In true Mission Impossible style the whole team couldn't possibly travel together. Paula Patton, international spy, landed first, closely trailed by bad guy Anil Kapoor. Luckily IT extraordinaire Simon Pegg was on hand to save the day, touching down just in time to crack the codes and leave a safe passage from Dubai International Airport for director Brad Bird.
Tom Cruise was nowhere in sight — yet. While the Hollywood heavyweight and star of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol co-ordinated the second part of the mission, a press conference at Dubai's Burj Khalifa yesterday, the rest of the cast dropped in for a chat a day earlier.
It takes a special kind of person to make a romantic comedy with flesh-eating zombies in every scene. Enter British actor Simon Pegg. Famous for his dry quips and tongue-in-cheek roles in films including Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, Pegg is exactly as you'd expect him to be.
"Sorry," he says, his move to yank a chair awkwardly from under the table somehow strangely hilarious. "I'm still eating," he added, eyes wide. "I couldn't resist whipping something as I walked past that buffet."
If it weren't for the huge films which have been added to his resume over the past 10 years — Tintin, Star Trek, Run Fatboy Run to name a few — you couldn't be blamed for assuming Pegg was an actor with few credentials.
"What is Hollywood though?" he throws back at the journalist attempting to ask if the industry is something he connects with. "I try not to place too much importance on that really. Because it's actually the product of it. The process is actually "it" if you like," he adds using air quotes.
‘No parties'
"Even the film isn't. My part of this job is the construction. I live in Hertfordshire with my wife, my kid and a dog. I don't go to parties, I try not to walk red carpets if I don't have to. I don't have any desire to be in the papers or on the television. I don't want to be famous. I love acting. That's it really."
Pegg walked the carpet for the MI4 world premiere in Dubai before jetting off to Moscow and Munich.
"This is what you get paid for — this bit. This is work. Making the film is fun, I'd do that for free. You get to go all over the world and endlessly say the same thing over and over again. What's not to love?"
"I don't love it [promotion] but I don't resent it either. You have to encourage people to go and see the film. I've actually said no to a few territories so I can be with my family."
Pegg is also appearing in cinemas now as Inspector Thompson in The Adventures of Tintin.
"Tintin was a different animal," he said. "To work with Steven Spielberg was an honour. I did Tintin three years ago. So to have these two movies out at the same time is deceptively impressive because it makes it look like I was working with Spielberg, Brad Bird and Tom Crusie in one year and I didn't."
Humble to the core, Pegg is not forthcoming about his industry success. "I know my place in the food chain. I'm no Tom Cruise. I'm not really an action hero kind of guy. I don't have the chance for it— or the pecs. Tom has just cultivated that aspect of his career so well. You almost expect him to do crazy stunts. He kind of sets his own bar which he has to leap over every time he does a new movie. It's impressive to watch."
So where was Pegg while Cruise was hanging out of the world's tallest building?
"I was probably in the Mall of the Emirates buying watches," he said.
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol sees Pegg's character Benji promoted from IT office geek to a field agent working alongside Cruise, a character Pegg didn't find easy to portray.
"I cant even remember my own passwords let alone anyone else's," he said.
"J.J. [Abrams, producer] and I always joked about it to be honest. We said if we do another one, let's make Benji a field agent. So it was kind of a joke. I asked ‘Can I have a gun?' and then as J. J. always does with me he sent me an e-mail saying ‘so do you want to be an agent'. He goes straight to you."
First it was a computer, this time he gets a gun, can MI5 see Benji get the girl?
"Paula [Patton] and I had this back story that Benji and Jane are having this affair," he said, clearly plucking old memories from the days on set last year.
"I would like to think one day I could hang off the tallest building in the world but for now I'm just happy being the IT guy. I feel very privileged to be a part of the Mission: Impossible family."
According to Patton, part of her major role preparation usually involves finding a real-life version of the character she's slated to play. "Not so easy when you're playing a spy," said Patton.
