'Mission: Impossible 6' Will Have Its Own Style

What's great about the Mission: Impossible series is that every installment has its own flavor. Each filmmaker, from Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill) to J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) to Brad Bird (Tomorrowland), brought their distinct style to the franchise. This past summer, with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher) left his identifiable mark on the series. McQuarrie is returning to direct the sixth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but that doesn't mean we should expect to see the same vision twice.

After the jump, read what McQuarrie had to say about the Mission: Impossible 6 style.

Rogue Nation was new territory for the filmmaker, but it still ended up feeling like a Christopher McQuarrie film. The writer/director's work is defined by clean storytelling, often relying more on action than exposition to tell a story. While Mission: Impossible 6 will retain McQuarrie's voice — and Rogue Nation co-star Rebecca Ferguson – the filmmaker told us he wants to push both himself and the sequel in a different direction:

"My desire as a filmmaker is to always be a better filmmaker than I was on the previous film. I'm not a filmmaker interested in stasis. I really want to grow and push myself. I think if you look at the three films I've done — from The Way of the Gun to Jack Reacher to Mission: Impossible — I think it's very clear there's a distinct voice that runs through them, and they're each sort of expanding, in terms of the storytelling and use of technology. I'm learning on each movie the mysteries of this technical craft or that technical craft. I had things I specifically learned from this movie I want to apply to the next. I gotta imagine it'll look different. Let's put it this way: if it looks the same, I'll be disappointed."

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation was refreshing in its scale. McQuarrie didn't feel the need to always go big, especially with the opera house sequence and the final set piece. If there's one lesson he learned from Rogue Nation he'll apply to future films, it's that you don't always need the largest explosions or car wrecks:

"I think the biggest thing I learned is you don't always need as much as you think you do. The motorcycle sequence was originally so much bigger, so much longer, and so much more involved. There were so many action sequences in the movie. You can make a bigger movie with less, and I'm determined to do something leaner, less heavily reliant on plot, and a little stripped down."

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on December 15th.