M:i:III director J.J. Abrams tells Scholastic Kid Reporter Juliette Kessler that he's wanted to make movies since he was 8 years old. Abrams was on the red carpet at one of the four premieres of Mission Impossible III in New York City on May 3, 2006. Get caught up in the action! Check out a slideshow of our Kid Reporters covering the Mission Impossible III premieres. (Photo: Andrew Fried)

Wednesday, May 3—The premiere of Mission Impossible III, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, took place Wednesday night at New York's famous Ziegfeld Theater. Scholastic News was there.

We spoke with J.J. Abrams, the director of this multimillion dollar, star-studded, action-adventure movie. Believe it or not, Mission Impossible III is his first feature film. He has, however, created some of the hottest television shows around, including Alias and Lost.

When Tom Cruise asked him to direct this movie, he said yes before Cruise had even finished asking the question. He told us that when he was 8 years old, he began dreaming of being a film director. While in elementary school, he said he had fun making "silly little movies." Then he went on a tour of Universal Studios.

"I remember seeing that and thinking, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen," Abrams told me. "And from that day, I knew that was what I wanted and I feel so lucky to be here doing this."

Many other celebrities walked down the red carpet and we wanted to try to find out a little bit about their lives before they became famous—before they were even grown-ups.

Grammy-award winning rapper Kanye West takes a minute to talk about his favorite music with Scholastic Kid Reporter Juliette Kessler at the premiere of Mission Impossible III. West was at one of the four premieres of the movie in New York City on May 3, 2006. (Photo: Andrew Fried)

Here are some of the things we discovered: Jeff Garlin loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Stephen Baldwin loved The Bad News Bears. He still loves Scholastic News, he said.

Kanye West told us that he loved The Wizard of Oz and his favorite music was—surprise, surprise—rap! West said he was a good kid, but then he added with a smile, "I don't know what happened."

Philip Seymour Hoffmann seemed way too nice to play a villain, as he does in MI 3. But playing the bad guy, he said, was "a lot of fun. There are no rules or boundaries. You can be as mad as you want," he told me. From what we've heard about the movie, that's pretty mad!

Jonathan Rhys Meyers had a very active imagination as a child. His favorite movie was Lawrence of Arabia.

"When I was 12 my imagination was so huge, I wanted the world to be just like that," he said. "I wanted it to be dreamy and romantic and slightly dangerous, and I would survive and get the girl." It doesn't seem too surprising that he decided to become an actor.

Even former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made a red-carpet appearance. He talked about how the Tribeca Film Festival was created to help downtown New York after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. "This is a big event for New York," he said. "The film industry is very important to New York, and the Tribeca Film Festival has really done a lot for New York City. It's a wonderful thing to see it [the film festival] blossom like this."

Superstar Tom Cruise made all four of the premieres of summer blockbuster Mission Impossible III in New York City on May 3, 2006. (Photo: Andrew Fried)

At the end of the evening, surrounded by screaming fans and flashing cameras, Tom Cruise arrived. He wore a big smile on his face and talked about how he has always loved the movies.

"I went and saw just about every movie that I could when I was 12 years old," he told me. To pay for all those tickets, he mowed lawns. "Summer for me was really important because all the cool movies come out in the summer."

This summer, he hopes the coolest movie of all is his own: Mission Impossible III.

"It's the best Mission yet," he said.