Bongos.
You can't beat starting with bongos.
I'm Lorne Balfe. I'm the composer from Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
And I'm going to try to
give an insight into the whole process
of scoring this amazing film.
So, this whole introduction,
there is a lot of musical elements here.
So, the bongos was something,
I think I started recording maybe about six months
before the end of the movie.
And we had a lot of bongos.
I think we had 12 bongo players, which is
11 more than you normally do on a recording session.
And we recorded the bongos at AIR Studios in London
in a massive cathedral.
Just really fantastic.
And this piece here is called Loves Reduced.
And this string piece was
really the beginning of my relationship with Mission: Impossible.
And we'll start hearing it in quite a few places
and I'll explain to you how that started.
The idea came up during breakfast with Chris, weirdly enough.
Anyway, that will be discussed later.
This coming up was
possibly the hardest scene to write.
And I... Now after doing it quite a few times,
I now understand why.
So this is our first introduction to the famous Mission theme.
Very subtle.
Didn't wanna make it too obvious.
So, this scene was just
a very hard scene. I think we scored it three times.
That's not writing it. Writing it...
I lost count of how many times I wrote it.
But it's... The mission briefing scene is
probably one of the most important scenes in all of the movies.
And you're getting a lot of information.
And it really sets the tone for the rest of the movie.
So we tried several versions.
I wrote a version that was very atonal,
with no melody, no harmonic structure,
and no pulse.
And...
It's weird, you...
You have to watch...
You have to get through the whole movie to understand the movie.
So, every time you watched it, you go back to it again
and change the tone and it's just...
Yes, this is the beginning of your movie, so...
So, it was a very difficult one.
It's also, weirdly thinking about that beginning
over the title cards, that again had...
I wrote that a few times
and the version that we had until the last minute
was very atmospheric.
And weirdly, we kind of went back to the first-ever idea
we had a long, long, long time ago and again it's the bongos.
And I think that Mission, it's just...
It's got one of the most famous themes,
I think in culture. You've got...
You've obviously got themes, Star Wars themes.
The Mission: Impossible theme is part oi
worldwide dialogue.
It's in commercials.
People can make jokes about being against the clock
and as soon as you hear that famous piece of music,
you automatically know you're in Mission: Impossible.
And...
There we go again.
It's again that subtle hint of it,
and just changing
one note.
Now, this theme here.
So, again...
That is
the second phrase of the original Mission: Impossible theme.
And I think that...
I can freely talk here 'cause there's no music.
So, I will take over.
I think
this whole process started over breakfast.
I was very fortunate in getting a meeting with Chris.
And we talked over breakfast, quite a few breakfasts,
about the movie,
and the truth is I think I went and wrote my guts out.
I've always loved the franchise of Mission: Impossible.
I've always loved Chris's films.
And...
I... I think after the second meeting or the third meeting,
I locked myself away in the studio for two to three weeks, and I wrote.
And I just thought
there's a lot of mileage with this iconic theme
that's just never been touched on.
And...
Chris had talked a lot about wanting
a new approach to the music and not necessarily wanting it to feel
like the TV show.
This movie is far different than Rogue.
It's just a different tone.
It's different colors, it's shot differently.
Tom's character,
it's just far more...
I think you see a different side to him
than we did in the other movies.
And I think that musically, we had to delve into that,
and not necessarily by writing new themes.
I think everything thematically
we've done with this score is so connected to the original.
It may be presented in a more modern style,
but the DNA is all...
All from the original show.
So, yes, I wrote my guts out and
that first piece over the wedding scene,
Loves Reduced, that was something
that we'll feature in the forthcoming scenes.
And was something that Chris and Eddie
started working with and placing it in other scenes.
We're about to get into some bongo action very soon.
Again another very difficult scene to score.
You don't want music to take over.
There's a lot of information happening.
And probably wrote it again quite a few times.
So, that was our gang of 12 bongo players,
going for it.
They're about to feature again.
So we recorded...
They're playing it not as one normally would.
But we're using bamboo sticks.
So all of them are playing bamboo sticks.
And then in some of the other cues, they're playing with hands
or they're playing with drumsticks.
And it just
again has a slight '60s feel,
but there's something tribal and larger about it.
So that was a lot of fun.
And as a failed
percussionist drummer that I am,
anything to do with getting people banging drums I love.
So again back to one of our action motifs,
which is gonna be featured in the latter reels.
Now also throughout that scene we'd been having a little hint
of our soon-to-be baddie theme.
This...
And I believe you are about to hear it now.
There.
