While working on Interview with the Vampire, Tom Cruise met Brian De Palma at a dinner with Steven Spielberg. When he went back home, he saw all of De Palma’s films and hired him to direct Mission: Impossible.

Paramount Pictures had owned the rights to the original show and had tried for years to make a movie. Cruise was a fan of the show and decided that the first movie he’d produce for his new production company would be this movie.

Sydney Pollack, Steve Zaillian, David Koepp and Robert Towne all took turns at a script, as well as Koepp being taken off the film and put back on, as well as supposedly being paid a million dollars to rewrite a script by Messiah of Evil creators Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

There was no final script when they started shooting the action sequences, but come on. This movie is all about set pieces. And it was all completed on time and under budget. Roger Ebert — as nearly always at least in print — had it right: “This is a movie that exists in the instant, and we must exist in the instant to enjoy it.”

You know who didn’t like it? The actors from the original series. Martin Landau said, “When they were working on an early incarnation of the first one—not the script they ultimately did—they wanted the entire team to be destroyed, done away with one at a time, and I was against that. It was basically an action-adventure movie and not Mission. Mission was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there. So the whole texture changed. Why volunteer to essentially have our characters commit suicide? I passed on it … The script wasn’t that good either!”

Greg Morris walked out of the theater when he found out that Jim Phelps would be a traitor, while Peter Graves, who played the role in both the 60s and 80s series, refused to be in the film when he learned how his character would change sides.

Instead of the original cast, all of Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) team is killed– yes, that’s an uncredited Emilio Estevez — and an arms dealer named Max Mitsopolis (Vanessa Redgrave) and her mole are behind it all. Hunt and the only person he feels he can trust, Phelp’s wife Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), recruit two rogue IMF agents, computer hacker Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and helicopter pilot Franz Kriege (Jean Reno) to figure out who is the mole and how they can stop their plans.

So yes, the story is convoluted, but again, you’re here to watch Hunt spider his way into CIA headquarters and fight people on a high speed train. It worked, too, because it made $450+ million at the box office and there are eight movies in the series.

De Palma would not return, but the series has seen John Woo, J. J. Abrams, Brad Bird and Christopher McQuarrie (who has been part of the last four films) work on different movies. That’s a pretty talented group of filmmakers.