I am writer/director Christopher McQuarrie.
And I am Tom Cruise.
He is the producer and the star of the movie, incidentally.
I do love this logo.
Brings back many great memories as a filmgoer and a filmmaker.
And also, once again, this is this is our second time working with Joe Kraemer,
laying music over the logos, bringing together a nice...
And you've known Joe since you guys were kids.
Yes, since we were very young.
I think Joe was 16 or 17 when I met him, in the woods in upstate New York.
That's a long, strange story.
You guys were making a film, but that's...
Yes. Yeah, we weren't just in the woods.
We were not just walking in the forest.
Yeah, we were in the woods,
we've been in the woods on many a films.
Yes, and the weeds.
In the weeds, we're in the weeds.
As a matter of fact, here we are in the weeds.
Yes.
Joe's use of the music here,
this idea of slowly introducing the theme,
and sort of sneaking it up on us was something very early on,
you remember we cut a trailer, very early on, a teaser trailer.
This is RAE Wittering, an RAE base in the, in the English countryside.
This ghillie suit idea we came up with in a production meeting
the night before we went and shot it, basically.
Yes. Well...
From the night we went and scouted, we had a few days to figure this out.
Yes, well, we knew we had this airplane sequence,
and we knew we had this runway.
And we saw pictures of the runway and thought, "There's nothing there."
-Yeah. - "How do we shoot a sequence?"
And Tom and I looked at each other and thought,
"Well, this is what you have to work with, let's make it work.
"And now let's make this about the space
"and about the vastness and the void."
And so, we went out to look at that space,
and asked for them to bring some ghillie suits along.
-And they were like, "What?" - And you and I put the ghillie suits on.
As you were lensing it out, I was out in the field.
Then I said, "You gotta put it on. We'll walk around the fields in ghillie suits."
There's a great picture of the two of us standing out in the middle of a field.
And everyone thought we were strange for walking around...
And we called Simon and said, "You're gonna wear a ghillie."
He's like, "What?" We sent him the photo. He thought we were joking.
Thought it was a total gag.
All of this stuff, incidentally, is...
The stuff with Jeremy is shot in half a day at Leavesden Studios.
And Ving was the other half of the day, on a staircase,
connecting a building outside Leavesden Studios.
-Of course here's the A400. - Yes, the Airbus A400.
And McQ goes, "What do you think of this Airbus, man?
"you wanna hang off the side?" I said, "What?"
I was joking when I said it. I didn't think you would take it seriously.
I said, "That sounds fun. They'll let us do that?"
They seem to let you do everything.
And people keep asking me about the insurance on this.
I really don't know how any of that works.
I have no idea.
Some great effects work going on in the background here.
All of these hangars don't actually exist.
And they were all put in digitally by Double Negative, the effects team.
This is a hillside right outside the offices at Leavesden Studios.
And Tom and I were walking by that hill one day going,
"How are we going to get Ethan onto the wing of the plane?"
-Yes, at Christmas. - At Christmas.
And several months later, we were like, "Wait a minute."
"Look at that.. - We walked past this hill.
It was like the big W in Mad, Mad World.
It was sitting in front of us the whole time.
It was freezing these days, we were shooting out there in the winter.
-Bitter cold. - Bitter cold.
It's the one thing you really can't appreciate
when you're watching this on film.
So, I did this eight times,
-going off the side... - I wouldn't have done this once.
I remember talking to the test pilot, great pilot.
-Ed Strongman. - Yep.
And I kept saying, remember we were like,
'1 need to see the runway as we're taking off.
'1 want my feet plastered against the fuselage."
You wanted to feel your feet slip off...
Yes. Off the side like you see there.
But what was hard is we were going so fast down that runway
that it was hard to keep my feet on it.
Preparing for this I really have to thank the stunt team.
They did a great job. And we figured out that I'm wearing lenses.
I wanted to wear a suit, kind of our homage to North by Northwest.
But it was freezing cold. We did it eight times.
We were worried about bird strikes. We were worried about...
Yes, that's the thing that is fascinating about these things,
is you're looking at a perceived danger of Tom falling off the plane.
And that was the least of our concerns.
The real concerns were debris on the runway...
Well, it was a bit of a concern from my...
I didn't say it wasn't a concern, that was just the least of our concerns.
There were greater concerns, like a pigeon hitting you in the head.
The pigeon, the fumes from the from the jet engine.
That was horrible. When I came out on the runway to talk to you,
and of course he had earplugs in and contact lenses,
he couldn't see me, he couldn't hear me,
but the jet exhaust was so horrific.
And you had not been telling anybody that.
No, I didn't want to mention it. Let's just get the shots.
By the way, when I came in that door and slammed against that wall,
that was really painful.
I remember that day you go, "Hey, let's try it again."
-I was like, "Did we get it?" - "Let's try that again!"
I was like, "Did we get it? Okay, good. I don't want to do that again."
Even me going off the side and hitting the side of the plane,
I remember going, "God, I don't want to do this 20 times."
And that whole sequence, by the way,
before we move onto the title sequence now,
we shot in a total of four days, short winter days.
So, we really had 24 hours to accomplish all that A400 material,
which is pretty great work by the team.
This title sequence, these guys who designed this sequence
-did an absolutely bang-up job. - Yep, yep.
Thank you, guys.
And there's a beautiful bit of foreshadowing
throughout the entire sequence.
And also the Mission: Impossible folder from the original TV series.
Bit of an homage. We have...
-Tons of homages. - ...tons of homages in the film.
Homage-o-rama.
And this is one instance where we used a digital camera for...
-For the opening shot. - . . .the night establishing shot.
This is all shot on film.
But these high aerials are all shot on digital to allow for better light.
This record store was so convincing
that people were walking down the street
and trying to go in to shop for vinyl while we were shooting it.
And I was always hoping that someone would build a store like this.
That's what you hope. You make a movie, you go...
Remember it was like, '1 want people to want to be in this store."
There's Sean in the back.
Sean Harris hiding in the record booth there.
-And this is Hermione Corfield. - Very talented.
Absolutely wonderful, wonderful actress
who we cast off of a headshot.
And came in, and she really clicked with you.
Yep. She was terrific.
It was a really surprising chemistry we found here.
This was so much fun to shoot this scene.
We had a great day.
And of course we ended up shooting pieces of it, do you remember?
Months later we were still not finished
getting all the little pieces inside the record booth.
In the record booth, you shot... In post, that was the last thing you shot.
-The shot of your foot. - Which we finally got it right.
Yes. Which we'll point out. Yes, exactly.
'Cause I was looking at the shot of the vent for months and going,
"This shot bothers me and I don't know why."
And then very late, as we were editing the movie, I go,
'1 know what's wrong. The camera's not moving."
This I love, this close-up.
And sort of withholding your close-up until this moment in this scene.
And this nice sort of playing with the idea of the myth of this character,
taking Ethan Hunt and recontextualizing him in a more mythic way.
This was your idea.
Tom, you were saying you wanted to do the analog version of this movie.
With vinyl.
And it turns out that in the first episode of Season I of Mission: Impossible,
-he gets... Yeah. - He gets it on an album.
Gets it off a vinyl record.
These graphics were an absolute nightmare to get right.
It takes a really long time.
And again, these pieces in this record booth
were actually shot over the course of the entire production.
We kept saving this record booth and going back
and shooting little pieces as...
-As the story was developing. - Yeah.
-And on the phone, that's from... - That's from Mena, right?
We needed more pictures of Tom.
And we just sent it from the set of the film that I was shooting after.
That shot. That foot. That shot was the last day.
That was the very last day.
Very last day, like, two weeks before the film came out.
-And this was our skirting the edge of... - Sean Harris.
-Yes, and Sean Harris is... - Very talented.
Very talented actor who was very reluctant to be in a franchise movie.
Really didn't feel like it was his sort of thing.
And the first thing that he said to me when I convinced him
to be in the movie, he said, "Just promise me you'll kill me
"so I don't have to come back and do more."
I said, "Sean, you're the villain. Of course you're gonna die,
"it's Mission: Impossible."
Yeah, wait till we get to the end of the movie.
Sorry, Sean.
There's the smoke, the hand.
Yes, and the homage, my credit over the shot of me,
once again doing something horrible to you.
-Yes, doing something horrible to me. - l love that.
Love it.
Between Edge of Tomorrow and Valkyrie,
the number of times I've killed you, and I kill you in this movie actually.
-Yes. It's nothing personal. - I know.
-I don't take it personally. - Okay, good.
-We're great friends. - Love working with you.
All of these little asides are pure Jeremy Renner.
These two are so great together.
They're so fabulous to work together,
and I'm humbly admitting that anytime Jeremy gets a laugh in this movie
it's the improvisation of Jeremy Renner.
He's a brilliant improvisational actor.
-And there's Alec. - Alec is just extraordinary.
-Incredible musical ear. - Yep.
And really great at sort of honing his dialogue.
And he's a real perfectionist.
He'll stop and go back and correct himself time and again until he gets it.
Yep, perfect.
He has just a great rhythm, and he's just a real pleasure to direct.
It was fun. You know, you're great at writing specifically for actors.
Thank you.
And I loved when we're going back and forth on scenes,
I love playing the other characters so I get to read your dialogue.
So you get to do your Alec.
So I get to do my Alec, I get to do my Renner.
And you're quite good at doing those guys, too.
This courtroom is beautifully lit by Robert Elswit.
Here's a shot inspired by The Parallax View,
one of the many movies that we drew from for inspiration for this movie.
I'm a huge fan of Gordon Willis and his cinematography.
And when we looked at this courtroom I said,
I wanna get one shot for reference to that movie."
And here we were shooting a sequence, this is actually very early in the film,
and later in the film you'll see a scene with Alec Baldwin,
at the end of the movie, where he's tying up the entire movie.
We shot all this in one day, very early in production.
And Alec is talking about things that have neither happened yet,
nor have been written.
But it always stood as a baseline building block.
We kept going, going...
Yes, we knew... we didn't know the answers.
-Yeah. - But we asked questions.
We liked the question, we just hadn't figured out the answer.
Being on the pole here, I have to say, having your arms raised like that...
This was horrible to watch.
This took a while, shooting this thing.
Just every time in between takes, they would undo Tom's arms,
and you could just see the physical pain that was...
Well, plus you were also starting this sequence
-by hanging all of your weight... - On my feet.
And also we were shooting, and I was training for the underwater sequence.
We'd shot pretty much everything, but the underwater sequence we had.
And you were training and it was very physically punishing.
Now here's Rebecca Ferguson.
The introduction of the fabulous Rebecca Ferguson.
And again, withholding her close-up until this moment.
We always talked about this sequence, I love what Joe did with the music there.
But this is boy-meets-girl.
We always said, "This is boy-meets-girl.
Well, you were always saying throughout this, "This is a date movie."
-Yeah. - This is boy-meets-girl.
And then the opera is a first date.
-And then... - The breakup.
.the motorcycle chase is the breakup.
And then they get back together again.
Which I thought was a bit unusual way of looking at it,
but it was a good model.
And this was actually, again, a set built by Jim Bissell.
This was all on a stage at Leavesden Studios.
And I think we only had four days to shoot this entire sequence.
Yeah.
And that's where the decision to go handheld played into it.
Usually I like to shoot in a pretty formal style,
but handheld was the one way we could move
with real speed to shoot the sequence.
And one of the things that's very important to me about handheld
is that you don't try to emphasize the use of handheld.
It's kind of minimizing the shakiness of the camera.
But most of the shots within the sequence are handheld.
Now that character, Vinter,
he's an actor who came in, there was only gonna be one scene.
Yeah, he was supposed to die after he hit his head on that pipe.
And he did that fantastic... He sent a video.
And he really shot it well, and he brought props.
And he was so good we just kept going, "This guy's too good."
-"We can't kill him." - "We can't kill him."
It was just a total waste. So, we ended up adding him to a scene later.
His first day on the movie is that scene where he opens the door in the hotel.
And then we thought, "Well, we're committed now."
But he's wonderful.
And this was lovely.
Again, these are things that were coming from you in development,
the notion of "nice shoes."
And what Ethan is doing within this sequence
is reading a dynamic in the room,
and trying to find a toehold where he can start to create a division.
-Trying to find those chinks. - Yeah.
That's Wade.
That's Wade Eastwood on the right, who is our stunt coordinator.
Stunt coordinator.
And the rabbit's foot.
Another suggestion of Tom Cruise's, and another reference to...
-MI 3. - ...M13.
We're answering what the rabbit's foot is.
-IVs a key. - IVs a key to a pair of handcuffs.
-All that for... - All that for a key.
My God, it really was a rabbit's foot. It wasn't an anti-God.
And, yes, strangely enough,
we did not intentionally use the same bone saw from Jack Reacher,
-but there it is. - Yep.
It was just the most menacing-looking weapon in the drawer.
-It just works. - Yes.
-And this hurts. - This hurts.
God. Doesn't hurt Jens.
It hurts Tom's shoulders when he has to lift himself up like that.
And going up the pole.
The bruise on my shoulder's real.
I thought I was gonna break my collarbone.
And this is where I drove Joe Kraemer crazy about the music.
We debated for a long time what the music in this sequence would be.
It had to have the right rhythm...
-Look at her fight. - . . .and the right tempo.
Yep. And she's never done this before.
Never. Never handled weapons. And she was afraid of heights.
That hurt.
She had vertigo, she had claustrophobia.
Yeah, that hurt a lot.
And she trained so well because,
look, when you're doing these films,
we told her, we wanted to be able to shoot all of our stuff together.
Yes.
And what's really interesting about this is
you're keeping two fights going at the same time.
And you have to be able to do it in such away
that you can intercut the two without losing story,
but also without losing energy.