So this is not quite an octave jump,
but this bass motif "ba-boom" is our...
Which we came to call it our "ba-ddie" theme throughout the movie.
And it's actually part of the famous plotting theme from the TV show.
So, it's the same DNA.
Now back to this
piece of music, which
we all refer to it as the Loves Reduced theme,
mainly because the way I had written it was...
This piece of music was called Loves,
because the way
Chris talked about
Tom's character in this show during one of our breakfast meetings
was about the emotions
of this journey that he's about to go through.
So, I wrote this piece called Loves.
And then he felt it was a bit too big.
So I started removing piano from it.
I had some more melody in it.
And then because of that,
it was much simpler, so I just called it Reduced. So, it's Loves Reduced.
It's probably the backbone
to a lot of the film.
And, unfortunately, this is one of the rare scenes with no music,
which as a composer I like, which is probably odd, but...
Silence is golden.
It's weird sometimes when you're looking at a scene,
you always have to pinch yourself.
Because normally when writing, there's no music there.
One of the amazing things about this project
has been Chris does not use temp music.
Temp music is music from other films
or albums
that they put into the movie and edit with to create a tone.
And he never uses temp.
So, anytime I watch this movie,
there was absolutely nothing.
And I started writing suites.
Not to picture but with just conversations with Chris,
and Eddie and Chris were able to edit it,
put it in different scenes.
So we created our own temp.
But, yeah, what's always something you have to pinch yourself is
when you are watching a scene like this,
or you're thinking, "Okay, I've got to start writing,"
it is pretty amazing.
You have Tom Cruise on the screen and you're writing to it.
It's amazing.
And it's his... I think it's one of his best performances.
It's just... It's...
It's another level, this movie.
So here... This was something that...
Originally, it was not played this way.
I think the way I had written it originally was, it was a very
synthetic rise
starting from here.
TV goes on.
And then a very synthetic rise
going from a low note, building up...
And it just kept rising and rising and I had the orchestra joining in.
And then,
we watched the movie
and one of the great things about working on this project was
where editorial is,
my studio was next to editorial.
So, I was literally down the corridor.
So, Chris was able to come into my room
and watch me trying to play the piano very badly.
Like a chimpanzee banging notes.
But this scene here, I wrote with him in the room.
And for the first time now, we're getting emotion,
instead of just making it a tension cue.
It just flipped it on its head. Before that rise,
you knew something was going to happen.
And now, it was more about the emotion of...
"Gosh! The world could be coming to an end.
"Now, I have a feeling we're about to get into some
"title music."
Bongos, obviously.
And now we're hearing our theme for the first time.
Longest Mission intro ever, I think.
The poor flute player could barely breathe.
Here we go.
I shouldn't talk over this, but I have to.
So, now I think you have permission to start smiling.
Now, with this,
we've got this very famous theme
that we all love and know.
But we wanted to slightly twist it on its head, so
the melody is actually in half time,
whilst the baseline is in double time.
We have this new end...
Which was an idea by Chris.
He just kept wanting this feeling.
And I think probably it was a nod to Rogue,
a very operatic ending. This...
Very over-the-top, but it worked so well.
And that's a trumpet motif there.
And again, this...
It's the second phrase of Lalo's theme.
So again, same DNA.
Yeah. So that opening was...
I still get excited when I see that,
in a non-egotistical way, but it is Mission: Impossible.
And there's the legend himself, Lalo.
Who I'm sure cannot believe that his theme is
still being sung by people all over the world, it's pretty amazing.
So, yes, that opening titles again, hard one to crack.
I think I started that one
five months, four, five months before we finished.
And again we came back, we were...
We were trying to add some more
fairy dust on it even at the last minute.
Because it's a hard one. It sets up your tone and...
And I did it. I've done a more faithful version to the...
To the original theme at the end for the end credits.
'Cause I think we wanted to just show respect to the whole franchise and...
And this one was just...
Bit of bongos.
In time with the walking. There's Eddie,
an amazing editor, most amazing person.
He got us through it.
I think two things I wanna also talk about is
our amazing music editor, Cécile.
Music editors, I think, rarely get talked about.
And rarely get given the credit they deserve.
But, Cécile,
really, I'll point out some of the scenes that she was
very involved with tracking.
So music editors have
several roles.
They...
They are the translator between the director and the composer.
And they can
protect both sides, really.
But also they help you get through it by
taking some music that you've written,
maybe for another scene that doesn't work,
and maybe they find somewhere else that it can work, so...
So, Cécile, Eddie and Chris
were just as important with
where music worked.
