Director Chris McQuarrie, who has collaborated with Tom Cruise on several projects including the last three Mission: Impossible films and as producer of Top Gun: Maverick, has recently shared details of his first encounter with Cruise in 2006, ahead of the much-anticipated release of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. 

McQuarrie, who also worked with Cruise on Valkyrie, revealed to The Times that during their initial meeting, Cruise, an experienced action hero, informed him: “I make mass entertainment.”  

McQuarrie said, “There is an outsized importance placed on Oscars,” McQuarrie says. “Films that not many people are going to see. A wedge has been driven into the industry. Are you an artist or an entertainer? Tom doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive.”

According to the director, Cruise shared with him the strangest myth he had ever heard about himself, which was that people working on set were prohibited from making eye contact with him.

Meanwhile, Simon Pegg, a close friend and frequent co-star of Cruise, told The Times that the actor’s strong commitment to keeping the film industry afloat during the pandemic was the reason behind his outburst at a crew member who violated social distancing protocols on the set of the seventh Mission: Impossible movie.

Pegg told The Times: “Everything that Tom cares about, in terms of his job, was at stake due to the pandemic. For him there was a danger this virus could wipe cinema off the face of this earth.”