And Eddie Hamilton did a great job of keeping all those plates spinning.
Yeah, and that you know where you are, and you're following the characters.
Because really this scene is,
it forces these two characters together, it forces her to help Ethan.
Yes, and you remember when we first shot the sequence
it was written in a different order.
She came in the room with everybody,
and the vials, and everything was all in one case.
And Robert Elswit asked, "What was supposed to happen?"
-Yep. - And it caused us to blow the scene up
and rewrite it all on the morning that we shot it.
-Which became a theme. - Yep.
With her, yes, it became a theme.
But it's important to always challenge the material.
-And that's something that... - Yes.
.we are tireless about.
And then this set was specifically designed for this very reason,
it was to create an obstacle for you.
You remember, we were struggling with the scene.
Like what is it, and then you came and you said, "Look I want it at the gate."
And she locks me out, and she's forcing him away.
Yes.
And then we changed the direction.
Remember, you guys were coming around the corner
instead of coming straight towards the gate,
and it was much more dynamic.
So, we kind of rebuilt the set on the day a little bit.
Where they're running down the hall,
we were never supposed to use that piece of the set.
And the world's worst marksmen.
They're short-barreled machine guns. They're very inaccurate.
Here we go, another little Easter egg.
Three Days of the Condor. Nobody's picked up on it yet.
And that's our little homage to Condor.
And also the dialogue that's happening here
is the exact same dialogue from Mission 1...
Yep, where I'm in the phone booth.
...when you're talking to Kittridge.
This is Great Windmill Street in London,
and we actually had to bring extra phone booths.
-There are three call boxes there. - l know.
But they weren't balanced right, so we brought our own call boxes.
-And there's not many of them left. - No, there's not.
I love that about London, these phone boxes.
Part of a Mission movie is celebrating the culture and architecture
of each country we're in.
And London is so beautiful, especially at night.
This is a scene in which we shot it twice, you remember.
We shot it once on location,
and then went back and saved the booth,
shot it again on the stage and altered some of the dialogue
as we were designing the story.
And one of the things I learned about writing a Mission: Impossible movie
is whenever you can, jam as much exposition as you can
into small spaces that you can recreate.
Yes.
When you're doing all the exposition.
And we were very careful about doing that.
Yes, you'll notice there's not a lot of exposition
when you're running across the wing of the airplane.
No, no.
We don't have to go back and reshoot that.
And again, this was all shot at Leavesden.
And it was just, Jeremy would be on set speaking to you,
and you would be on set speaking to Jeremy.
There was a real continuity.
It's interesting also when you were shooting, we shot Jeremy's side first.
And you and I were talking, and that's when we came up with the idea to be...
Well, yes, you said, I could be shot."
And I said, "You can't be shot.
"you!ll be walking around for the rest of the movie with a bullet in your..
And you said, "Six months later."
I was like, "oh my God. We can shoot YOU."
And I was so excited that we were gonna shoot it.
-One more abuse. - Yeah, one more, one more.
It's fun. One more.
One more thing. Can I shoot him in the head?
There was a moment here in this scene,
which is actually Alec Baldwin's close-ups were out of focus.
-Did you know this? - Yeah.
Yeah, you remember this.
So, this is actually a reshoot, and Jeremy was not there.
We did a split screen.
And we had Alec come back and reshoot his dialogue
speaking with another actor for the eye line.
And he was so funny that day.
He was torturing this stand-in, playfully, playfully.
Look at this. You can't even tell.
No, you can't tell, it's amazing.
See that's the stuff where it's very helpful to be able to do that.
Yes. And to never panic when you have some sort of technical disaster.
No.
And how many times did we debate what should come first, whether it's...
I know. Whether it's Havana,
how the letters should come out, where they should be.
Literally it wasn't decided till a week before the premiere.
Yeah.
And that establishing shot of the CIA,
you're not allowed to film the CIA anymore.
So that's all...
The last-ever establishing shot was taken from,
was it Clear and Present Danger?
So, we had to go in and add leaves on the trees,
'cause it's actually wintertime and we're in summer.
Here's my brother Doug, he's one of the guys in this sequence.
-Doug is a... - Technical advisor.
? . .former Navy SEAL, and he's a technical advisor.
Works with me all the time.
That was shot in Morocco, that piece. And this was shot onstage.
-I had to do about 1,000 pull-ups. - About 1,000.
-I was like, "Come on, man. Come on." - Yeah.
Well, I was enjoying, you know, you were getting exercise.
I was worried about your... You know, you didn't have to train that day.
So, yes, this is bouncing back and forth between Morocco,
that's shot in London.
There's my brother Doug in the foreground walking towards the camera.
-There's your great beard. - Yeah.
-That Sarah Monzani did. - They did a great job.
They put that on in the morning.
That was a lot of fun, putting the beard on.
-And it didn't take forever. - No.
And a strange ad for Nokia in our movie.
Thank you, Nokia.
And Jeremy did a really nice...
Within all of these scenes Jeremy is
the pressure that is being put down on the team.
It was always having Jeremy to play the anxiety and the stress,
and then those moments of relief.
And he does this fabulous job of sort of carrying the conscience of the team.
These headlines, these are again shot with a digital camera
so we could get a much better macro lens on these things.
We went back and shot those later.
-And this... - Here, I love this.
I love this cue here introducing Simon.
Yeah, the music editors put this together for me
and I just fell immediately in love with it.
-And I love this, him playing with... - Yes.
And Simon had so much fun with it.
And this little bit with the gum was pure Simon.
And again, a reference to Mission 1.
And here's my big cameo in the movie, doing Simon Pegg.
There's my hands, doing Simon Pegg's...
-There he is. Well done. - That was it.
There you go, that was it. Yeah, I didn't even get paid for that.
-Nope. Do what you have to do. - Do what you gotta do.
So, this was all in a building in Paddington.
We had two days to shoot all of this stuff, this entire sequence.
-But it's this great glass building... - Yeah, great building.
? . .with these big vistas.
All of this stuff, everything you're seeing is all our people
that are brought in and dressing up the building.
We were lucky this one floor was empty,
this great sort of graphic glass building.
With the busiest elevators in the entire world.
In every shot there's an elevator flying by.
-Don't even worry about matching it. - No, don't even worry.
Here we're going through, we're still...
We were working out the story and I had an idea.
But the way we work, we...
-Seat of the pants. - Yeah, seat of the pants.
But also just being honest with each other about things that don't work,
and really trying to keep each other true to the story and the structure.
Yes. Yes. And when you're not feeling it, it's just...
But we had this thing where it was really interesting,
for example, Alec is throwing a stack of papers on the table.
There's actually just random things stuffed in those plastic sleeves.
And we didn't shoot the inserts until later.
We knew there's gonna be something,
but we're not quite sure what the headlines are, or what the images are,
or we haven't figured out what the faces look like.
And we want it all to tell a very specific story.
So, just get the big elements, and we'll get all the little...
When we know, you know, where the story needs to be.
-And then we'll... - Yes.
We'll figure it out.
And our polygraph operator, Zhang Jingchu,
originally it was a much larger part,
which, along with some other things, got cut out.
She was absolutely fabulous.
-Had great presence. - Great presence.
She had a whole beautiful scene with Simon,
and unfortunately it didn't make it in.
Just the story, unfortunately, when you're working on something,
story is king.
And Sean Harris lost a big scene, Alec Baldwin lost a big scene.
That is not my hand. That's the real Simon Pegg.
And again, just a beautiful surprise
that the music editors put into the movie.
Yep.
And you just feel so great when you cut to Vienna with this music.
Yep, I always wanted to shoot in Vienna.
Now this, him coming off the subway,
originally he was gonna be at a hotdog stand.
Yeah, well, the dialogue was a scene between the two of you.
Yeah. And you and I went to it, and we went...
Well, and you remember this.
This was actually before.
Originally when we shot in the subway
it was the night before we officially started shooting.
We went, and stole these shots
of Simon Pegg just walking through the metro.
It was just to get him off the train and to the opera house.
And then you and I, we scouted the location.
You were like, "It would be so much cooler
"if somebody just walked up to Benji
"and, I don't know, gave him an envelope.
"And there was, like, an earpiece in it,
"and I was talking to him and he didn't see me."
And I was like, "But why didn't you tell me this last night
"when I was on the subway?"
And so, we ran back,
we went to the producers and said, "We've gotta get back in the subway."
We were already a day behind after our pre-shoot.
They said, "Let me get this straight.
"We haven't even officially started shooting
"and we're already reshooting our pre-shoot."
Do we call that a re-pre-shoot or a pre-reshoot?
-And it again set the tone... - For the film.
But, yes, this was all our first days of shooting.
-And we scrambled. - Yes.
-And I had driven... - And you did a great job.
And Simon did a great job with this stuff.
He was just one of... The timing of this was...
Doing all this with a Steadicam on an active train platform.
'Cause when we went back we couldn't have the same control of the platform.
And this was the very first shot of the movie.
And they're very helpful to just give it to us within hours.
The city of Vienna was incredible. They tolerated a lot.
Look at this shot.
That was the first shot of the film I designed.
I was standing down there and said,
"This is how I want to introduce the opera."
Now this sequence, okay, that's coming up,
I remember you played the music for me.
He goes, I want to do it in an opera house."
-Yes. - And you played the music.
-I was like, "All right, man." "Okay"
"I've never seen this in a Mission movie. It's very elegant."
You were the one believer.
There were many people saying, "Really?
"You're gonna do 20 minutes at an opera?"
And the intention was never, by the way, to make it 20 minutes at an opera.
It just kept growing, and growing,
as you and I kept riffing with the material.
And just the music, and to say, "I'm gonna use this music,
"and we're gonna cut the whole sequence to it."
It was incredibly ambitious.
And people were a little bit suspicious of us.
Concerned.
-Notably concerned. - Noted.
-Noted. - Noted.
-Yes. - And here we found this.
Yeah, this beautiful use of depth,
and just doing everything that we could
to explore as much of the opera house as we could.
And again, shot with, you know, we had control of the streetcars
that we lost control of at a certain time of night,
and all of this, everything that we're doing is establishing geography.
It's just taking all of the information
and never once stopping from teaching you
the three-dimensional space that you're in.
This is a shot that's not even at the opera house.
We knew we needed the shot.
We ran out of time in Vienna,
and this was another little bit of business
that got put to another day that didn't exist on the schedule.
And that list just kept getting bigger and bigger as the movie went on.
Yeah, all of this, the amount of geography
and story you've got juggling here, every little piece establishing that...
-Cause and effect. - Yep, cause and effect.
I just have to say the thing that...
We had a great team with Jim Bissell, Elswit...
Yeah, amazing.
Joanna Johnston, what she did with the dress color tones,
understanding the color tones of the opera house.
Yes, and all these little bits that you're looking at,
the orchestra pit, and these hallways,
were all built from leftover scraps of the opera set
when we knew we had shots we had to get.
And we were finding new and creative ways
to bring all these characters together.
And this, where Simon is,
he's actually under a staircase on the Leavesden stage
where we just stuck a bunch of light boxes on the wall and put a gate in.
We didn't even have a set.
It was really more just all of this gak sort of created it.
Okay, look at this shot.
We had four hours to shoot inside the opera itself.
We had very limited time.
And this was one of the shots I was determined to get.
And I honestly didn't believe it would end up in the finished film.
I am so glad it is.
I kept waiting for somebody to go, "Come on, move on."
-I know, please, I know. - Yeah.
And Eddie and I were constantly skirting the edge of, you know...
We were always worried that... We wanted to really take our time
so that the pace of this could gradually accelerate.
But we were always wondering, how much time can you take?
Yep. How long will an audience allow it to go on?
And during the shooting of this I was enormously stressed
because there was just very little time to prepare.
And other sequences we were able to do...
This dress, the color of the dress,
the style of the dress, her walking up and what Rebecca does with it...
-Just fabulous. - Yeah, beautiful, very elegant.
And the color of the dress was interesting.
-It was a process of elimination. - Yep.
Maggie Q wore a red dress in 3,
Paula Patton wore a green dress in Ghost Protocol.
We didn't want black or white, and that's how we ended up with yellow.
-And all of these little pieces... - Very beautiful with her color tones.
All of these little shots are, again,
with just the few hours that we had in the opera house,
all of this is familiarizing you with the three-dimensional space.
And at the same time, this music that you're listening to
was chosen at random by Robert Elswit when you were walking up the stairs.
It was not music we had originally intended to use in the sequence.
-He just started playing it. - He was just like, "Start with this piece."
And we immediately fell in love with it.
And that set in motion
the reinvention of the means
with which we were gonna use music in the sequence.
And we ended up using a whole lot more of the opera
than we had originally intended.
As the sequence grew,
and again, also, I have to say that the armorer, our props...
-Simon Atherton. Fantastic job. - Yeah, he did...
I mean, the crew on this movie, thank you.
Because these sequences don't get done without that kind of commitment.
No. And you can't take for granted the fact that
what's happening in the midst of all of this chaotic sequence,
that's a full opera that they have staged.
And a separate opera director came in.
We cast the entire thing.
And all of that had to be working in the background of this sequence
because we were determined to shoot it all as a piece.
This is a fantastic idea Wade came up with to get you down there.
These were all things that we were working out on the location.
And then this shot here. This is one of my favorite shots in the entire film.
This moment, Eddie Hamilton found this music
and dropped it in from the moment you come out the door.
And this just happened to line up with the edit.
And it's perfect.
And that's when we knew the sequence was gonna work.
And that's when Joe said, "Yes, this is her theme."
And Joe began to reference Turandot throughout the film.
And the choice of Wolfie here, Wolfie's hair is not actually blond.
We made the decision to make him
look as much like Sean Harris as we could.