You know, a composer...
You work on a scene and you get very attached to it
and sometimes it's just...
It's... You're writing it for the wrong scene,
which we'll point out in a couple of scenes.
Three-note motif again from the original show.
So, another little spot with no music.
So, I lined up with the orchestra.
Very, very big line-up. We had 12 bongo players.
We had 14 drummers,
which is again
13 more than you normally would,
and a very large orchestra.
We had 12 French horn players,
12 trombone players.
Four trumpets, two sax players,
two tuba players.
Strings.
I think we're on about 92.
We had a fantastic choir,
which came to about 60 singers.
We also had a kid's choir of about 20
from Thomas's.
And you'll hear them in a scene coming up when we're in
the cathedral and
there's a wide aerial shot of inside
and there, because there had been a...
A piece of music being sung from the choruses in the church.
I thought it actually would just be a bit fun to write a new piece,
so it sounds like score but maybe it's coming from the choir.
Anyway, so that was our extraordinarily large line-up.
And we're coming up to... A truly amazing scene coming up here,
which again musically was not planned this way.
It was...
When Tom jumps out,
I actually played it more atmospheric and we had...
There was actually a very long choir rise.
And,
again, watching it a few times,
stepping back from it and just constantly looking
the same way Chris and Eddie look at the movie.
I tried to watch it.
I tried to sit down and tried to watch it every Sunday.
Because, normally, I'm working seven days a week,
which is a good thing.
But I'll try on a Sunday to just watch the whole movie
and...
And see where I think there's pacing issues or
melodies not working.
There's not enough of the melody.
And this is a great shot coming up. I love this.
Our amazing brass section.
So, yes, we recorded at two different studios.
We recorded at AIR Studios in London at Hampstead.
We also recorded at Abbey Road Studios.
And...
There, my eardrums have gone.
And... Gosh, that looks good.
And also it's amazing being able to watch this
because also,
you're writing a lot of the time...
You've always got when you're looking at the screen,
you've got words written around it.
You've got your name written in the middle.
So you're always put off by that,
unless you love your own name, which I don't.
But there's always a lot of data and it's not color corrected either.
So that's always... So here's the beginning of this
rise texture,
which I always had,
but then right there, as soon as he misses
where he grabs onto him.
Started trying to do this effect with the brass rips.
So it's 12 French horn players
on this surround effects.
So if you're able to hear this in surround,
it's each rip...
...is moving around the cinema
so you're getting a total surround feeling with it.
Or if you are watching it on your iPhone,
you're hearing it in two ways
from left to right, left to right, so...
And also a pulse.
Again this was, there was no tempo change here.
And then Chris was sitting in my room
and he said, "What about if it just started building pace up?"
So it's a gradual pace.
All building up tempo while it's all the way until the bang happens.
And then this
was played silently at one point.
Which... And then, again we were just talking about...
This was a Tom idea, actually having a bit of music here.
And it just adds a bit of fun to it.
And here's the beginning, we're at a night club.
You're slowly hearing it in the background and...
And it's the same tempo as the cue also,
which... As a...
It's good always trying to connect
your source music to your actual score.
And I think I wrote this piece also, actually.
Late night raving going on in my house.
But...
Thankfully, it was a lot of sleepless nights.
I remember writing this track because,
I think it was the night before our baby was born.
So thankfully, with midnight feeds,
I was able to start writing dance music every night.
I love this shot.
I think it's...
Club scenes are always a difficult one visually.
I always remember the club scene in Basic Instinct.
It was just a great scene.
And this just captures...
Captures that club environment.
Not like I go to clubs any longer.
But when I used to...
That sure summed it up.
And we're about to,
I think, go enter one of the best fight scenes
I think I've ever seen in my life.
And fortunately or unfortunately,
there is no music in it.
So it's an interesting one
because it shows you don't necessarily need music in scenes,
which is... I think it's always a hard thing to...
It's very hard choosing
whether you want music or you don't want music.
And I think normally the process is you sit with your director
and editor, and you spot the movie.
This scene
right from the beginning,
Chris had always mentioned
not wanting to have music
because you're hearing the bass from the club.
So there is an underbelly sense of something going on.
But it's...
But, yeah, I think it's one of the best fight scenes I've ever seen.
And I'm...
I'm pretty grateful that nobody did want music because
I wouldn't know how to score it.
I did have a go at it
just as an experiment.
And...
It's just... It was interesting.
Music seemed to kind of slow it down.
Or it...
It gave away a lot of information.
It's all in the eyes. It's all in their looks.