"Good luck finding one," she joked. "It was really important to me to try and develop the character emotionally as best I could. As an artist myself that's so much more compelling. It's fun to watch. I had a trainer who was great and really taught me things a woman could realistically pull off if she was smart. And when I knew how to do that only then did I really feel like I could play Jane Carter."
Ironically, Patton in real life couldn't be further from the character she was slated to play.
Femininity
While Jane is cool, calm and collected, Patton is lively, bubbly and warm from the outset.
"What was important for me when playing Jane was although she's strong I didn't want her to be like a man. I feel a lot of the time when a woman is in an action movie she has to be like a man. But being strong doesn't mean losing your femininity. Because femininity is power.
"It took a lot of rehearsal time and training. I worked muscles I didn't know I had. It became like a dance."
Patton's film credits include Hitch, Swing Vote and Precious — none of which involved shooting guns.
"I would never have a gun in my house but it was so much fun to shoot one," she said. "You pull this trigger and the feeling is unbelievable. I'm not perfect — my opinions are not all on the same track," she admitted. "It was fun."
A childhood of make believe is what Patton credits for her success.
"I lived in LA and it was so cliché to want to be an actor," she said rolling her big brown eyes. "Playing make believe was my favourite game as a child. And this is make believe at the ultimate level. You have costumes and sets, all these people coming together for this grand game of make believe. Like lots of children, I didn't have the perfect childhood so I loved to live in my own imagination. In a dream world. Movies let me do that."
Asked about comparisons drawn between her and Halle Berry, Patton said: "If I'm lucky enough to have anywhere near that kind of career then I'll take it."
Meet Brad Bird and it's easy to see why his animation films — The Incredibles and Ratatouille — have done so well. Bird is animated from the inside out.
"Tom was always determined to have each film have the personality of the director," said the American director. "From the beginning both Tom and J.J. [Abrams] were encouraging me to make the mission I wanted to make. Working with Tom as a producer is similar to working with him as an actor in that he's very committed, he's very knowledgeable about film. He's worked with some of the best directors ever and he's asked them a lot of questions. His attitude is that of a really smart student who wants to learn more, which is the attitude I try to have. I feel any time you feel you've mastered something then you're done being good."
An Oscar-winning director, voice actor, animator and screenwriter, Bird is best known for writing and directing Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles and Ratatouille as well as for adapting and directed the critically acclaimed animated 1999 film The Iron Giant.
For Bird, who has also directed episodes of The Simpsons, MI4 was his first live action movie.
From animation to live action
"I think it was when we finished and I started to put the film together that I really believed I'd done it," he said. "I really love the editing process. It's womb-like, you have the elements and you start cutting it together. From animation to live action, any director can do it if they want to tell the story and are critical of their own work. If you care about storytelling and the characters, anything's possible."
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol was filmed in Prague, Dubai, Vancouver and Mumbai but Brad says the highlight for him happened in the UAE.
"It's not what most people would expect," he said. "We had a lot to film before we left, a big complicated party scene to shoot. Tom had been up for two days straight. It was an incredibly intense scene to pull off," he said becoming more animated with every word.
"Jeremy had to jump, Paula was with Anil, Simon had the probe and Tom was watching the whole thing from the party," he said, totally aware he had lost most of us but thriving on the blank looks.
"It was complicated to try and figure out what everyone was doing and on top of that we were exhausted. And there was a moment where we realised nobody knew what we were shooting. So we just said ‘Oh, well we'll shoot it a couple of different ways' and ‘I don't know what I'm saying but I'll say it', we knew it must have made sense but we just couldn't tell."
Dubai was chosen as a filming location when producer J.J. Abrams visited the city and realised the potential. "He just said, this is an amazing looking city, we have to make a movie here. This film benefited from the idea," said Bird.
But while the filming location were impressive, Bird says the success of the shoot was down to the professional attitudes on set.
"Tom is relentless," he said. "He was coughing up sand for days after the sandstorm shoots. I worked with a great cast. I imagine if you were working with actors who wouldn't come out of their trailer or only wanted blue M&M's or something like that, it wouldn't be the same. Thankfully nobody did that on this film."