But that obligated us then to add a shot of Sean,
because we didn't want the audience thinking
that that actually was the guy from the opera house.
Which also... I love this close-up.
This is money, as Eddie would say, proper money.
This was shot at the last week of filming.
All of these little pieces,
remember, these pieces we kept going, "We need these."
There's so many bits throughout...
Yes, well, we kept going, we would shoot them whenever we could.
So, actually that close-up is the middle of production.
And then the shot of her putting her leg up
is the very last shot of production.
It was the very last day, it was the last shot for her in the movie.
It was the very last shot for her in the movie.
And you remember this, if you played the music in continuity,
it got very quiet here, and you felt the energy drain out.
So, again, the music editors are manipulating the opera
in such a way that keeps the energy up.
And what you're actually hearing is almost a medley.
And you see these shots of tying in both characters.
This was the shot you insisted on.
Well, you knew it needed to be there, too.
-Of course I did. - You and I were like...
But when the clock is running down, and you're like...
And they're trying to give the list,
I mean, you look at the amount of... The detail, the lenses,
the amount of shots within this sequence,
I mean, we had a huge list of shots to get throughout
while we were shooting other things.
Some of these shots would just follow us around.
Yes. And we would run off to another stage,
like that close-up of the rifle.
We went back and reshot that until we got it right.
And it was great. We had a great splinter unit
who were doing incredible work, picking up all these shots.
-This was shot much later. - Yep.
All these little inserts that we just knew we had to grab.
And here's music editing.
-Yeah, music editing and the mix of this. - Yes.
-Okay, those guys were... - Incredible.
-And the job that they're doing to... - And the sound design...
Eddie, working picture and certain transitions to land dramatically.
Once I learned that we could do it, I became obsessive about it.
Eddie created a monster.
I was like, "Nope, it's two frames too long. Figure it out."
And they were just killing themselves.
But again, here's a great...
These discordant notes,
do you remember when I played you this opera?
I was like, '1 don't know what's gonna go there,
-'but it's gonna be awesome." - "But it's cool." Yeah.
"It's gonna be dark, and something bad is coming."
And what happens now on this trestle where Tom and Wolfie are shooting,
just on this piece of trestle we're using 11 different lenses.
And you see, looking at Wolfie,
I used wider lenses over Wolfie's back,
and longer lenses over your back,
and it created an even greater sense of...
-Size difference. - Size difference between the two of you.
-And you were also bending your knees. - Yeah, bending my knees.
You were doing everything you could to push Wolfie up there.
I was like, "All right, he's big, he's big."
-Wolfie trained me in the fights in this. - Yeah.
He's a great fighter.
And so much effort went into shooting this, you can't imagine.
Just the physical effort that Wolfie and Tom were involved in...
Also you look at how high we are.
Okay, so, those cameras have to be on scissor lifts above.
Okay, this was her last shot in the film.
This is the last main unit shot
-of the entire movie. - Yes, that's it, right there.
And that was the first thing when we came in and saw her,
do you remember that?
We were like, "you!re right, you know."
Yes. Doug was training her.
And she said, "Well, how would I fire the rifle?"
And he said, "Well you would probably want to do bone on bone."
And he said, "put your leg up on the table."
And Rebecca was just wearing, you know, T-shirt and sweats,
and she put her leg up on the table.
And you and I looked at each other like, "oh my God."
.."This is gonna be great." This is gonna be awesome."
"Call Joanna Johnston."
-So we brought Joanna down and said... ..Design the dress."
"Design the dress around this shot."
And of course, later on, when we were trying to pare the list down,
one of the producers came and said, "Do you really need that shot?"
And Tom had not even seen the shot and he goes,
"The shot is iconic. We need it. Of course we need it.
That was great faith you showed in me, thank you.
I know it.
-I knew you'd crush that one. - Oh, my God.
You have to understand, this fight took about two weeks to shoot.
All of it 60 feet off the deck, all of it with atmosphere.
There's was a foggy sort of atmosphere up there.
And we were in at 6:00 in the morning, and leaving at 7:00 at night.
-So, we never saw the sun. - No, so, it's like a two-hour warm-up.
This flip here, this was hard.
-Oh, God. - Yes.
Every time I hit the deck.
And this is Rob, our other assassin,
who I think we had to fly back three or four times
-to shoot all of his little pieces. - Yeah. Do those pickup shots.
And again, just little things that we went back,
-for example, that shot. - Yes.
We couldn't get it on the day 'cause it needed a dolly,
and it just needed to be more dynamic.
We kept honing the sequence,
and there were certain shots that just didn't...
For story and clarity, that shot.
That was originally an insert of just your hand grabbing a bullet,
and we made it much more dynamic.
It was very fortunate that we were able to go back
and constantly revise the different shots to give them the most dramatic impact.
And I don't know how you don't work that way within it.
Lots and lots and lots of planning and preparation.
Yes.
And this close-up of Jesus, our Cal¨¢f, singing opera,
we had 10 minutes to shoot his close-ups by the end of the sequence,
-you remember? - Yeah.
And it's just the right pieces that we needed.
They all lined up perfectly. It was very serendipitous.
And this, the dilemma that Ethan has in the sequence,
I have one bullet, two assassins.
One, I believe, is this woman I've seen before.
What decision to make?
That was one of the earliest ideas for the opera sequence.
And so, even as this sequence became bigger and more complicated,
I always knew we had that moment to work towards.
Yep.
And that kept it grounded.
There were times when it just was overwhelming.
And Rebecca's so great here. She just really took to it.
As somebody who'd never handled weapons before,
-she really looks like a pro. - l know.
Without her kind of commitment and training...
Now Benji really got slammed against... Simon did.
He got punched in the face.
-Yeah. - Yeah.
And the juggling act that's going on here
in terms of all the cross-cutting, all the editing,
is how long you can cut away from one character
without it ever feeling as though that character
-was waiting for you to cut back. - Yep.
And Eddie was really pushing the envelope
in terms of how much time we could spend away.
Keeping all these plates spinning.
Keeping it and knowing where you are the whole time.
Yeah.
Now here we are in a hallway set that we had built.
And it's the same hallway that you see everybody running up and down.
We just kept shooting it at different angles.
So, originally,
it was written that you guys burst out the back door of the opera house,
get in a car, and drive away.
And you said, "This is Mission: Impossible.
"You can't just walk out a back door."
I said, "Well, how you want to get out?" He's like, "We're going off the roof."
"With what?" I need a rope."
And all of these little pieces became part of telling that story.
We just, you and I, started riffing back and forth
-with the same theme of first date. - Yes.
-I mean, just as a kind of a motif. - Exactly.
And hence the shoes.
And you were saying to me,
"It's like at the end of a night
"when a girl's kind of comfortable with the guy.
"And he's walking her back to her hotel room,
"and she's carrying her shoes.
"She's been wearing her heels all night."
And so, we had to design these shoes, you remember?
-Yep. - These were specially designed
'cause shoes don't just slip off like that.
And Rebecca, here she is. This is her first day...
-This is it. - . . .on the movie.
Sliding down there,
-and she's afraid of heights. - Afraid of heights.
And fully committed to playing this role.
And just did such a fantastic job.
These are all shot in London, not Austria.
We just needed these little pieces. Remember, we ran out of time?
Yeah, that rope we shot, that was in Austria.
And then again, I drove Joe crazy with this music.
On this cue. Yep.
The cue getting off the opera, and keeping the pace going.
And then he brings in the theme like this,
and it was really beautiful.
And this was, again,
just the moments of humor like this that keep it from going too far.
And you guys were so great.
I knew when the two of you met that that chemistry was there.
-And I was just so encouraged. - IVs gonna be fun to...
When she walked in the room, you just...
The sense of the energy you get off of Rebecca,
and the way you two were together.
The Austrian Police were very upset about that explosion.
Yeah, yeah.
-They were not quite prepared for that. - No.
-. . .quite prepared. - No.
They did a great job with it. We like it, we like a good explosion on set.
Everyone gets pumped up when there's a good explosion.
-Yes. - Whole crew smiles.
We all feel like, "yeah that was a good day."
Everyone loves it. "Now we're making a movie."
-All of this is shot... - The streets in London.
Yes, they were all shot in London. But this is all done on greenscreen.
This was all done on a stage at Leavesden.
The greenscreen work is fantastic.
Everything has to be kind of... I love that look
-that she gives you right there. - Yep.
I like the weapon she has in there.
Yes.
And again, I remember you were suggesting,
you know, let's have it be hidden in something.
Remember, there was gonna be stuff on her,
and you were gonna find this disk or whatever.
And you said, "No, let's have it be hidden in something,
"and make it romantic."
And eventually it became about...
-The lipstick. - . . .the lipstick.
The lipstick became this device that carried us.
But I remember this.
We went over and over the scene so many times...
-So many times. - . . .to get the rhythm right
and to take out any extraneous dialogue.
But also, everything here that's happening in the scene
is telling you the truth about who Ilsa is.
That was very specific what you said. She doesn't lie.
She never lies. She lies once in the movie.
She lies when she says, "He's dead."
-She lies to some grunt. - Yes, that's it. To save him.
But then everything else she says is true,
-both to you and to Lane. - Yes.
And it's the circumstances that make her appear as though she's lying.
I never wanted her to be duplicitous in reflection.
When the movie was over, you realize, you know, she was good.
All of this was shot in London later on,
right in the city of London, like, 4:00 in the morning.
All the guns were setting off...
There's a lot of jewelry stores around there,
and the guns were setting off everybody's alarms. And the police...
Yeah. They were, again, very, very patient.
Very, very helpful.
And the fabulous, by the way, credit where it's due, Lucy Cork,
doing that stunt, being thrown out of that car,
which was an amazing stunt.
And a really nice use,
you remember when we put that prelap in later,
and picking specific shots
so that when he's saying, "Benji Dunn," you're looking at Benji Dunn.
All of it is storytelling.
All of it is very specifically chosen so that we're marrying these two stories.
And this very strange blocking within this scene was so that
I was always looking out into the room.
I was always looking out into the depth of the room,
as opposed to looking into walls.
I was determined to keep that war room as deep as possible.
This is, again, another shot that we got in London.
All on the same night that we got those motorcycles, and all that cast
we just picked up these little shots.
And you remember, you came on set and you were like, "What are we doing?"
And I was like, "I've got this idea. I just want to feel a little bit of a...
"It's almost like a Great Escape moment.
"you know, I wanna feel a buddy moment between the two of you."
And as soon as you looked at the shot,
-you were like... "l got it.
Yeah, you were like, I know what to do."
And you two guys just did it. It was so great.
I liked this idea of the old IMF.
Yes. Well, this was something you were very specific about,
which was, if Ethan's on the run and he's hiding,
he shouldn't be accessing this stuff, like a retinal scanner and everything.
He should be kind of jury-rigging it.
It's, like, stuff they haven't picked up yet.
And that became the boat.
This set, they did a great job building this.
-Remember, 'cause this wasn't there. - No.
They put this together in about two weeks.
Yeah. No, all of this stuff had to be put together very quickly,
because, again, we were coming up with ideas,
they were building stuff as fast as we could think about it.
Yep.
And we're foreshadowing the mask machine there.
We're foreshadowing all the gak in the movie
-in this scene. - Yeah, in this scene.
You can see it in the background of all these little moments.
And because this was such a long scene,
my idea was to shoot it as several different scenes within one.
So, this first bit of business, I shot it one way.
And so, you'll notice that as the scene goes on, it breaks apart.
Now we're in a different scene and we shoot this scene differently.
And to always give each movement its own different look
so that it never became stale in this room.
-Which was a real challenge. - A real challenge.
Because you look at this small space that we had,
and yet you still needed a visual movement through it.
Yes.
And all of these images were added later.
We had not compiled these images yet.
So, Simon and Tom are actually interacting with something
that was really only a vague description of what it was.
And we then had to design these images
around what you guys had done interacting with the screen.
So, it was a little bit of a "chicken and the egg" situation.
And then there's a part of this scene which we came back,
-and you remember we shot later? - Yep, did a pickup.
Yes, we shot it later after we figured out what the title of the movie was.
Yeah, what the title of the movie was, and the full story
-where we go, "This is it." - And the whole story. Yeah.
And what's really great is, when I first started on this project,
Tom said to me,
"What I want is I want the audience to experience
"what it's like for you and I to make movies."
Yes.
-And, boy, is that what happened. - Yes.
I want them to feel that emotional roller coaster,
and edge-of-your-seat, what's gonna happen next?
Yes, exactly.
Here, this is the shot, that shot later, where you got your Mena hair,
-and we're trying to hide your Mena hair. - Yes, yes, yes.
-His hair was longer, he couldn't cut it. - Yes.
And, yeah, so a lot of these scenes,
when you're seeing the characters discovering things,
-we, too, are discovering things. - Yes.
There are moments where we'd say... Remember, we were like,
"How do we make the Chancellor part of the whole movie?"
And we were thinking there's this whole plot and everything else.
And you, on the day, just said,
"Killing the Chancellor was a statement, a part of a new phase."
-And I was like, "Is it really that simple?" - Yet it feels bigger, doesn't it?
-Yeah! - You said, "What did you just say?"
And I said, '1 don't know. I don't know. I forget, I forget."
I said, I play that back. What did he say? Oh, my God.
"Just write it down, somebody write it down."
And we had written whole scenes and whole plotlines
of why you killed the Chancellor.
Trying to make it like this is gonna escalate.
Yeah. And it was like... Yes.
And that the Chancellor was a bad guy who was tied into...
-It was like, "No, it's a statement." - We spent weeks talking about it.
Oh, my God.
And none of it mattered.
And it just needed to be addressed,
-so it was a great, elegant solution. - Yep.
And that was... A lot of times,
we would really have our backs up against the wall.
