Due to Paramount scheduling this for a very early time in the morning, I was half asleep while listening in. By the time I realized I might want to ask a question, J.J. was gone. The cool part is a few of the questions were pretty good, like…

Fred Topel:                    And with Lost do you have to come with a season cliffhanger that will top the hatch in the last season?

J.J. Abrams:                 I can tell you that Damon Lindenoff has done just that.  The ending of this year of Lost blows the ending of last season out of the water.  It is an incredible finale.

Fred Topel:                    But there has not been like a single thing… like last year the hatch was sort of dominant mystery.  Now there is so many.  I mean what is the one thing that you can leave hanging?

J.J. Abrams:                 You will see what happens, but I can tell you that a lot of it has been there, and has been building from the beginning of this season.  It is not out of the blue, but what happens at the very end of this year is… for me it is like the greatest finale I have ever heard.

Below is the rest of the conference call, and if you are a fan of J.J. it will be a good read. Also take a look at the conference call with Ving Rhames here.

Question:                      Hi J.J.

J.J. Abrams:                 Hey how you doing?

Question:                      My question is did any of the ideas in Mission Impossible III be they for action scenes or other elements come from anything you wanted to do at some point on Alias, but could not for whatever reason being they were not appropriate for Sydney Bristo or for a TV budget?

J.J. Abrams:                 There were so many things that we wanted to do on Alias that we could never in a million years afford, and one of the things that we did in this movie was this Vatican break-in sequence, which a sequence like that requires so many pieces it is a very intricately, visually intricately told sequence, and in television you never have the time to do the kind of pieces that you need to really sort of tell it properly.  Clearly sequences like on the bridge, the helicopter chase, the whole factory sequence, the Shanghai jump, the race to the… each one of them in a weird way was a dream version of the kind of thing we might conceive of doing on Alias, but never have the time or budget to properly execute.

Question:                      Will there always be a role for Greg Grunberg?

 J.J. Abrams:                Only as long as I am directing.  No, I am kidding.  Greg who is my oldest friend since kindergarten is someone who… I love working with Greg.  He is my good luck charm.

Question:                      And that you have completed Mission will you be returning your focus to running Lost or are there other movies?

J.J. Abrams:                 I look forward to back to Lost although ultimately I hope to do both.  It is an amazing experience work during this movie, and if they will have me back to direct another movie I would love to do it.

Question:                      Okay, thank you.

Mary McIntyre:              Good Morning J.J.

J.J. Abrams:                 Good Morning.  How are you?

Mary McIntyre:              Pretty good.  I have a question, in talking to some of the stars in the movies invariably they get asked how did you feel about J.J. being a first time feature director, and then coming from television, and one I was wondering what is it like to have all those questions floating around about you, and secondly, did you ever doubt yourself?

J.J. Abrams:                 I am getting the same question too, which is what was it like to be a first time feature director.  The opportunity to do this movie was so remarkable.  I cannot think of anyone else who would let someone who never directed a feature before take the reins of something that is this large in scale, this expensive, and yet Tom did, I mean he believed in me, and never wavered from that the entire experience.  I do think that there were moments that I was in shock that I was given this opportunity, but the truth is I wanted to do this all my life, and the pressure, and experience of doing television seem to continually confirm that doing a movie was something that was certainly possible.  I did not necessarily think that the first movie I would get a chance to direct would be something as large as this one, but the crew was so incredible.  Tom, and his producing partner, Paula Wagner were so supportive from the beginning that I always felt, and I believe the whole crew always felt incredibly supported, and safe, which always allows for more creativity, and so the whole experience was great, and I honestly never doubted that I could do it.  It actually felt incredibly comfortable doing it.  It was a fun challenge.

Mary McIntyre:              Great.  Thank you.

Hanh Neuyen:                Hi J.J.

J.J. Abrams:                 Hello, how are you?

Hanh Neuyen:                Good.  I want to find out with Tom and basically his character being such a strong personality.  What were you looking for with the other team members?

