Trivia / Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Jeremy Renner stated that working with Tom Cruise was a dream come true, since he's always idolized him as an actor. Renner did mention Cruise is a great actor, but even more a nicer guy.
• B-Team Sequel: J. J. Abrams was unable to return as director, as he was working on Star Trek (2009), though he did co-produce.
• California Doubling: Prague stood in for several scenes in Moscow. Prague Castle was used for some of the Kremlin scenes, most notably the second courtyard and the Spanish Hall. The Russian hospital was Prague's Hostel Chili. The local bar Ethan walks by after his escape was somewhere in New Town. Ethan gets picked up by the IMF secretary about a block away from the Hilton, but then doubles back and crashes the car into the Vltava all the way over at Mánes Bridge. Oddly enough, that's just upriver from Charles Bridge, which was used prominently in the first Mission Impossible movie. Prague and Budapest apparently share train stations as well. The satellite station at the end is also either in Bangalore or Hyderabad going by the sign on the service door (the official languages of both cities have near-identical alphabets) when the climax is set in Mumbai.
• Fake American: The English Tom Wilkinson as the IMF secretary.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Léa Seydoux performed her on-camera role in English and dubbed her lines for the French releases.
• No Stunt Double: Tom Cruise performed the sequence where Ethan Hunt scales the outside of the Burj Khalifa tower himself without the use of a stunt double. The Burj Khalifa tower is the tallest building in the world at 2,722 feet, or 829.8 meters. Cruise dangled outside the tower at approximately 1,700 feet, or 518 meters.
• Sequel Gap: 5 years between this film and Mission: Impossible III.
• Shrug of God: The Light the Fuse Podcast asked several screenwriters and the director Brad Bird why Hendricks wears a mask of Wistrom during the Burj Khalifa scene. All of them said that they had no idea, apparently the result of the film's extensive rewrites as it was being filmed.
• Troubled Production: As noted by Christopher McQuarrie during an interview promoting Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Ghost Protocol's production was married with delays and Executive Meddling. McQuarrie himself noted that he was "parachuted" into the franchise to rewrite the film more than midway through the production. At that point, a large number of second unit/exterior shots had been completed, and dialogue and setpieces had to be substantially rewritten to fit in with a new plotline for the film and to cut down on the runtime due to budget overages. (Benji's glib line, "Blue is glue, red is dead," in reference to the climbing gloves, was suggested by McQuarrie on his first day of involvement in order to functionally avoid a lengthy (and costly) expository sequence.) As a result, major swaths of the plot had to be rewritten to accommodate the participation of the supporting cast. Benji's rescue of Brandt during the climax of the film was only added in after McQuarrie promised Simon Pegg that he would find something exciting for the actor to do, after having to cut down part of the team's scenes during the second act of the film due to budget cuts, and was only accomplished through McQuarrie convincing Paramount executives (who were extremely reluctant to give the Benji character any focus) to have the scene added in.
• Uncredited Role: Tom Wilkinson, Ving Rhames and Michelle Monaghan all make uncredited cameos.
• What Could Have Been:
  • An early draft lacked The Reveal that Julia didn't really die. Christopher McQuarrie, the eventual director of the next two Mission: Impossible movies, added this to the script to lighten its tone. That draft also had a different backstory for Brandt, who failed to protect two nameless IMF agents; McQuarrie replaced them with Julia to connect him to Ethan.
  • Edgar Wright was considered to direct, but he was busy with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
  • Tom Hardy, Anthony Mackie and Chris Pine were considered to play Brandt.
  • Brandt was written and cast with the idea that he could take over as lead protagonist of the Mission Impossible movies, with Cruise shifting to the supporting role of the IMF secretary. In one script, Hunt receives a Career-Ending Injury to his leg, necessitating his retirement from the field. The finished film downgraded Hunt's injury, and Cruise ultimately remained the lead of future films. Brandt has a minor supporting role in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation before dropping out of the franchise.
  • The prison break scene originally entailed Benji breaking Hunt out by blowing up a glass partition using an explosive prosthetic tongue. The geography of the prison location forced the filmmakers to radically rewrite the scene just before filming.

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