Simon Pegg has shared an update on how the Mission: Impossible 7 team is aiming to get back into production by September, several months after filming was halted due to coronavirus (COVID-19).
Speaking to Variety, Pegg, who plays tech expert Benji Dunn in the franchise, confirmed that a September restart is currently “the plan” for the Christopher McQuarrie-directed movie. “That will begin with the outdoor stuff,” he revealed. “That feels fairly doable, and obviously there will be precautions put in place.”
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Pegg noted that the large-scale shoot would likely present some challenges along the way, as he suggested that logistics would need to be figured out for shooting certain scenes, especially when the action moves indoors. He jokingly remarked that fight scenes would need to be shot “five feet apart.”
“People that are involved in any close proximity stuff, it will have to be determined that they’re safe to do that,” he explained to the outlet. “I don’t know what the testing situation is, how that works, or whether they’ll be able to be tested regularly.”
First assistant director Tommy Gormley further addressed the complexities of shooting the film’s “stunt scenes” and “crowd scenes” in a separate interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today show, though he also displayed confidence in the production picking up in September and running right the way through to April/May next year.
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“This is our challenge,” he said. “We are not a chamber piece movie. We do spectacle, and that is what people expect of us. If we have the protocols in place and we break down all the procedures very carefully… we will get it going again.
“We hope to visit all the countries we planned to and look to do a big chunk of it back in the UK on the backlot and in the studio,” he added. “So September through to end April/May is our targets. We are convinced we can do this.”
The cast and crew of Mission: Impossible 7 were apparently poised to shoot a major sequence in Italy when that country went into lockdown and production on the Tom Cruise-led film shut down indefinitely. This setback in the shooting schedule reportedly forced Nicholas Hoult to drop out of the production altogether.
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Amid these shifts and delays in production, Paramount Pictures pushed back the release of Mission: Impossible 7 from July 23, 2021, to November 19, 2021. Mission: Impossible 8, previously scheduled for wide release on August 5, 2022, has also now been pushed to November 4, 2022.
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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com Mission: Impossible 7: Simon Pegg Explains How & When Production Will Restart