Hot TV writer he may be, thanks to Alias, Felicity and, especially, Lost, but JJ Abrams had only directed the occasional episode of his various series when Tom Cruise came a-calling with an offer to take the reins of his next $150 million movie. An incredible success story? As Donald Clarke discovers, in Hollywood, nothing is impossible

When asked to name his professional hero, JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, two of the most gripping TV series of recent years, needs no time to gather his thoughts. The late Rod Serling, famous for devising The Twilight Zone on television, has long been an influence on and an idol of JJ's. "In The Twilight Zone, he did my favourite thing - he took outlandish situations and told them through emotional characterisation," he told the New York Times recently.

Abrams has already equalled one of his icon's notable achievements: he has managed the near impossible business of becoming famous almost exclusively through writing for television. Serling may have penned the screenplays for Planet of the Apes and Seven Days in May, two fine films, but people still tend to think of him as The Twilight Zone Guy.

Abrams, using his given name Jeffrey, did receive writing credits on such unlovely movies as 1991's Regarding Henry (Harrison Ford becomes nicer after being shot in the head) and 1997's Gone Fishin' (Danny Glover and Joe Pesci go fishin'), but his growing legion of fans would surely date the birth of the Abrams brand to the creation of his first television series, Felicity, in 1998.

"Oh, yeah. Gone Fishin' really fits into the canon nicely," a weary, jet-lagged Abrams laughs.

There are some funny moments in that film. Aren't there? "Really? That's interesting. I've never seen it."

Now, after redeeming himself on the small screen, Abrams is moving back into the multiplex. Whereas most writer-directors make their feature debuts with small, intimate dramas, shot on 16mm in bars and cars, JJ is launching this next stage of his career with $150 million worth of helicopter explosions, speedboat chases and smirks from Tom Cruise. Following abortive attempts to develop a third film in the Mission: Impossible franchise with such directors as Joe Carnahan and Frank Darabont, Cruise himself decided that Abrams might be the man for the job. He had directed episodes of Lost and Alias, but it was still a brave decision on the Cruiser's part to hand the job to somebody with no experience behind the bigger megaphone.

"He was something of a fan of Alias," Abrams explains, referring to the zippy, twisty espionage series starring Jennifer Garner. "What he responded to was the integration of the hyper-reality of the spy genre with emotional relationships. I was thrilled by that, because, as with Lost, that was the point with Alias: taking a story that is larger than life and telling it with real people."

Was he surprised when Cruise offered him the directing gig? "Definitely. I suspected maybe he would get me involved in the script. That was how I first met Tom. He and Steven Spielberg came and asked me about writing War of the Worlds, but I was too busy. I never in a million years thought he would ask me to direct it."

Abrams, despite having been involved in the industry for a decade and a half, admits to still being occasionally starstruck. But he must have rubbed up against Cruise before.

"Well not literally," he says with a cautious laugh.
 
No. Let's not venture into supermarket tabloid territory. What can he tell us about Tom that we might not already know?

"I realised that I actually knew very little about him," he says. "I had seen his movies. I knew where he was from. I knew he was a Scientologist. But I didn't know anything about his life. I knew the headlines. So when we first got together and had this meeting, what amazed me was how normal it was. It seemed crazy to have a mundane, funny, engaged discussion with this man who happened to look exactly like this icon of film."

I would imagine that he probably performed quite well in his meetings with Cruise. Born in 1966, Jeffrey Abrams, neat with thick black hair and serious spectacles, manages to radiate galloping enthusiasm for his profession, even when debilitated by days of morale-sapping media promotion. You wouldn't quite call him a geek. But his obsession with the mechanics of mainstream storytelling does identify him as, shall we say, a passionate technician.

"Meeting Tom was so uncanny," he says. "I feel like I grew up with a similar background, a similar work ethic and a similar sense of story. I feel we love the same sort of movies. We both like mass-appeal movies unabashedly. I don't know if that makes me an unartistic hack, but that's how it is. I love many smaller films, but I really love films like Jaws, Tootsie and Back to the Future. I like those films that create that communal experience while still respecting the audience."

That enthusiasm for commercial film-making began when, as a child, JJ was taken on a visit to Universal Studios in Hollywood. His father later became a producer of television movies and he got to spend some time on set.

Abrams developed any number of skills as a youth. He can draw, animate, compose (he wrote music for Alias and Felicity) and is even a pretty adept conjurer. But he always reckoned that he would end up making his living as a storyteller. While attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York he teamed up with a friend to write a comedy script called, eventually, Taking Care of Business. The finished film, released in 1990 with James Belushi in the lead, was not a hit, but it set Abrams on the road.

In 1997, after writing a few more ho-hum features, he and his collaborators came up with the idea of a television series concerning a girl who follows her boyfriend when he heads off to college. Felicity, starring Keri Russell, who also appears in Mission: Impossible III, was a modest success.

"I loved doing that show," he says. "But I felt it needed some bad guys. In college there are no stakes. You are supposed to play around, fail classes, get drunk and so on. But there is nothing really at stake. So, I suddenly thought: what if Felicity was a spy? What if a college student was also an agent?"