And we'd go to set knowing, "We have a big problem to solve,
"and I don't know how we're gonna solve it."
And somebody would just blurt a line out.
We'd be like, "What did you just say, what did you say?"
Let's just keep shooting. - That was it.
Yes, "Just keep shooting."
Simon's fantastic in this scene, by the way.
He's great in this scene.
He is such a great comedic actor, a dramatic actor.
I love what he...
And a lover of movies, and especially spy movies.
And he just really gets it, and loves being...
You remember all the time we spent shooting that little...
Here's the shot of Jens.
-Here's Jens. - This was his first day on the movie.
Which meant that he couldn't die in his second day on the movie.
Yeah, exactly.
And he was thrilled.
And he opened the door, walked out, and he said,
"What do you need me to do now?"
And I said, "You can go home. We'll see you in a couple weeks."
Look at her doing this.
It's great.
That was, again,
one of the first things that she did on the movie.
-One of her first days. Yep. - That was her first fight thing she did.
And really did a fantastic job.
And she and Sean are just great together.
Yep.
They had a really great energy.
I have to give credit to Wade for the design of the fights.
Yes.
-What Wade did was incredible. - And the whole idea of using her legs.
I remember early on he said that's what he wanted to do with her.
-Look at Sean. - Yeah.
By the way, that's the thing we didn't talk about
when we were talking about the subterranean chamber,
that that was a sequence that
we had talked about in its basic construction,
but then you and Wade would go off when I was shooting other stuff,
and you'd choreograph this stuff, and you'd come back to me and go,
"There's this thing where I land and my head's on her stomach."
And you'd show me these little bits that you guys were working on.
And so, it was great for me to be able to just watch it.
To just feed you, and then you brought your notes in,
and how you were going to shoot it, and what it was like, it was so much...
It was a great experience of collaboration.
And it was a great way to develop that sequence and keep it constantly fresh.
I was surprised, and we were always sort of challenging each other.
It was a great way to do it.
And just with everything else that was going on in the movie,
it was a huge load off to know that things like that were progressing.
Yeah. And to go through... And, I mean, that's kind of my job.
Deliver inspiration, it kind of goes back and forth.
No, your job is to climb the pole.
Everything else you're doing is gravy. They're not paying you for that.
It's amazing what I get out of this guy.
-It's a huge bargain. - I love it.
It's going back and forth together like that.
-Yes, absolutely. - Look at this. I love how you shot that.
Look at her face, her eyes, and his profile there.
Well, the way she plays his nerves there.
Yeah. And I remember this.
-We went back and... - Yep.
? . . reshot it. We saved the set.
We had shot the scene, but we had to rush,
and we had to do it in one single setup.
And it just needed the depth.
And fortunately, we had a camera problem.
You remember, some film had been damaged.
Yes, yes.
So, we had to go back and shoot in this room.
And I was like, "Great, let's get this."
I love this music cue, and shooting in Morocco was wonderful.
And by the way, my apologies to all of the wonderful citizens of Casablanca.
After this movie came out, people on social media came up to me
and they were actually offended that
when we cut to Casablanca, we cut to a shot of a desert.
They said Casablanca's a city.
Now in the reverse you can see
Casablanca, the city, in the background, the far background of that shot.
But unwittingly,
there were people who felt like we were depicting Casablanca as a desert.
As opposed to we should have said outside of Casablanca?
Yeah, exactly.
And it was a lesson learned.
We should've just said Morocco
-when we said Casablanca. - Morocco.
So, this is my official apology to anybody whose feelings were hurt.
We certainly meant no harm.
We thought we were cutting to a beautiful establishing shot of a desert,
this great second unit shot.
Anyway, some people were upset. And we really didn't mean it.
Yeah.
And this location,
this was this wonderful location which was
actually outside of Marrakech, I think.
It was like two hours from anywhere.
And this guy had built this beautiful little oasis.
Was this outside of Marrakech?
Yeah, I think so.
Were we driving from Marrakech everyday out there?
Yeah, it wasn't two hours outside of Marrakech,
but I remember when we were scouting
it was like two hours from wherever we were scouting.
This is actually, again,
another fabulous example of great greenscreen work.
-Yep. - This was all shot
on a backlot at Leavesden Studios, and not in Washington D.C.
In fact, geographically,
I think that helipad would have to be on top of a building that doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, you can't get the shots in D.C.,
like they did in All the President's Men.
No, unfortunately.
I mean, the shots they have in that is crazy when I see that film.
Oh, my God, it's extraordinary.
Anyway, there's Ving Rhames. I love his entrance.
-I love that entrance. - Ving's entrance was great.
And poor Ving, the wind kept ruining this line,
you know, I was trying to get this all as a piece.
And Ving was having to take off time and time and time again.
And I think he took off in that helicopter, like, 19 times.
Yeah.
And he was starting to feel a little airsick.
And Jeremy, the wind started blowing, and Jeremy...
Jeremy started doing his Michael Jackson impression.
His Michael Jackson impression.
He turned around, and we were all laughing,
and Ving was just looking at him like,
"You're gonna make me get in that helicopter again.
1'm gonna knock you out. - He was like, "Sorry man."
But, yeah, watching the two of these guys together...
Again, I loved it.
As much as the relationship seems to be tense and antagonistic,
off camera, the humor going back and forth
between these guys was just great.
And Ving is just such a delight.
Yep.
Love this.
I know, look at that.
This was also very early in production.
We're at a stage talking about, you know,
they were asking me elements of the story.
And I was saying to Ving,
"Haven't worked that out yet. But we're gonna."
-And this. - This.
Now this was all of the exposition piled into this room.
We had a day to shoot this, or something.
And we hadn't quite figured out the torus yet.
-Correct. - And the system on the torus.
So, you and I were going back like,
how do we overshoot this, and what's it gonna be?
Yes, how do we ensure that the rules of the sequence are clear?
And cover ourselves, because we ourselves
still don't quite know the rules of the sequence.
We were still trying to figure out the geography of the torus itself.
And so, all of the exposition
that went into explaining what the torus was,
we actually had...
Each of you guys explained it in a different way.
Yep.
And when you watch the first scene cut together,
there was no way anyone on Earth was not gonna be clear.
-And then it became about... - Paring it down.
-Paring it down. - Which is a lot of stuff we do.
We overshoot certain things knowing that we're gonna pare it down,
and go through it,
so you have your choice in the editing room.
Story is king.
And just making sure that people are never confused.
Yep.
I love that moment. These moments, the little looks between you and Simon,
there's just such a great interplay going on between the two of you.
And then all of these graphics were not actually there on the day.
Okay, now,
I have to say, here comes your idea of doing an analog,
an old-school visual effect, okay?
No one picked this up.
-We have to tell them. - Okay.
-So, the mask gag. - Okay.
We knew we had to do a mask gag.
And what was really important to us, as we were looking at it,
I said, "It's been done this way, it's been done that way."
I said, '1 want to do it in camera.
'1 want to do it so there's absolutely no visual effects involved."
And so, what we ended up doing when we stood on the set
is we designed a shot here in the mirror.
Okay, those aren't my hands.
That's not Tom Cruise on the left.
That's Tom, and there's not really a mirror there.
We built two sets.
And even the books in the other room are backwards.
Everything is a mirror image, the clothes are a mirror image.
And there's one little detail in the thing that is not the mirror image,
-which is the mole on your cheek. - Yep.
-It's the only thing we didn't change. - Yep, that's the only thing.
-We changed the scar on Sean's eye. - We were waiting for people to...
But the day we shot this,
the crew and everyone, we were all so jazzed.
But it was so good.
-I got confused. - You were talking.
I was directing your double.
You were directing my double and you kept saying,
"Tom Tom, your hands."
'Tom, you're pulling the mask too hard."
-l was like... - "I'm pulling the mask too hard?"
'Tm pulling the mask too hard, Chris?"
"Sure, yeah, you're pulling the mask too hard."
"Chris?"
And Simon looks at me and he's like, "Chris, Tom's over there."
I was like, '1 guess this gag's gonna work."
You were looking at it in the monitor.
-1 must be really tired." - I know.
"Been working a lot of hours."
This, actually,
we saved a little piece of the set
and shot this on greenscreen, you remember?
Yep.
So, we went back and got it later
because we needed to change the graphics
so they told that story.
Things were evolving so quickly.
And this was you saying, I want this flash-forward.
-"Give the space.." - "We wanna show them everything,
"how it's supposed to go before it all goes wrong."
And we had just enough time in the tank to get that last shot.
That was the very last shot that we did underwater,
the little flash-forward.
-Ten days in the tank. - Yeah.
With everything else, I trained for a month free diving,
learning the technique how to free dive.
That was really, for me...
The A400 and opera fight,
a lot of difficult physical stunts.
The hardest thing was to watch you going through the underwater training.
-That was brutal. - It was really brutal.
-'Cause there was long take after take. - Oh, God, yeah.
Remember we came up with the idea of the underwater thing
when we were doing Edge of Tomorrow underwater.
Here's what happened. Here's what happened.
Jim Bissell showed a picture of the torus
as, like, just an idea of something to do with sequencing.
And hung it on this board.
And you saw it and said, "Great, we're doing an underwater sequence."
And I was like, "No, we're not.
"We just did one and it was horrible, it was so miserable.
"you really want to go back in the tank?"
And you were like, "yeah we can do it better."
"We can do it better."
Which is typical of working with you.
Which is, "That was miserable. Let's do it more.
"Let's do it bigger."
"We can figure... We'll kick this one in the ass."
Yes, "We have learned."
We will improve." "We have learned."
"We will improve." - Yes.
And so, well, we'll get into that sequence when we get there.
This, again, remember there was originally
this whole long thing of how they eventually tracked her down?
And there was all this exposition of the technology
that Luther was using to find her.
-And finally, we just stuck a line in... - l love this.
...that goes, "CCTV picked her up in Casablanca."
I know.
One line of dialogue just fixed
-a whole subplot. - Look at that.
-Found her. - And there it is, found her.
And it's just wonderful humor.
And it gets a great reaction from a crowd every time.
You two just... You're always surprised.
That's what you can do with a Mission: Impossible.
You can jump like that.
Yes, and just leap from one country to the other,
-the shorthand. - Yep.
And you were the one that was constantly telling me that.
I would feel like we had to bridge all of those gaps.
And you were saying,
-We can just keep moving." we can jump."
"The audience will come with us.
.."They're expecting it." - Yep. They'll come.
If everybody knows where we're going,
and what we're supposed to do when we get there,
they don't really care about how you got from point A to point B.
We don't want all the... Just take us there.
That's right.
And this, you remember,
we had shot this as a completely different idea.
That Benji was trying to use this thing to open the gate.
And Eddie Hamilton took it and turned the whole thing around,
and cut it as though he was jamming the gate.
And then we added that little bit of dialogue of you saying,
.Benji we're in." - Yeah.
And it coordinated these two moments in a way that hadn't before.
And this was the first gadget we ever came up with.
And it was originally how you were gonna
get into the opera house through the roof.
-Through the thing and... - 'Cause you were gonna skydive
-onto the roof of the opera house. - Yeah, yeah.
We were like, "Yes," and they were like, "No.
"Let's get rid of the skydivers, and then we'll get rid of the glass thing."
And then it all seemed to come back.
Everything we talked about, in our first times we started talking about it,
-ended up happening in the movie. - Yes.
And we didn't realize it until the movie's together,
and we were like, "Didn't we... Oh, my God."
"We were talking about that a year ago."
Everything we talked, thematically, and it all found its way in different ways.
Yes.
Tonally, the relationship.
You spoke about Ilsa,
what you wanted to do with the female character
-right from the beginning. - Yes.
We were going over that, it was your idea.
That's she's an outsider, she's keeping you off balance.
And we don't know if she's good or bad.
-She tempts you to come away. - Yes.
But remember, it was originally a thing
where she had all this money in the second act of the movie,
and was like, "Let's get out of here together. You can't win."
And our first thing was a bomb under a table with the villain.
-It was the first scene of the movie. - Yes.
That was where you first met the villain, at the beginning of the movie.
And we could never make it work, so we threw it out.
And then months later, a year later...
A year later you're like...
A week before we shot it, we wrote that scene,
and then while we were shooting we go,
"Wait a minute, didn't we talk about this at the beginning of the movie?"
Yeah. Every little piece kind of found its way in it.
Yes.
And having a scene at a restaurant, two spies.
And how it found its way into the train station.
Yes, you were like, I wanna have a moment
"where they savor the wine, and they have, you know..
And what's interesting is they all came back,
but it was never a thing of where they were forced in.
No.
We created ideas, and threw them out,
and they sort of filtered around in the subconscious
-and they eventually came back. - But you, your writing,
McQ, and your direction,
I mean, honestly, it's like, I just read it and go, "You found it."
He's like...
"Did I?" - Yes.
-It was purely by accident. - We drive to set
-in the mornings together. - Yes.
A lot of mornings going through it.
It was such a pleasure, such a pleasure.
-Thank you. - Really.
I feel the same way.
-Oh, my God, the mask. - Let's talk for a moment about the mask.
The amount of time that goes into designing,
-you can't buy that mask at... - No.
.your local scuba store.
And getting that mask to not leak was...
Here we go.
Okay, there we go into the water.
So, now this sequence,
I was given 10 days to shoot all of the underwater stuff.
And the experience that Edge of Tomorrow had taught us
was how time-consuming underwater work is.
And so, I was uniquely prepared, having worked on that,
working with Doug when they were shooting second unit.
I was then able to say, "Okay, if I have 10 days to shoot this sequence,
"the way the sequence is currently designed,
I would need a month to shoot it.
I know I can get "X" number of shots a day.
And we decided very early on
that the best way to do it would be to shoot it in single takes.