And...
And then amazing sound effects.
It's...
It just shows you how powerful
scenes can be
without music also.
But, yes, I think this is the whole sound team here.
And James Mather and his amazing team,
it just shows you what an amazing job sound does.
If you watch this silently, it's a great scene.
But, gosh...
You feel the pain just from hearing it.
But, yes, this is a... There's no music here.
But maybe I'll talk about
other processes that we started it on...
So, yes, I got involved with
the movie, really,
I think by presenting to Chris
some ideas of what I thought
we could do
and how we could musically tell a new story.
I had seen some clips, some scenes.
But from what he talked about,
I just went with it.
And I just felt this piece, Loves Reduced,
which we'll keep talking about
and I'll point out where it comes in,
was Ethan's journey.
And I thought that
this was this new story that Chris was telling
and Tom was telling with this movie. So I wrote a lot not to picture.
Gosh, it's hard to talk with this visually...
What a great scene.
Blimey. No.
So, yeah.
That was a major thing, writing not to picture.
And I think also...
It's a difficult thing starting a new project with somebody,
also starting with a new composer.
Chris had created some
amazing films with Joe Kraemer,
and Joe's created amazing soundtracks.
Rogue really was a fantastic score
and fitted the picture just perfectly.
So it's always...
It's an intimidating thing coming into
a new relationship.
And it's not just, weirdly enough,
it's just not about writing music most of the time.
It's about whether you click.
You've got to work and live and breathe with each other
for a long time.
Six, eight months.
And if you don't personally get on,
it doesn't matter if you're writing a new requiem.
It's not gonna work.
So we had to...
So thankfully, it clicked.
And...
Yeah, and we had a good laugh.
But, yes, so the main process was
I presented quite a lot of ideas and different approaches
to Chris.
And...
There's a scene coming up,
which was the second scene
where they actually took one of my suites
and cut to the music,
which was a first for Chris.
He said that he'd never done that before,
changing picture to music. So that was...
But also I think it was a great discovery
because again,
as well as this fantastic theme that we have,
we have a very famous time signature, 5/4.
That...
And...
I thought, gosh, we should just eliminate the notes
and just do that time signature as an action suite,
which many films have done.
But the fact is,
this is the original,
this is going back to the '60s.
So I think we're gonna be coming up to that scene
in a bit and I'll point it out.
But again it wasn't written to picture originally.
And it was cut to it.
So we had a very long,
lots of recording sessions
with Mission,
which was weird.
It's kind of a great... It's a great time
to be able to hear the music come alive,
but then there's a lot of...
We record it separately
because the edit is constantly evolving.
So we record everything in sections, so...
The strings are separate and the brass are separate,
and the woodwind.
Also, I think it would be impossible to get 200 and whatever it was,
255 players in one room at one time.
It would just
not be possible.
Here's another rave track that I wrote.
So, yes, we record everything as its own separate identity
just so when if picture changes in any way,
we're able to edit it.
Edit the actual music stems and make it work.
Also another reason is that you want to be able to push certain layers
because you're dealing with sound effects.
And you'll see in...
There's a lot of helicopter noise coming up,
and motorbike noise,
and you want to be able to push, for example, the short strings.
And if you record everything at the same time,
it works as a piece of music
and it's lovely to listen to on the album.
But most important thing is how it works in the film.
And you can't.
If you record everybody at the same time,
you're just unable to mix it around the sound effects.
So we record everything separately.
So we can have total control on the dub stage.
And push certain textures.
I love this scene.
I actually... I was there in the background.
You won't see me because I was hiding.
But I was there on that day of filming,
which is always quite interesting
because composers really don't have exciting lives.
They don't get...
They don't go to premieres normally
because they're working on another project.
But you rarely go to set.
And you sit in a very dark room by yourself.
But seeing that set, it was just fantastic.
I think just behind where the band is,
I popped my head in and looked at it,
a beautiful-looking set.
And the lighting is great.
Yes, so...
So this scene was slightly different.
The whole entrance to it,
there was no score, then I did the score.
And the source music was different also.
It's interesting choosing...
Well, I never chose a song, but Chris was the...
A lot of different songs that you're hearing in the background
was potentially tried.
It's another, other role,
is choosing the right music in the background.
That club scene, I wrote quite a lot, I think.
Maybe two or three weeks of
trance was going on in my house, writing at home.
It's also, always interesting when you're working on
a film or a project and you see characters.
I worked on The Crown,
which of course, Vanessa is in.
So I think when I started Mission,
I'd just finished Season 2 of The Crown.