The resulting show, Alias, demonstrated Abrams's enthusiasm for applying the highest standards of narrative craftsmanship to material that might be treated as pure pulp by less thoughtful writers. Jennifer Garner, who Abrams's wife had spotted playing a small role in Felicity, became a star, while JJ himself, producer and writer, was designated a serious player.

"Out of that came a phone call from the head of the network asking if I would like to do a show about a bunch of people who survive a plane crash. And that became Lost," he says. "Then ultimately I got to do Mission: Impossible III, in which finally Keri Russell - Felicity - does get to be a spy. I had always wanted to direct movies. And this film now feels like the culmination of everything I have been doing till now. The work I had been doing in the spy genre was all great training for this movie."

Mission: Impossible III proves to be the tightest, least silly film in the series so far. Following Brian De Palma's gloriously vulgar opening episode and John Woo's mystifyingly chaotic second, the new film, though quite sparsely plotted, does have the disciplined shape one might expect from viewing Abrams's television work. It seems as if Cruise's gamble paid off.

One could draw facile comparisons between the requirements of delivering one instalment in a film franchise and knocking together an episode in a television series. Was the experience of working in the voraciously story-hungry medium of TV useful?

"Well, when you are writing one scene in a series of 24 episodes, you know there won't be that intense level of scrutiny that you get in a film," he says. "Every scene in a film is going to resonate. Once you get past the pilot of a TV show, you know you will not be under that level of pressure."

Mission: Impossible III follows Cruise's Ethan Hunt as he and his fellow agents seek to stop evil Philip Seymour Hoffman from doing something terrible with an obscurely defined, but clearly hideously dangerous, cylindrical object.

The film is, for the most part, undemanding, noisy fun. But, towards the close, it turns darker. There are hints that Abrams and his co-writers are trying to say something serious about the irresponsible behaviour of certain US government agencies in fighting the war on terror.

"Approaching any movie with a '3' in the title - especially Mission: Impossible - you know you are not going to get a political polemic," he says. "You are not going to get some sort of political statement or ultra-deep message. But the other writers and I talked a lot about how hard it is to defeat evil without becoming evil yourself. I believe there is some very Machiavellian thinking going on now, and not just in the war against terror. The film is still an entertainment. But that is, hopefully, a discussion you can have afterwards."

Weaving such political and philosophical issues into genre drama was always a defining trait of the various Star Trek series and films. So the comments above may please the science fiction franchise's many fans, who, last week, learned that JJ is to produce and direct the next film in the series. Rumours abound that the picture will deal with the first meeting between Captain Kirk and Mr Spock, but Abrams is reluctant to discuss any story details at this early stage.

Has he checked out the internet to see how the notoriously sensitive Trekkies - or Trekkers, as they tediously insist on being known - have taken the news? "I have been on the road since the news came out," he says, suddenly looking somewhat fearful. "Is the reaction bad?" No. On balance, they seem happy enough.

"Being involved with a series that has a passionate and vocal following makes me incredibly sympathetic," he says, happier. "They have put up with so many incarnations along the way. These fans, they are a smart bunch. They are an intelligent group. We are very respectful and we have no intention of subverting the material."

That draught of air you just felt had its origins in the relieved exhalations of single men in basements across the world.

Lost screens on RTÉ 2 on Mondays at 10pm

LOST AND FOUND

Lost should have been a disaster for ABC television. Abrams, working with his co-writer, Damon Lindelof, had taken the executives' original pitch - Cast Away, the series - and transformed it into something considerably more curious. The pilot episode, which sees the survivors of a plane crash coming to on a deeply peculiar tropical island, cost an extraordinary $12 million.

The show expected viewers to connect with a dozen or so principal characters in a matter of minutes. After 24 episodes of the first series many bewildering mysteries remained stubbornly unsolved. Long sections of one particular story were subtitled, for Pete's sake. At best, the network might have hoped for the world's most expensive cult hit.

As things worked out, the show was significantly more successful than Abrams's more genre-friendly Alias and, alongside the dizzyingly tacky Desperate Housewives, helped ABC out of a serious ratings trough.

"Though it requires effort, Lost is, I think, a much easier show to get than Alias," Abrams muses. "While there are mysteries, we are working them out. Lost, with all these characters, has a very broad appeal. There is, also, a simple wish-fulfilment feel to it: it's about these survivors on a tropical island. You get that situation quickly and the show has, as a result, built up enough of a following so that we can get away with ever weirder stuff."

Perhaps so. But as the second season progresses, some viewers, perhaps remembering the unsatisfactory winding down of Twin Peaks, are beginning to suspect that some of the conundrums might never satisfactorily be solved. Did the writers work out explanations for all the mysterious phenomena when planning the series?

"We did have answers to all the broad questions," Abrams says. "But those often changed as we got closer to dealing with all the storylines. When Damon and I were first working the stories out, he felt strongly there should not be just one answer. It's not like there is one big solution, like in The Sixth Sense."

So, we cannot expect a great narrative epiphany? "No. When we answer some questions, those answers trigger yet more questions. We are not going to say: oh, they are all in purgatory or whatever. It's more complicated than that. It's like life."