-Long single takes. - And we designed the whole thing
so we would only have to do two setups a day.
The caveat being,
you would then have to hold your breath for an inordinately long period of time.
That shot, for example,
just to get the piece that we ultimately used,
we actually shot you for about three minutes,
doing that with the camera sort of moving around you
in relation to where you were.
And this sequence, one of the scarier parts of it is that
the special effects are so specific
that some of the environment is real, some of the environment is virtual.
Everything Tom touches is real.
And Tom is underwater.
But this was the last sequence that we were working on
right up until the very last day.
And we did not finish the sequence until five days before the premiere.
And you and I gave our last notes at 11:30 at night.
And we were not able to see those last notes.
And there were shots that were still not quite there.
And Dave Vickery, the visual effects supervisor at Dneg, said,
"It's gonna be great. It's gonna be okay."
And you and I left and we went to the premiere,
and we did not see the finished movie until the premiere.
No. We didn't see everything put together until the premiere in Vienna.
And I remember when you jumped off of that gantry,
in the movie, you turned to me at the very end, you went,
"Now we'll see." - Yeah.
And everybody else is biting their nails for one reason,
and we're sitting there going,
-"Oh, my God, is the shot gonna work?" - Both of us are biting our nails for this.
And all of these little intercut-ty bits that we did,
we actually shot a lot more of that, of those guys, in the control room.
We thought we needed more of that,
and we actually ended up needing very little.
And the other big piece of this was score.
Were we gonna have music on this sequence or not?
And Joe Kraemer actually wrote
a fabulous piece of music for this sequence,
and we debated it right up until the end.
And what it ultimately came down to was that
I noticed the effect of music over these underwater sequences.
Suddenly, you did not feel like you were underwater with Ethan.
You felt as though you were in a room with an orchestra watching a movie.
And so, the decision was made to take the music out.
But each one of these camera moves,
each one of these camera shakes, the lens flares,
they're all part of a very carefully constructed sequence
to hide the places where the visual effects
were right on the edge.
And it worked beautifully. They did an incredible job.
It's all those things you take for granted
when you're watching a sequence like that,
those camera shakes and everything, they're all deliberate.
Now, originally, we had talked about trying to do it,
trying to stay inside the torus the whole time.
And when we shot it, even though I would do three-minute takes,
you're having to do your breathe-up, you take it off, you get into position,
and it ended up being,
there's ones that were three minutes and 45 seconds.
-I would have to do take after take. - Oh, God, yeah.
Well, that was issue one.
But the other thing that we looked at when we looked at that sequence...
-It wasn't a team sequence. - No.
You lacked the tension of seeing Benji come across and the victory of this,
-and the struggle. - Yes.
And it was, you were achieving the mission,
but you were also saving yourself
-and not Benji. - Yep, and not Benji.
And so, the emotional stakes sort of outweighed
the filmmaker's desire to do an ambitious oner.
And you remember, right, the last night of the mix,
we went in... I flew in.
I was shooting, we flew in, we went through the mix,
and we put in the...
-It was, like, at midnight. - We were like, "There's something..
You were like, "It needs something. What is it?"
And you said, "Get a microphone. I got it.
So, yeah, at 11:30 at night, you were...
Making all these noises in the mike,
and 15 minutes later the editor had dropped them in.
-Did an amazing job. - Amazing.
Guy did an amazing job.
I looked at them and went, "Great sound editor."
And it was so disturbing the first time we heard it,
we knew that was gonna work.
All of these little bubbles, everything you're seeing in the water,
all of that is added after the fact.
Because the water is so clear, it actually didn't look like...
-So, we could capture the image. - Yeah.
All of those bubbles are to create the sense of movement
that you wouldn't otherwise feel.
You needed to constantly feel this sense of current.
-This is me just being pulled along. - Yep.
And then here's where the score begins again.
I like what you did here with that also, bringing her character in,
-very heroic. - Yes.
Well, you remember we debated that.
There was a whole thing about whether or not to see Ilsa jump in.
And you articulated it quite nicely.
You just said, "It relieves me from the sequence.
..."It releases me from the sequence." - Yep.
"When I see her jumping in, I know she's coming."
And you remember, you were getting a lot of notes about just like,
"I'm not gonna know where she's coming from."
And then it's like, "Of course you're gonna know.
-"We saw where she's coming from." - "We saw Ethan do it."
Yeah.
And again, this was a little thing where,
remember, we went back later and got the close-up of your eyes?
-Yep. - Shooting all these little pieces.
And again, this was a set built by Jim Bissell.
And we filled it with water, but you can't really see the water.
-It was a really interesting effect. I know. - Yeah, I know.
We just made this huge wet set so you understood,
but we really struggled to bring out the water
and have the sense of it there.
This, again, some of the beautiful stuff that Simon Pegg does,
-this really nice... - Yep.
The interplay between him and Rebecca that's all done...
You see him realize what has just happened
-all through the way he looks at her. - Yep.
This was, again, my brother Doug,
during his time as a SEAL had actually drowned,
so he was adding some more technical advice
-to show the state of mind. - Yeah. Well, you told me the story.
-You told me the whole story. - Yes. Yes.
He woke up from a coma and had no short-term memory.
So, things like this you sort of...
And talking to Doug about it...
And I love that you brought in the thing of just going like,
-What are you doing here?" - Yeah.
Yeah, we call him "ice...dead Doug."
-Because he drowned... - He drowned twice.
He drowned twice.
And the story, it's...
He's fine now, by the way, he's totally fine.
Yeah, he's fine now. But, yes, that he...
It informed the whole character...
-Yes. - ...of what...
And you would tell him something,
and then five minutes later, you'd tell it to him again
and he would say, "What are you talking about?"
So, here, this was a simple bit of business.
Come outside, get in the car, drive away.
And we were shooting Rebecca's bit second.
We were shooting you guys first.
And you came out the door and you said,
"This is Mission: Impossible.
'1 can't just cross the street and get in a car."
And I was like, "Well, what are you gonna do?"
And you go, I got it. I got it. Just, I got it. Just try this."
And we set up the camera,
and you didn't tell anybody what you were doing.
And you did this face plant across the hood of the car.
And of course when you did it,
first you heard everybody go, "oh my God."
And then everybody started laughing.
And we thought, "Well we know this is gonna work."
The line I said, "What's the line he said to you?
.."what's the line Doug said?" "What!d he say?"
I said, "What are you talking about?"
"That's it." - I said, "That's the line, isn't it?
"That's what Doug said to you. 'What are you talking about?"
I meant, "What are you talking about?"
This was, again, another thing where,
remember, it was gonna be a fight scene?
-Yep. - And you were like,
"No, I'd really like her to do something faster and more propulsive."
This is the moment I just did for Chris.
And here's the, "What are you talking about?"
That's Doug.
"What are you talking about?"
And so, here we're diving into...
The gluttons for punishment that we are,
we had shot a car chase in Jack Reacher,
and had had so much fun with it that we decided,
"Now we're doing Mission: Impossible.
-"Let's take everything we learned." - "We gotta blow this out."
And, of course, we're gonna take it a step further with motorcycles.
And so, we brought back a lot of the guys
that we had worked with on Jack Reacher to plan that sequence.
Here was the staircase in Rabat.
I knew when I saw this that I...
I knew exactly what we had to do there.
This scene, which is set in Casablanca,
is actually moving back and forth between...
That is Simon in the car with me, by the way, the whole time.
-Very brave. - Throughout the entire thing.
-Very brave to do that. - Yes.
He was a very trusting guy.
And we had a blast doing it together, too.
Yes.
There's the motorcycles.
Look at these guys. They can ride.
They're awesome.
It was so much fun on those Rabat steps.
And I remember you saying, "Damn it, I don't have leathers.
"Otherwise, I'd be doing that stuff.
..1!d like chasing myself." ..l!d like to chase myself."
-You guys did not want me to do that. - No.
Well, no, I would've been fine with it.
After the A400, what are you gonna do?
Yeah, what are you gonna do?
Now look at this. These are very narrow streets.
Okay, this we just came up with on the day,
-remember that? - On the day. Yeah.
You're like, "When are they gonna meet?"
And we're like, "Here's this corner, I'll crash into this."
-Yeah. - "And we'll just look at each other."
And then Jeremy, as he was doing this U-turn,
just ad-libbed this bit,
-and Ving picked up with it. - God, he's funny.
"You just had to get the four-by-four."
It's great.
That's Jeremy and Ving.
It's Jeremy, and the riffing between the two of them.
And all of this, keeping all of this geography straight,
this was one sequence that we had pre-vized very carefully.
God, that was brutal, watching that.
That's Chris. Thank you, Chris, for doing that.
-Yeah, that was a hard hit. - That was a hard hit.
All of those hits were pretty rough.
Now a lot of these people that you see there gawking
are actually people gawking.
And at a certain point we felt like it felt kind of natural.
Yep.
We were running out of time, and everybody felt okay.
-Banging, drifting. - Yeah.
I'm okay, I'm okay."
And all of this was shot in a couple of days,
in these tiny, little narrow streets. The people were incredibly tolerant of...
Wade did a great job setting it up, and Gregg Smrz.
Amazing job. And the pursuit guys.
-Yep, pursuit guys we did Reacher with. - Majesky and company,
who have to be driving in front of you
with the camera hanging off the back of the car.
Yep.
This was one of the first gags we came up with for the chase.
Great stuff, McQ.
-Why, thank you. - Fun.
And the rig for that thing,
that spinning rig and all of that,
to make sure we didn't actually crush somebody,
was actually quite complicated.
No, but still the guys are taking a hard hit there.
And this BMW is being fired with a cannon.
The BMW is on a rail.
-Thank you, BMW. - Thank you, BMW.
Thank you very much for letting us do that.
For all the BMWs you didn't get back.
I know.
So, it was on a rail, and we had to fire it with a cannon.
And after the third time we fired it, we started to notice that
there were some cracks in some of the buildings.
And we were asked to not fire the car cannon anymore.
And I remember you pitched this to me. I did it. I laughed.
-And I laugh every time. - Yes, and we pre-vized it.
I laughed every time.
And Eddie just did such a great job with all of these little bits.
-Again. - Yeah.
And the quietest car in the world sneaks up on him.
Yep.
What's interesting is these little pieces that you're seeing back and forth,
-that was shot... - In London.
? . . in London months later on a cold, gray day.
And there's greenscreen behind Simon.
Just these little pieces, little bits and pieces,
that we, for whatever technical reason,
or for time we weren't able to get on the day,
we had to create elsewhere.
-These little moments. - And then you remember this,
finding the right frame
-for the insert of the sunglasses. - Yep. Yes.
That it would tell a story.
-And there it is. - There it is.
And this nice intercutting between sunglasses, knife.
Eddie did a really great job.
So, now we're into...
Thank you, Morocco, for giving us this highway, by the way.
-Forever. Yeah. - Really appreciate it!
We could not have gotten this sequence without your all's help.
I was very excited to shoot this.
This is high-speed driving, no pads, no helmet.
Why they let you do this stuff is beyond me.
I have no idea.
Because it's safe.
-it is safe. It is very safe. - It is safe.
Or in some cases, it appears to be safe.
-Yes. Safe enough. - Yes.
Safe enough.
So much fun shooting this stuff.
This was a lot of fun.
The adrenaline going though.
And again, what you and I had designed,
you remember, was like an eight-minute motorcycle chase.
Yeah, we had an eight-minute motorcycle chase.
And four weeks before we had budget challenges.
And essentially cut it all,
even down to two weeks before, you cut the whole thing down.
-Yeah, it got cut again. - Yeah, and you cut it again,
and you rewrote it, and just made it what it is.
It's like, "Let's just make everything as dynamic as possible."
And we were aching the whole time thinking,
-It's not enough, it needs to go bigger." - That it's not enough.
"It needs to be this thing."
And when we actually screened it the first time,
we felt like, "This is actually about 30 seconds too long."
-And we would've cut all that stuff out. - Yes.
Here's another brilliant piece of editing.
This is a very famous road in Morocco, by the way,
-Look at the editing. - Yes. The Ouarzazate Road.
I love the windshield. Look at this.
Whenever you cut to close-ups,
we wanted to bring a close-up in of our bad guy with his helmet.
On the knee, a little scrape on the knee. That hurt.
-Yeah. - I'm sorry, yes.
No, that was owie.
And by the way, he did that several times to get that shot right.
That's only kind of an accident.
Remember, I was gonna do it in my bare feet at one point?
-And shorts. - Yeah.
I was gonna do the motorcycle chase in bare feet.
Joanna Johnston, our costume designer,
was mortified when you suggested that.
And you were like, "Dude."
"Trust me. Trust me." - 'Trust me, don't do that."
You just scrape your pants on the road, you're gonna feel it.
Okay, sorry...
As I was saying, whenever you see the close-up
of the guy with the mirrored helmet,
we never actually had time to get that.
So, we actually digitally put a mirrored visor on Rebecca's helmet.
Now this stunt coming up, McQ did it first.
-Look at that. - Yes.
He stood in front of that when the camera's coming.
-At 60 miles-an-hour. - Yep.
And I actually stepped over the line.
I straddled the line.
And I just tucked my elbow in right as the car went by.
And I felt the rearview mirror brush my elbow.
And so, I said to Rebecca, "Okay, are you comfortable doing this?"
And she said, "yes"
And I go, "Well, just don't step
-"over the line." - Over the line.
"you need to stay a little further to your right."
But she was game. She was really game.
And I love that moment. You're like, "I wonder..."
I remember I was saying, "Her stepping in front, I don't get it, I don't get it."
But I said, "Look, let's try it," after you did it.
I remember what you're saying.
You were concerned that we'd lose sympathy for her completely.
-Yeah. - You were just like,
"I'm not gonna like..
