Christopher McQuarrie responds to reports ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ will destroy 111-year-old bridge

The plans were indeed in place but false facts were reported, he claims

The director of Mission: Impossible 7 has issued a statement to clarify what he says are false reports surrounding production plans to blow up an old bridge.

It was reported last month that the film crew wanted to destroy a Polish bridge that is over 100 years old as part of a proposed scene of the forthcoming movie.

Christopher McQuarrie confirmed that the stunt was green-lit to physically make way for a potential building project to revitalise a non-functional railroad system, and said it would also be a boon to the Polish film and tourism industry. But misinformation about the team’s intentions, he claimed, was spread by an unnamed individual in retaliation for not securing work on the film.

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McQuarrie explained in an exclusive article for Empire that the person in question allegedly “tried to have this condemned, unsafe and unusable bridge landmarked in the hopes of preventing it from ever being removed and rebuilt (which we understand would be to the detriment of the area’s economic needs). Then they reached out to us to gloat about it.”

Elsewhere in the statement, McQuarrie wrote: “The people we spoke to were excited by the prospect of our bringing a large film production to Poland and the resources it would inject into the local economy (Poland has just released a new film incentive program, and wanted a known project to promote its film industry). They were also delighted that we’d be making way for a new bridge that might otherwise not be rebuilt, and might lead the government to revitalise the railroad line.

Simon Pegg
Simon Pegg and the cast of ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’. Credit: Alamy

“But not everyone was happy. One individual, for reasons I cannot specify without revealing their identity, claimed they were owed a job on the production for which we felt they were not adequately qualified. When this individual’s demands were not met, they retaliated.

“After harassing members of our production publicly and anonymously on social media, as well as privately, this individual misrepresented our intentions and concealed their personal reasons for wanting to penalise us.

“In short, this individual manipulated the emotional response of the people in a move that has now compromised our ambitions to bring our production to Poland,” he wrote.

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As for claims circulated online that the bridge was a historical landmark, McQuarrie said there was confusion over the matter and clarified which bridge his team were planning to partially destroy.

“The bridge was not built entirely in 1906 as has been reported. That bridge was partially destroyed by the retreating Germans during the Second World War before being rebuilt (the current bridge is, in fact, one of two very similar ones in the area, neither of which is a protected monument). Bottom line: to open up the area to tourism, the bridge needed to go.”

You can read McQuarrie’s statement in full here.

Meanwhile, Mission: Impossible 7 is reportedly on course to resume filming next month after being on hold due to the coronavirus.

Variety reported in June that production is planned to resume in September. The film’s first assistant director Tommy Gormley told BBC Radio 4: “We hope to restart in September. We hope to visit all the countries we planned to. We hope to do a big chunk of it back in the UK on the backlot and in the studio.”

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