J.J. Abrams:                 What I wanted to make sure that we were casting actors, and writing parts that were as strong as they could be because you know when you got Tom Cruise it is that blinding star power, and you cannot put him on screen with someone who cannot play at that level or they will get drowned out, and the movie will not have a spark.  So you bring in actors like Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, certain Philip Seymour Hoffman, and you find people like Michelle Monaghan or Maggie Q, and I got to bring Keri Russell back because I worked with her on Felicity, it was incredibly important to me for not just the team, but for all the supporting actors that they be not just wonderful actors, but have a certain level of that charisma and it was great to see Tom with all these actors because he I am sure could feel that same energy coming from them, and it only made him better, and that certainly makes the film better populating with people who are that compelling to watch. 

Hanh Neuyen:                And with his immediate IMF team in particular what were you looking for as far as how they would compliment his activities?

J.J. Abrams:                 Well, I want to make sure that very quickly everyone felt incredibly distinct.  What I loved about Jonathan Rhys-Myers is he sort of felt to me in many ways the Irish version of where Tom was in the first Mission movie, which is a little bit more of a cocky guy who is at an age when he has not been doing this for very long.  I wanted to have… with Maggie Q I really wanted to have an incredibly strong female, and powerful voice, and character, and someone who was as lethal as she is brave, and as she is vulnerable, and Maggie brought all that.  She also looked incredibly good.  That red dress that she wears to all places, the Vatican, and I knew we had Ving coming back who I had loved in so much of the work he had done in other films, but I felt like he still had not been as kind of relatable as I wanted him to be in the first two films, and I just think he so brought an incredible personality to the role of Luther.  So it was just important that Tom’s character be surrounded by distinct and unique and compelling other characters.

Hanh Neuyen:                Okay great.  Thank you.

Reg Ceeton:                  Hi J.J. 

J.J. Abrams:                 Hey how you doing?

Reg Ceeton:                  Pretty well, yourself?

J.J. Abrams:                 Good thank you.

Reg Ceeton:                  In this mission you seem to go into a lot more details about the tricks of the trade like showing how the masks are made, and how Ethan collaborates the wire for his signature drop.  Now was that a conscious decision to kind of lift the curtain a little bit, and show how the team does what they do, and why did you go for that?

J.J. Abrams:                 Yes, and thank you for mentioning that little collaborating thing on the wire.  That kind of stuff to me was… it was so easy not to do that stuff, but I thought part of the fun of Mission Impossible the series for me was always not just the what, and the why, but the how, and I just loved watching this team using the kind of equipment, and using it with such a precision that I wished I had that kind of equipment, and I wished I knew how the hell to do that stuff, and it is easy to skip that stuff, and go over right to the end game, and get to the point, but I feel like part of seeing… part of getting to know, and love the team is seeing them do their job, and appreciating why they do their job, and appreciating why they have been chosen to be in out in the field that they have… anyway doing that kind of stuff with the mask or doing the little moments with the collaboration thing here there, when Tom puts the cross on the wall, and transmitting that or when we see Ving open up the drill case… all these little details were to me the things that it felt when I watched the show it respected the audience in their ability to track the sort of machinations of that kind of operation, and I just feel like if you lose that stuff you are not getting… you are not sort of getting to really see the details that matter.  So that was really important to me that we do that stuff.

Reg Ceeton:                  Now you left to throw Ethan out of windows or off the top of building like in the beginning when he repels down the window or when he leaps off the building in Shanghai, why are you so attracted to the jump?

J.J. Abrams:                 The jump off a building?

Reg Ceeton:                  The jump… any of the falling sequences or the repelling sequences.

J.J. Abrams:                 To me the fun of the movie is in the same movie having the crazy larger than life moments, and also the incredibly relatable intimate character moments, and so part of that stuff… the jumping off a building, the repelling down, which is obviously was just a nod to the first films… that stuff was for me… just part of seeing the… showing the extreme measures that Ethan has to go to, to either pull off a certain mission or rescue the woman he loves, and its classic old school physical thrills, but those do not really thrill us anymore unless we have characters that we relate to, and so the goal was to try, and do both.