-But the second... - It's that look.
It's afterwards, the look.
But also the shot is so good of her stepping out.
I turned to you, I was like, "This is awesome. This is awesome.
Thank you, thank you. Thank you." Thank you."
Well, that's the thing,
you know, I remember you came to me with the rooftop in Vienna.
And you were like, "We're gonna go off the rooftop."
And I'm like, "What?" And I was like, "Really?
'1 just don't get it. Just go out the back door."
And you and I constantly have these things
where you'll come to me with something and I'll go,
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about,
"but we'll shoot it." - "Let's go."
-And then... - You'll tell me something,
I'm like, '1 don't get it, okay,
-"but let's do it." - "But let's do it."
And we always end up in a place... Here's...
Simon's beard is much longer.
This is all a reshoot.
Because he wasn't in this scene originally.
-That's right. - There was a whole other plot...
That's a fake mustache on Ving.
And Simon's beard is like three weeks longer than it was in the movie.
Ving showed up with no mustache.
We were racing to reshoot all this stuff.
But it was a little bridge that allowed us to cut
a 10-minute chunk out of the movie.
Scenes that we really loved.
And then here's the entrance of Simon McBurney.
Simon's character was not in the script until very late.
And what happened was,
originally, you were chasing the villain in the motorcycle chase.
And we had the idea
it would be so much more interesting if you were chasing Ilsa.
Yeah, you came up with that.
But if you're chasing Ilsa...
And suddenly we're like,
"Well, if she's running from Ethan, and she's running from Lane,
"who is she running to?"
And originally we had said, "Maybe she's running to Hunley,"
-but it felt too plotty. - Yeah.
And it demanded something else.
And I called you in the middle of the night, said, I got it.
And this scene was born.
And this is one of the few scenes
that is editorially almost exactly as Eddie cut it the first time.
There are very few little tweaks.
They were so good together that day.
And I remember you and I were being
really particular about Rebecca in this scene.
And finding just the right energy
where she maintained her strength, but you still felt her vulnerability.
And you kept coming up to me, and you were just like,
"It's not, she's still... It feels angry.
"And I wanna feel hooked into her."
And finally, I went up and I stood right by the camera,
-do you remember? - Yeah.
And instead of calling out to Rebecca, I just started speaking to her.
And the softer I spoke, the more the energy in the scene seemed to change.
And she found her stride in the scene,
and it was really great to watch the two of them.
It was great to watch the two of them, and watch you direct her.
Because also with her, the journey she's taking,
because we have to get to the train station...
-Yes, that's right. - . . you've gotta know the pressure,
but still maintain the strength that she has,
-which I feel with this character. - That's right. That's right.
And this line, "Lane will order you, and to regain his trust, you will do it."
It's another example of it felt right in the scene.
But we didn't know how we were gonna pay that off.
We were asking a question
-to which we didn't know the answer. - No, not until the morning we shot it.
Exactly, exactly. Exactly.
Yes, at the beginning of the day.
But within that we knew, "God, this just feels right."
Remember, we didn't know what was on the disk at this point.
But everything was about feeling your way through a scene and saying,
"That scene feels dramatically right. It's taking us in the right direction.
"And when we get there, we'll figure it out."
And it was constantly kind of feeling it where you go, "That works.
-"Now we know we have to get there." - Yes.
-That's the story. - That's what we have to play to.
I know, I feel I wanna be here
-in the movie at this point. - That's right.
And we would trust the actor to deliver the line in such a way
that however they played it, we knew we're gonna build to that level.
-We're gonna earn that moment. - Yep.
This is where we figured it out.
We finally decided what the red box was,
-but not what was on it. - No.
This was our way of getting through this scene.
Yes, it's a red box, but we don't know what's on it yet.
It's encrypted. We don't know what's on it, yeah.
Jeremy's, I think, fantastic in this scene.
Okay, here's another Jeremy line.
-Thank you, Jeremy. - Jeremy. It was just great.
And Joe's music that just sort of feels right.
And what's interesting is, Joe's music, that cue,
he had written different music for this scene.
If you notice, that's the exact same piece of music
that's playing in the safe house
when you guys are talking about the torus.
And one of the interesting things that Joe and I have discovered is,
because I cut without temp music, the movie...
Yeah, Chris doesn't cut... He finds his own internal rhythm.
So, he cuts with no music.
So, when we're watching the film, there's no score.
For months we're watching it without score.
And what happens then is that Joe will write a piece for one scene,
and you can literally take it and lay it over another scene,
and it'll hit all the same cuts.
The movies have sort of a dramatic rhyme...
The scenes, rather, have kind of a dramatic rhyme.
And we took that music from that scene,
and laid it to bridge these two as an experiment.
We realized the thrust that it created, that when you cut into this scene...
I remember hearing it the first time.
I was like...
It was like, "Oh, my God."
And it's marrying these two scenes together,
-the disk is carrying over. - Yep.
All of that, again, a happy accident.
So, the idea that that music ends right before Jeremy's note
is pure coincidence.
And we played to it.
And this, again, finding these dynamics within that scene,
creating sort of the...
The team is sort of pulling apart.
There are key elements within this scene that, you remember,
-we cut a shorter version of it. - Yeah.
We cut about 30 seconds out of this scene,
and it was a much tighter scene.
But the whole film played differently, the whole ending played differently.
You no longer believed that Jeremy had any doubts.
-No. No. - And it took that away.
This is another shot that I thought for sure
would never end up in the movie, both of these shots,
-just 'cause they were taking their time. - l love those shots.
And I'm so happy they made it there.
We had half a day to shoot all of this.
You can see it's very low winter sun in London.
But it gave us this beautiful cross light.
And I just absolutely love Elswit's photography in this scene.
-It's really beautiful. - Yeah.
And poor Sean, this was yet another scene
where it was given to him just a few days before.
All of Lane's dialogue seemed to be
evolving just right before we went to shoot it.
-He did such a great job. - He did a fantastic job.
-They have a great energy together. - Yep.
And it's a much different interplay than between the two of you.
I was actually up in those trees with a pair of clippers
just cutting away just specific little branches.
Yeah, I remember that.
You told me your, like, little branches...
When we were looking, it's like, '1 cut that branch over there."
It's like, "All right, Chris. Come do my yard later, will you?"
You can't afford me.
-I only cut the one branch. - Yeah.
Just one, one very specific...
It would take you forever to do the yard.
Yeah, exactly.
"Are you still working on this one branch?"
"Dude, you've seen how long it takes me to shoot a scene,
"you ask me to cut a whole tree?"
This, again, really beautiful interplay between the two of them.
And Eddie doing a fantastic job
finding the rhythms within the editing so that there is constant movement.
And you remember, there was an earlier line in this scene.
Yes. That you trimmed right at the end.
Yeah, he kind of nails her earlier in the scene.
He asks her about Atlee.
And it implies that he knows what's going on.
And it demanded that the music start earlier.
And when we took that away,
it gave so much more impact to the line at the end.
And it was all these little things that we were exploring,
and giving ourselves the freedom to do it.
And again, this whole idea that the disk was empty,
we had to figure out why it was empty.
We still didn't know at this point what it was gonna be on.
-That's right. That's right. - What was gonna be on it.
And this was lovely. This is pure improvisation by Sean.
Originally, he just touched her with one finger.
And each time he touched her, he touched her in a different way.
And this one was just so wonderful.
This is some of my favorite music by Joe.
I know. And I love this transition here.
Okay, what did we have, two days to shoot this whole thing?
We had four days to shoot all of it.
That means, not only the garage, everything.
The parking garage and everything.
And we ended up, you remember, we didn't get the parking garage.
But the important thing, when we say four days,
this is four days in London in the winter.
This entire set is lit by giant silks in these huge skylights above.
So, we really only have half a day.
Again, the crew did an incredible job pulling this together,
because, remember, we just found this location.
-You wrote this scene. - Yes.
Okay, here's the scene that we were talking about,
one of our conversations where I said, '1 want two spies at dinner."
-Remember when I said that? - Yes.
-Where it was just a hint of... - Just a hint.
? . .just how much you can get away with in this kind of movie.
-Yes. - You know.
-Not indulgent, just a taste of this. - That's right.
And I love how you brought that in.
Also, you cut this scene two different ways.
-One without the options. - Yes.
When she said...
Going back further.
You and I were watching the first assembly of the movie.
And we knew that after Morocco there were all of these dialogue scenes.
Dialogue scenes.
And we're watching a rough cut of the film.
We're at Christmas, we're still shooting.
Yes, and whenever you're watching a rough cut of the film,
it's always a tough experience 'cause you're not really watching the movie.
And it's always a little bit rough.
You walk out of the room going, "We got our work cut out for us."
And we had watched the first half of the movie,
and we knew this stuff was coming.
And you paused the movie and you said, "Let's take a walk."
Which was sort of code for, "Cut me, Mickey."
It's like, I need a break before we go into all this talk."
And we got to this scene,
which is almost exactly the same way as Eddie cut it the first time.
And she said, "Come away with me," with no music.
And you and I looked at each other and we were like,
"That's like, really effective."
.."Like it works. This really works." .."This works. This is working."
"I'm not bored."
'Cause we're pretty tough, we're honest.
That's when we knew, "Okay, we're good."
-Okay, the talkie bits may actually work. - We're good. We're good.
We don't need a motorcycle chase
-in the middle of the sequence. - Yeah. We're good.
-A gunfight does not have to break out. - This story is working.
All we gotta do is figure out what's on the disk.
We still have to work that out.
But also, that your relationship with her
-was working. - Yes, yes.
And the relationship with the team.
And there was some pressure for me to make this a much simpler scene,
and just have everybody sitting at a table.
-As if that would be easier. - Do you remember, you're like,
-"Don't do it." - l said, "Don't do it."
"Don't do it. - Much more fun.
But this idea of the three choices
also harkens back to Turandot,
-which is three riddles. - Yes.
The three riddles I propose.
And the three riddles is a theme running through Turandot.
And Joe had the idea here to bring in the Turandot theme.
This was the first time in any of his score
where he brought it in and began to experiment with it.
And he actually had it at a slightly different spot,
-if you remember. - Yeah.
And we just slid the whole cue just a little bit later,
so it lands there.
And it played so beautifully
that we just knew that that was gonna become
the theme throughout the movie.
And on this particular day, I remember,
we were all looking at Rebecca, there was something
-so radiant about her. - Yeah, she was glowing. Yeah.
She was really glowing.
Another thing I love about Rebecca which I'll point out is,
Rebecca is somebody who wears messy hair
better than any woman I've ever worked with in my life.
You know, her hair would be beautifully coifed in the morning,
and I'd see her across the room and I would say, "Rita."
And she would do Rita Hayworth.
-She would just flop her hair around. - Yeah, yeah.
She'd mess her hair up,
and just as soon as she did that,
-it just softens her face so beautifully. - Yeah.
And it just felt so much more natural.
The beginning of the scene, the staging, where she walks in,
and seeing kind of the equal training that they both have together.
I mean, that's something we haven't talked about.
But you and I...
How you use action and motion to develop and tell character and story
so that the right hand knows
what the left hand's doing with Ethan and her.
And this is the way that she comes in and discovers the team.
And then again, we play that back
-when Ethan shows up at the café. - Yes, at the café.
And we play this back again.
It supports character.
It's just something that the audience doesn't...
They don't know why they feel so connected with these characters.
But those are very conscious things that we put in there.
Yes.
And that just tell a story about their training,
about their lives, and about their synchronicity.
And it creates a relationship between these two characters without ever...
Without ever having to... You know, you want the audience to...
-To feel it, rather than be told. - Yep. Yep.
-Now this. - Now this.
Okay, just jumping back for a second.
The shot of Rebecca disappearing there took forever to shoot.
-That's real. That's not CGI, that's real. - That's real, she just vanished there.
This, you were fresh out of the tank.
I was so tired. I was blurry-eyed.
You had just finished doing 10 days in the tank.
-And oxygen-deprived. - Yes.
And you were also feeling all this pain in your joints.
The free radicals are floating around in there.
And again, these were scenes that we were still figuring out.
And you were like, "What am I saying?"
And I was just like, "Just say this line. It's gonna be fine."
And there was a point at which you were answering the phone,
and you couldn't remember to answer the phone.
I was foggy, man.
I came up and said, "You're gonna have to carry me.
.."Carry me, please." - Yeah.
But the thing to remember about this
is the intense workload that goes into these movies,
and how long we're working, and how hard we're working,
and how so many of these scenes
change and evolve and develop on the day
that, you know, it's like shooting a soap opera.
I mean, you're shooting pages that are freshly written.
Yes.
And then to compound that
with the physical punishment that you had undergone,
keeping that in mind in this scene,
it gave the scene a really unique energy at the same time.
And Jeremy is playing so beautifully off of you in this.
Like, looking at you, like,
Ethan's lost it, man."
And here's a scene
where we got a shot of the iPad, not knowing what was on it.
But we knew, we just said, "We want Hunley to be...
"We want to sense that he is beginning to open up to this bigger idea,
"and becoming more introspective."
And again, just such a pleasure to shoot Alec the way he played here.
And also Renner, again, in this scene.
I love seeing an audience.
Yes, because everything he's doing here,
-he has to be playing sincere. - Yep.
He's not performing for anyone.
And so, Jeremy and I spent a lot of time
talking about what is the anxiety that Brandt is feeling.
And all of that business that we did at the beginning of the movie
establishing that he's the one who represents the pressure.
That you always sense this thing of he's just worried about his team,
he's worried about his friends.
Carries over here very naturally.
Yeah, so that structurally,
when we're saying, "You should've been gone by now."
Yeah.
-And he's worried about... - Yes.
So, everything's played literally on the surface,
but because of the way we're presenting all of it...
