Regisseur Brad Bird, o.a. bekend van de regie van de Pixar animatiefilm The Incredibles (2005), sprak over zijn eerste live-actionfilm Mission Impossible: Impossible Ghost Protocol met Entertainment Weekly. Tevens vertelde hij iets meer over het langlopende project 1906 over de aardbeving in San Francisco.

De opnames voor Ghost Protocol zitten er al op en op dit moment bevindt de vierde Mission: Impossible zich in post-production. Bird over zijn eerste live-action film: It was a very challenging shoot. It's a big film and we had to move around a lot. We were doing a lot of physical effects live — we weren't using special effects. And so it was physically a real challenge."

Entertainment Weekly vroeg hem ook of hij het niet vervelend vindt dat hij Mission: Impossible IV niet kan regisseren als een animatiefilm "Yes and no. The wonderful thing about animation is you have absolute control over every frame. The nightmare of animation is that you have absolute control over every frame. Literally, you have to decide upon everything, and you don't get anything for free. You can't go to a location and simply say, 'This looks good,' and shoot there. You have to discuss what kind of trees, is it a railyard, how wide are the tracks, are the tracks new or old? The amount of planning you have to do is just jaw-dropping." en "So that part of it I'm not sorry to be away from [laughs]. But there are pleasures to be had in both mediums. With live-action, you're trying to catch little moments of lightning in a bottle. In animation you're trying to do that too, but you're doing it one volt at a time."

Over zijn project 1906 over de verwoestende aardbeving die in 1906 plaatsvond in San Francisco kan Bird weinig concreets melden. De laatste berichten over het project zijn alweer een jaar oud: "I don't know. It's all about getting the story to work, and the canvas is so big on it that it's easy to bust down its movie-sized walls and go rampaging throughout the countryside. The problem has always been scaling it and containing it in a movie-sized length. It's really a movie that wants to be a miniseries. But if you did it as a miniseries, then you'd have to do it for the small screen, and the story demands to be told on a big screen. So we're still working on it."

Naar verwachting verschijnt de eerste trailer van M:I 4 volgende maand om op 16 december 2011 in de States in première te gaan. In de actiefilm zijn de hoofdrollen voor Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Maggie Q Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames en Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Jeremy Renner | | Maggie Q |