Christopher McQuarrie excited by Ethan Hunt's journey in next Mission: Impossible films

Christopher McQuarrie decided to shoot back-to-back 'Mission: Impossible' films because his story for Ethan Hunt couldn't fit into one movie.

The 51-year-old director is helming 'Mission: Impossible 7' from a script that he wrote and after it is released in 2021 a sequel is slated to hit cinemas in 2022, and he admits the idea to have two connected films came about because the seventh instalment is a "sprawling movie" and an "emotional" roller coaster for Tom Cruise's alter ego Ethan.

Speaking on the 'Mission: Impossible' podcast 'Light The Fuse', the filmmaker said: "I said to Tom, 'I really want to make it more of an emotional journey for [Ethan Hunt].

"Going into this, I said, 'I want to take what we learned from 'Fallout' and apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc.

"We realised we had a movie that was two hours, 40 minutes long. And every scene in it was necessary."

McQuarrie - who directed the two previous films in action franchise - removed some scenes from 'Mission: Impossible 7' to use in the next movie.

He explained: "The ending of the first movie snapped into place. We knew what the ending was and we knew what the beginning was.

"And now I had two sequences, which means, I've got 40 minutes of 'Mission: Impossible 8' figured out."

Production on 'Mission: Impossible 7' was halted due the coronavirus outbreak and McQuarrie has been using his time in lockdown to improve the film.

The 'Jack Reacher' director said: "We're going to take this opportunity to make the movie better in prep than we've ever had a chance to do before."

McQuarrie - who was joined on the podcast by 'Mission: Impossible' stars Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell - also teased a "casting coup" for the project.

He said: "There is someone we were talking to before the world blew up. An actor I was very excited about.

"I don't know where that is, because we had talked days before (the shutdown) and it was an incredibly exciting casting coup."

The movie will also see Henry Czerny return to the franchise for the first time since the original film in 1996 and the filmmaker hinted that more characters could come back.

He said: "Any character, dead or alive, is fair game to return."