-Everything he says. - Yeah.
-And that was again true to the Ilsa role. - Yep.
That's he's just playing everything straightforward.
But that the context is manipulating you.
And Elswit just shot the hell out of this room.
Oh, God. He shot the hell out of this room.
I think Renner's fantastic in this, so's Ving.
Everybody.
-Look at Ving. - Yeah.
And remember, this is another one of those places
we had all this business
-and we had a day to shoot it. - Yep.
Now here's that scene that we shot on the very last day of first unit.
And we were debating whether it should be in the movie or not,
-l remember, for running time. - Yep, yep.
And there was actually dialogue in the original scene.
And we just cut out all the dialogue,
and made it this moment between these two.
Benji had actually said a line to instigate Sean's reaction.
But it's much better without. Look at Sean just...
-And it keeps Benji in the story. - Yep.
It really reminds you what the stakes of the movie are.
We just felt it, we felt like we needed it.
And I was glad we put it back in.
And Simon just does such a great job of telling.
You're wondering what the hell that thing is.
-What is gonna happen? - Yeah.
And so, here we are at Blenheim Palace.
Beautiful, jeez, look at this.
Again, chose the location not knowing what was gonna happen here.
Yeah, remember that?
We knew there was a confrontation coming.
-We'd shoot every night, then we'd be... - Yep.
And so, all of this, we're very lucky,
'cause, remember, it was pouring rain every other night that we were there.
And it was pouring rain right up until we started shooting,
and right after we stopped.
We had so many lucky events like that.
And, again, the late arrival of the Prime Minister as a character.
We kept talking about him as...
He was always somebody sort of in the background.
And we had this idea for this Prime Minister,
and we called Tom Hollander, he was available.
-We did Valkyrie together. - Yes.
-Luckily, he came in and did it. - He came in and just crushed it.
-Crushed it. - Absolutely crushed it.
And all of this business going on outside, and Simon McBurney,
this was all stuff that was developed just days before we got there to shoot it.
Yep, days before.
We had the location and we knew.
-This is right before Christmas. - Yes.
Yes, these were our last days before the Christmas break.
So, the crew is tired,
everybody is looking forward to the Christmas break,
and there's a very different energy on the set.
You're just trying to keep people going to the finish line.
And we had an incredible amount of work to do here on this location.
-And miraculously, we got it all. - Yep.
And again, Jeremy playing that pressure,
-and playing it straight. - Yep.
Blenheim Palace, by the way, was the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
-Amazing, amazing palace. - This beautiful palace in almost
the geographical center of England.
We appreciate them letting us shoot there.
It's beautiful. And, yes, they were incredibly accommodating.
And there were art installations.
Remember, there was an art exhibit going on,
so all those little rooms that they're walking past,
we actually can't look in there,
because there's all these huge art installations in there.
And Joe's music.
You remember, when we first tested the movie,
that you just felt, like, this drop in energy.
And the notes that we were getting from the audience were
that it felt like the movie ended multiple times.
-It was score. - And that's because
-we realized the movie was ending. - It was just score.
Well, and your note.
And people were giving notes of how to re-edit the thing.
And you walked out and you were very clear.
You said, "It's the music. The only problem is the music."
And you said to Joe,
"you just need to write a piece that unifies this last stretch of the movie."
So that it feels like one sequence instead of many.
And Joe really ran with that.
And the next time we tested the movie...
-It went... - The score skyrocketed.
With almost no editorial differences whatsoever.
-We put back the 30 seconds of Jeremy. - l know. Which was great.
And then this music. And Tom, so fantastic here.
And also the other thing to remember is that Simon McBurney
is playing two characters in this scene.
He's playing Atlee, but he's playing...
He's playing me as Atlee, which was fun seeing Simon create that.
Really fun.
And that he is consciously manipulating information out of the Prime Minister.
And at the same time he has to incriminate himself.
-Yes. - And it's all on the fly.
And these shots of Jeremy, originally that line had belonged to Alec,
because it tied to a different scene that we cut from the movie.
And so, we actually, in key shots here, had to cut Jeremy out,
and replace him with Jeremy saying those lines.
Saying those lines.
So, there's actually a really subtle,
but a very beautiful use of visual effects here.
I do have to say, look, you have to understand,
the kind of writing to get this story across,
keep the characters moving, and have wit,
that's why it's, like, your casting choices,
and the writing of this scene, I love this scene.
I love reading this scene, and all of us acting in it.
I mean, it's so much fun.
And having an audience when they're with the movie at this point,
and enjoying the character laughs,
that, you know, that's what you dream about.
As a filmmaker, and also as an audience
to be so invested in those characters that you're enjoying. Look at it.
I never believed it would get the reaction that it did.
I like this speech that you wrote for Alec.
It's so funny.
I remember, I pitched this to you at the opera house, you remember?
At the stage, when we were shooting backstage.
I was like, "This is so good, just great writing."
It was just on my way to work, I was like, "How would I describe Ethan Hunt?"
Like, how would I sum him up?
And you were there that night going,
"He's gotta move less, he's gotta really focus, have Alec move just less."
And we did it a million times
to just get Alec really laser focused on him.
-And Joe's score here, really wonderful. - l like the horns that he adds.
Look at this.
And all of this, day before Christmas break,
the last day, we're rushing to shoot all of this material
and have all of this come together.
And when we heard Tom Hollander deliver the speech
about the Syndicate, we looked at each other and said,
-"Is that our movie?" - "That's our movie."
Blurry-eyed, exhausted.
-I think this might work. - Yes.
"We've got stuff to work with."
Okay, this we didn't know. No.
We shot all of this stuff in half an hour at the end of that day.
We literally had a half hour left.
All this stuff, and we had a half hour.
You just set the camera up and you're like, "Okay, pick up the phone."
"Do this, do this,
Imove the camera in, out, back and forth, say the line again."
And Ving said, "Okay, so, when I say, 'I got it,' what do I got?"
And I said, '1 don't know yet."
-"But it's big." - "But it's big. Just make it big."
And the way Ving said it, we said, "Well, we better earn that."
-Yes. - Yep.
Okay. Hollander's fantastic. Look at Renner, that's improv.
Improv, a pure improv moment between the two of them.
-And Hollander. - Yes.
This, I remember this one shot.
-And it was like, "We gotta get this." - I know.
Have him coming in.
And just with the gavel and everything, it just hit me in the moment.
And we grabbed it as a tail end.
-We had so many of these things. - Yeah.
These were all nice little bits.
This dart, for instance, was just there all the time.
We would digitally remove the dart and then just let it suddenly appear.
And this shot, which is one of my favorites,
Alec Baldwin's actually not there.
Remember, you were there on separate days, so,
because of scheduling, we had Tom and Jeremy on one day,
and Alec on another.
But we also knew we wanted that. We needed it.
It was a shot that begins to unite...
Yeah, you wanted that three-shot, the three of them.
Yeah, creates a sense of the beginnings of unity here.
And all of these were little pieces that we couldn't shoot at Blenheim
because of the nature of the camera angles.
And we were able to get them after Christmas.
And you remember, we were shooting it on the day and you were like,
"There's something else, we talked about it before Christmas."
-Gosh, that's right, yes. We had an idea. - "And I forget what it is.!'
Yes, and I said, "That's why you framed her."
And you were like, "oh my God, thank you."
And you ran back, and we shot it one more time
'cause we were like, "There was one thing we left unexplained."
-Yeah, that was it. - Yeah.
And you walked up to me, though, and you were like, I had forgotten it.
You were like, '1 remember there was something,
"but I don't remember what the something was."
And I was like, "I remember the something."
It was like, "Thank God we were both here today."
But like anything, you gotta keep just chasing your movie,
-chasing your movie, chasing your story. - That's it.
And here's Joe keeping the music and the rhythm and the pace alive,
and really creating that sense of unifying all of this as one sequence.
This was one of the last days on the film.
This was getting closer to the end of the movie.
This is the garage at Ascot.
Yeah, it's not even the garage.
It's like a service tunnel under the stands for the racetrack.
But again, great choice of location.
Because you see when Ilsa leaves that tunnel,
when we were shooting that day, it just tells a nice story.
And we got here on the day.
And we're looking at the scene and setting it up for the glass box,
and suddenly just said, you know, "Just start shutting off the lights."
Yep, you showed up.
You're like, "Turn the lights off, turn the lights off,
"turn the lights off," for the second half of this scene.
And throughout this scene we're foreshadowing all of the pieces of Plexi.
All of the tanks, everything, all of the bits and the blocks are there.
And we actually thought we were kind of pushing it.
And now I look at it, I was like, you know, there's a piece of Plexiglas.
-That was your last shot of the movie. - Yep, that's it.
-Doing the drill. - Principal photography the very last day.
Yeah.
Again, I mean, we got so lucky with the weather.
And also, again, London, thank you so much.
Because, you know, we grew up watching movies of London.
And this is kind of... We walked the streets,
and spent Christmas kind of walking the streets, and thinking of this.
We always knew we wanted to shoot here.
We didn't know what was gonna happen.
-But the cobblestones, the fog... - Yes, that's right.
And if you look in certain shots you can see the wind is blowing...
Okay, so, we had four days to shoot this entire sequence,
all the dialogue at the table and the gunfight.
And we had not figured out the scene.
I remember I came to work on the first night and said,
'1 figured out the scene on the way to work, but I don't have time to write it.
"So, I'll write it tomorrow, and we'll shoot it tomorrow night.
"So, tonight we're just gonna get you to the table."
And that was the one night when the rain wouldn't stop.
And it turned out to be the one night
where we couldn't really shoot anything else except you walking to the table.
That was it.
And, okay, now can I tell this story?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I come to work the next night,
and I have written the scene on my way to work.
And all of this dialogue, I've written it and I hand it to you.
And you look at it, and you're like, "That's it, that's the scene."
And I was like, "You good?" You were like, "I'm good."
You had one little note, we tweaked the little thing.
And then you looked at me, he goes,
"There's no way I'm gonna learn this dialogue in an hour.
"There's just no way."
So, we wrote Tom's dialogue on a tiny little index card,
which Simon Pegg held in front of his face.
So, everything you're seeing Tom doing in this scene...
Am I telling too many tales out of school?
No, no, no.
Everything Tom is doing in this scene he's actually reading off of a card
that was written for him about an hour before.
Everything that he's saying...
I have to say, Simon moving it up,
like he had to do it at the rhythm of the scene, 'cause my eye line...
-So, he had to move it all the way up. - Like a human teleprompter.
And he was incredibly helpful.
And I've never seen Rebecca so relieved to not have any dialogue.
She was like, "I'm fine. I'm fine.
"What do I say? Okay.
"I've got one line? Okay. I'm gonna work on it."
She was so happy.
And Simon is so extraordinary in this scene.
-Yeah, he's extraordinary. - The sympathy that he plays.
He just delivered.
Yes, but you do this beautiful thing when you walk up,
and you put your hand on his shoulder.
And it's these little moments that you and Simon were creating
between yourselves were really nice.
And just the fear in Simon's eyes, and the tremble in his voice.
You remember, you looked at me the first time he did it
and we were on you, and you saw Simon doing it, and you were like...
I was like, "Please shoot him."
"you gotta get this, shoot him, shoot him.
"Don't shoot me." ..Don't shoot me, shoot him."
Yeah.
It was so much fun. I mean, four days we had, we were hauling.
But it's also all of us together, and everyone was really...
That's what I love about movies, too. Everyone coming together.
Yes.
And then knowing on the day everything we needed,
and we created a shot list, and it was way too ambitious,
the weather was against us, and everybody pulled together.
And they were like, "We're gonna get this."
And we had half a night to shoot the entire gunfight.
Gunfights are difficult only in that, creating geography,
you have to shoot in lots of pieces.
And we actually managed to get it all.
-Like, literally just got it. - Just got it.
And this was using a digital camera here.
Remember, we had this tiny little handheld digital camera,
to replicate the eye contact lens.
Gave us a lot of freedom.
And this was the discovery.
This was the discovery we made while we were shooting the A400,
this idea of memorizing the disk and playing this bluff.
And I'll give you$50 million to let Benji go.
-We didn't quite know... - How or where.
And again, this was the first conversation,
remember, in the screening room, that we had about,
you asked, "What scenes did you ever want to see?"
We started talking about a bomb.
I wanna be at the table with the villain with a bomb."
"And he set a bomb."
"And he set a bomb, and we're in a restaurant."
And then you made, you created this.
And then we created this.
And I was like, "This was a great idea I had."
"Wait"
We both... I totally forgot.
No, we both did. We both did.
Well, we were so tired and suddenly we see the movie and we're going,
"Do you remember, really, everything we wanted to do with the film?"
And like an idiot, I reminded you.
I shouldn't have said anything. I've gotta keep my mouth shut.
No, but it's you and I riffing it back and forth, it wasn't just me.
Of course.
And watching Rebecca in this scene, and her watchfulness,
and this feeling of a connection between the two of you.
-Yeah, look at her. - Yeah.
She's just playing such a great level of intensity there.
I know. She's looking at Simon, looking over, its...
She really just does a beautiful job.
All of these little pieces of geography, these were shot on a stage later.
We couldn't get them on the day.
We shot little pieces of people on greenscreen
just to keep the three-dimensional geography going.
We're just holding on by our fingernails to get the setup for the gunfight working.
But we had the eye lines.
We had you and Rebecca giving the looks that you needed to give.
And again, Simon just playing these subtly beautiful moments.
For me, it just brings me right into the human drama.
He really is the heart of it.
Now we get into...
We're at a point here where we literally had half a night left to shoot this.
Okay, this piece coming up, I love how you directed it.
You were very specific about what you wanted.
Yes, the two-shot.
-The two-shot right here. This. - Yes.
