "It's never been done. It's all photo real. It's going to be incredible. You then have to create the contrivances for that sequence to happen. And then there's only a few locations in the world where you can shoot that sequence."

The director said he even had concerns that he might be doing too much to change the franchise. "You know, you worry all the time," McQuarrie confessed. "Am I taking this in a way that it can't go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because [Ghost Protocol director] Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this, I said to Tom, 'I don't think we can do that three in a row. I think now it's going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.' And we did... We're at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying, 'Well, how dramatic can you take Mission?' It's not going to a dark place. It's going to a more emotionally dramatic place."

We'll find out where that place is when Mission: Impossible 6 hits theaters on July 27, 2018. Until then, check out a few daring action scenes you'd never guess were real.