I remember we were shooting it, it's just the timing.
And this.
You know, Eddie with the sound design, bringing the sound out,
Eddie Hamilton, our editor.
And pushing this to its absolute limit, that every time I watch it
I can't quite predict where it's all gonna kick in again.
And this kind of gunplay's a lot of fun, too,
what Wade did with that.
It's also, you said, "Look, I want you blocking her."
Yes, you're blocking her, and then she's...
You're trading the weapon, and it becomes again hand in glove.
It's all behavior,
each one knows what the other one is doing.
All of this stuff, we were banging through it very quickly,
as rapidly as we possibly could.
So, now we're into the end of the movie,
which we had really been struggling with,
believing that we needed this big epic ending to go with the movie.
And then there came a point where we said, "Well, why? Who says?"
If the story is working, and we had always wanted to do a foot chase.
It was another thing in our...
Through the streets of London on cobble.
-Which is very punishing, by the way. - Yeah, it was rough on the knees.
Incredibly punishing.
But all of this, these were all locations that Wade Eastwood went out and found
at the mere mention of this foot chase.
And we were able to run through here, and very quickly pick off these moments.
So, we were very carefully prepared.
So, suddenly we're really in our rhythm, too,
we were sort of post-Christmas and felt dialed in.
And we were shooting things really fast.
-Really fast. And then this, okay... - Okay.
Okay.
So, we did not actually get, on the day, this close-up of these guys.
So, it kind of felt like when you watched it
that Tom had just shot two random strangers.
Yeah.
And you were always saying,
"Well, let's put a baby seat in the back of the car."
Let's go, let's hit, like, tourists.
Have the little kid going, "Mommy!"
Now whenever I watch that scene that's all I hear is, "Mommy!"
-Okay, so this location. - Yeah.
We're location scouting and Tom Cruise walks past a window and says,
"Hey, it'd be great if we could smash through this window."
And now there's a whole bunch of people standing around.
And Tom is talking about this gag of smashing through this window.
'Cause we needed to separate Ethan and Ilsa.
Ethan and Ilsa. And this is a great place to separate them.
And while Tom is pitching this idea,
we're all looking at the people in the office looking out going,
"Is that Tom Cruise standing out there talking about the window?"
And you remember, you knocked on the window,
and they opened it, and you went, "Can we come in and look around?"
"Can we come and look around?"
And what was it, the guy who worked at the office...
I said, "Do you mind if I smash... 'Cause we'd like to smash through this window
"and I wanna throw a guy out the other window."
And he goes, "I've often wanted to do that."
Yep.
This location's great.
I love the way Bob... I love this scene, I love the way you directed it.
-Well, this was how we... - The way Bob lit it.
The way they acted in it. The choreography.
And this was on the night, just figuring out how do we tell this story?
How do we... When we finally stepped outside of the three-dimensional space?
And Elswit's always so great at just giving me the freedom to do what I want,
and saying, "Don't worry about the camera
"and how it's gonna work. I'll figure it out."
And he just put it on a crane on a piece of track,
and was really, really something lovely.
-Again, tough scene to shoot. - Very.
-Two nights to shoot it. - Two nights to shoot it.
Which was not a lot of time for this.
And very little time to prepare for it,
because again, the idea had developed very late.
The lovely people at Black Rock Bank,
-thank you very much... - Thank you, guys.
? . .for letting us smash through the front of your bank window.
Thank you for letting me go through the window.
-Yes. - Really appreciate it.
And we had originally created a whole lot more business in that bank.
There was a lot more glass, and a lot more stuff to go through.
And we ultimately discovered what it did
is it took away the sense that you were drawing Lane in.
And so, we dialed a lot of that down.
And this intercutting,
remember, we played with all these different ways
to intercut these two sequences until we found just the right one.
And then of course Joe's music,
we were playing with this right up until the very end.
Sorry, Jens.
-You're not coming back. - Love his reaction.
And we will not be seeing Vinter in Mission: Impossible 6.
-A wonderful actor, that was great. - Yes.
But now this geography, interestingly enough,
is very close to where you were just running.
All this geography doesn't matter because you're following story.
So, when you smash through the window,
you're actually in a completely different piece of geography
from where you came in the window.
Yeah, we had a whole little cat and mouse before this.
Yes. And you remember on the day
we thought, "It needs to be so much more complicated."
And we were talking about how much more complicated it needed to be.
Then we got there and we thought,
"We gotta get through this so much faster."
"Just smash in the window, go down..
I got an idea. Just run to the hole."
We had a whole thing worked out.
And here, we are not hiding the glass box.
This was our thing of how far could we push it?
You could see the box in every one of these shots.
Rather than try to hide it,
we were actually trying to push how far we could do it.
This was, again, really great,
you communicating with Joe and saying,
"This is where you want to start to feel the theme coming in."
And also feeling this sense of triumph here.
-l always look at Rebecca in this. - Yep.
And we played with this line forever.
We shot all these different varieties of this line.
-And you wrote that... - On the day.
Yeah, you wrote it, you found it.
I love this, "Gentlemen..
"Meet the IMF." - Yep.
And that was, again, just very much on the day.
We had other lines written, but they just...
The whole box thing we're like, "Is this gonna work, is it gonna work?"
But I remember seeing it for the first time.
You said, "Turn all the lights off," you start seeing that smoke up.
I go, "Okay, this is graphic, this is cool.
"This is cool." - Yeah.
We didn't know because we were rushing so much.
You just said, "Get me a box, we're gonna fill it with smoke."
-"We're gonna gas the guy." - "We're gonna gas the guy."
Yeah.
And then we saw just the nature of it, with the top light it just...
I love Joe's music here, too.
That, with the horns, you just feel the team.
You feel like, "Yeah."
I mean, it's beautiful.
And Sean, what's beautiful is,
these are all things that are so against his instincts as an actor,
they're so melodramatic, they're so villainy and intense,
and he does them.
-And he does them beautifully. - Beautifully.
And then of course realizing at this moment,
I'm not gonna die, am 17'
-And I told him on the day. - That e-mail.
-Look at this. - Yeah.
And that's why I like this set so much.
Look at her looking there.
I remember you going in and staging that, and...
Yes. And then we talked about the nature of the goodbye.
You know, we've sort of come full circle.
And you always had your choreography of it.
You knew exactly what you wanted with this.
-Yes. - Look at her.
And that it's really about a relationship between these two people.
That's one about trust and respect, it's...
Friendship.
-It's romantic, but it's not a romance. - Yes.
And we'd sort of come full circle on that. We'd had the ending of Jack Reacher.
And then we'd really struggled with Rita and Cage
saying goodbye at the end of Edge of Tomorrow.
In Reacher we were like, "They don't have to kiss."
And then we realized they do have to kiss.
And then we were back again going, "Actually I don't think they have to kiss."
It really feels okay. And it just felt so satisfying.
But then of course you were the one who said this...
Keep it alive. Just keep the hope there
that maybe they'll run into each other again.
And I love the cue, and then her driving away.
And you remember we had minutes left.
-l know. - And we couldn't reset.
So, we just waited till she said...
Now this, this is what he shot first.
-Remember, you shot this first. - Very early in the movie.
-And said to Alec... - You didn't even know.
You're directing was just, "Sit there and..."
"And thinking about all the crazy stuff that's happened."
Alec said, "Well, what's happened?" I said, "I don't know."
"I don't know, but it's gonna be crazy."
McQ was like, "Just sit there and just think about everything."
And we spent our whole time trying to earn that moment
with that character of what happened.
This bookend right here was sitting there
as kind of the cherry on the cake that we hadn't made yet.
Yeah.
And it was how to work toward it.
But to know that with a character, without this, just sit there and just...
-Yes. - That was...
And what's beautiful as you're watching Alec Baldwin,
he has to walk such a fine line because he has to convince them.
But if he's too convincing, he'll confuse the audience.
To where they'll be thinking, "So, was it all a ruse, was it all a lie?"
And he skirts it so brilliantly in his delivery.
And the thing to watch here, the great double act of these two guys.
Watch Alec out of focus reacting to Jeremy's line.
It's so beautiful and this little thing. The little...
Yeah, just swallow.
Yep, sorry.
And, okay, this room was at Pinewood Studios,
and it used to be the commissary,
and it is where you had the first-ever meeting on the first Mission: Impossible.
It's where I had the first-ever meeting.
I love these end credits.
What you did with it, the design.
These guys.
Their submission to get the job,
they said, "Well, we have two options for you.
"We have option one and option two."
And we looked at both of them and said,
"Well, they're so cool we're gonna use them both."
And so, they were very happy.
And I love this.
As you said, a curtain call is this way of sort of
just being able to enjoy the characters that one more time.
You know, when I see a good film,
or I love the characters in the movie, I want a bump, give me a bump, man.
Well, you know what it is...
-It's like Great Escape. - Great Escape.
That's what you and I were talking about.
I feel like I get one more bite at the apple with the characters.
That's exactly right. You get this feeling of triumph.
We're in China right now about to go to the premiere.
Yes.
And we're doing it here.
And this is our fifth film, and thank you, McQ.
-Thank you, my friend. - I really admire you so much.
-l love making movies with you. - Thank you.
I feel the same way about you.
I have such respect for you, and thank you for this.
No, thank you.
How I ended up getting this job, for everybody listening to this,
we were working on Edge of Tomorrow,
and in the middle of a script meeting, just Tom and I,
Tom turned to me and he said,
"You should direct the next Mission: Impossible."
And I thought, "Okay"
And I thought, "We!II talk about this later."
I said, "you wanna do it? Would you do it?
And you were like, "Would you do it? I was like, I guess so.
And then the whole time I'm thinking,
"I hope this is not a serious conversation
"because that's gonna be a really intense job."
I've seen other people direct these movies,
and I don't know if I can handle that.
And I don't know if you remember this,
you left the room, you were dialing the phone as you left the room.
And I hear you talking in the other room,
and laughing, you're chatting with somebody.
I didn't know at the time that it was Brad Grey,
the chairman of Paramount Pictures.
And you walked back in the room and you were like,
"Okay great, all right, Brad, good talking to you, thanks."
And you hang up the phone and you go,
"Yeah, you're directing Mission: Impossible."
Which I thought was kind of a...
That was a big leap of faith, which I gotta say I really appreciate.
You took a huge gamble.
-I don't think it was a gamble. - Okay.
Great, let's go to Vegas.
Want to play poker later?
No, 'cause you crushed it.
And it was such a pleasure, and look at what you did, man.
Wonderful.
I still kinda can't... Look what we did.
I mean, you were so amazing on this movie.
You were so supportive.
And having made four other of these movies,
you had this incredible insight during periods of total insanity.
And moments where the script just seemed to not hang together
going from once scene to another.
And you would just say with absolute confidence,
"This is Mission: Impossible, man. You don't need to do that stuff."
"Just cut to the next scene. They're not gonna worry about it."
And I would think, "All right, we're gonna be back
"reshooting this whole transition a month from now."
And you got there and you were like,
"You just really didn't need all that business."
And as we started to see that come together
it really became more and more liberating.
And it has changed the way
I look not only at how the audience perceives movies,
but about how I approach them.
And it was really a great learning experience.
It was a great learning experience for me,
every time you go out and make a movie.
And I just have such confidence in you,
just 'cause you're enormously talented.
And it's a real privilege working with you, and thank you.
-Thank you. Thank you very much. - A real privilege.
And also the great crew that we had, everyone that...
Those guys were amazing.
And with every day we were lobbing another grenade at them,
and coming up with another impossible thing
that they had to build, or conceive of.
And they really rose to the occasion. It was very challenging.
Who else haven't we thanked?
Our producers, Don Granger, J.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk.
-Jake. - Jake Myers, of course.
Gotta thank Paramount.
Brad, thank you so much for your faith in us,
allowing us to make this movie, Brad Grey.
Yes, Brad Grey. Marc Evans.
Marc Evans, Rob...
-Liz Raposo. Rob Moore. - Rob Moore, Liz Raposo.
The whole gang, Megan, all you guys, thank you so much,
everyone at Skydance.
David Ellison, Dana Goldberg.
Who else are we leaving out?
-IMAX. - IMAX.
Everybody at IMAX.
IMAX, we love seeing movies in IMAX, and we love making movies for IMAX.
Thank you so much, great partners.
And our new friends at Alibaba Pictures and China Movie Channel.
Thank you guys for coming aboard. This was great.
-BMW. - Oh, my God, yes.
We crashed so many of their cars.
They came by at the end to pick their cars up, and poor guy...
They were given a pile of metal.
Pointed over there to the pile of junk that was there and was like,
"What happened? Did you crash every one of them?"
"I!m afraid so. "I!m afraid so.
Afraid so. I think it was, what was it?
It was 12 or 13 cars and 25 motorcycles.
-Gone. Gone. - Gone.
But for a good cause. They will live on forever.
Yes, they will live on forever in cinema.
-They will live for eternity. - Thank you very much.
But everyone, Gregg Smrz, Wade, the stunt...
Just the whole gang, thank you all so much.
Yes.
-Robert Elswit, Jim Bissell... - Elswit, Elswit, thank you.
-Joanna Johnston. - Joanna.
Yes.
-Everybody at Double Negative. - Toby and Tommy.
-Double Negative, the gang. - All the visual effects guys.
There were a lot of visual effects houses working.
Those guys worked, they were sleeping on couches at the end.
Yes.
-In shifts. - In shifts.
-It was like a submarine in there. - I know.
-That was crazy. - That was crazy.
-At the end we're going in, it was just... - No, they deserve combat pay.
-And thank all of you for listening. - And thank you all for listening.
-And for watching. - And for watching.
We love doing these things, and it's always a lot of fun.
-Thanks for being here. - Thank you.