So I kept reminding myself
not to be writing bassoon solos every time she came onto the screen,
which we always did in The Crown.
So here,
these high textures was
an idea from Chris.
We...
And again bleeding back into the source music again.
So we wanted to keep everything
in the same key.
So it comes in and out, you're still hearing the source,
but then it's stopping now,
obviously because everybody's aware of the fight happening.
So now the music enters.
Again, I think
this was Cécile,
our music editor had...
I wrote this piece for somewhere else, actually.
And a very tasteful judgment here,
which was playing that action dry.
And then for that final punch, then introducing the music.
So here
was the beginning of
a Walker motif, this piano...
Which...
Again, I had not originally written to picture.
Whilst Chris was filming
the HALO shoot,
I was in London
trying to write this motif for Walker.
And...
And this was the first time we... I...
The first time I wrote it to picture here.
Again a hard scene coming up to write.
It's weird.
What you think is the simplest is
nine times out of 10 the hardest scene to write
or what you've probably written the most amount of times.
A lot of information being given now.
And...
You need to pay attention.
And I think this is one of the interesting things
with film music.
You've got to follow the dialogue
and you've got to follow the story
and sometimes it may not be the most interesting thing
on the album to listen to.
But we don't want it to pull away
from the information that we're being given, so...
Very difficult scene to score.
And I was at it a while.
So the scene coming up was
one of... I think this...
It was the first time
Chris and Eddie had been playing with my Loves Reduced suite,
which was to me, really, it's Ethan's theme.
It's Ethan's relationship, it's his journey.
It's his soul, really.
And...
They temped it in the scene coming up
with no sound effects.
So it's just music.
I'll point out when it comes in.
Again here, very difficult scene to score this cat and mouse,
back and forth.
And again it's always interesting when you're watching these scenes
because you spend a lot of time.
The score was mixed by Steve Lipson,
who is an amazing mixer and...
We spent a long time with all those elements,
those synth elements moving around the room.
Different parts,
but listening to it on your
iPhone, you probably won't get to hear it.
So here it is. Here's Loves Reduced.
And this was the first place it was used in properly.
No sound effects.
And you could have played this as an action scene.
You could have played this as tension.
But it's played as emotion,
which is genius.
I can't... I wish I could say it's my own genius,
but I didn't write it for there.
I wrote it for
Tom's character.
But this is who he is and this is...
It's giving a fascinating, different sense to the scene.
And weirdly enough, like many things when you...
We tried... I tried writing this differently.
I took the same piece of music and made it darker
for the twist that's about to happen here.
You know, this is low.
This is seeing a side of Ethan
that we've not seen before.
Just a great frame shot, this. And it's...
But, yes, it was interesting.
So they took that piece of music I'd written.
They pulled out all the sound effects and played it emotionally.
I tried retaking the same theme, but making it darker.
We watched it. And it just morphed the scene
into something that you didn't...
You weren't invested in.
And...
It still always amazes me
how music can totally change
the emotion
that we're feeling and seeing also.
And I think that...
It's always interesting when a piece of music is used
from a different scene or out of context
and it's placed somewhere else.
Something interesting can be added.
Great shot. So again, here
at one point, this was...
The cue coming up
started much earlier, it started around here.
And...
I think after a couple of times watching it again,
it's just
filling gaps which you don't necessarily need.
So we just started it later.
Singular high note.
Something that...
Which writing less is sometimes more, which
I'm still trying to learn.
It takes a long time to do that.
But I suppose it's just... Somebody said to me,
"It's just like cooking. You don't need 20 ingredients.
"You can make a Michelin meal out of three."
You've just got to get the right ingredients.
So I think it's always... It's difficult writing
narrative scenes because you feel
that you should be doing turn after turn.
And the dialogue's doing that,
so you sometimes can sit back and just support the scene.
And there is our "ba-ddie" theme.
So, now you know that baddie theme.
Now we're telling you, we're telling the audience,
"Do not trust him."
Our baddie theme was a late discovery.
I had tried writing a darker tune,
and then, weirdly enough, one night,
I was playing with the original Mission theme,
and there was this...
It's halfway through the theme, and it's very quick.
And it's been there all this time,
but we just didn't know.
So, here's, coming up, a big scene
which was edited to picture
and I think it's...
It changed a lot.
But when I started on this film,
this was, I think, the second scene that they had edited to the music.
And we... I think, possibly
secured the job, really, for me.
And it's our 5/4 rhythm.
So, again, it's going back to the original, the TV show.
And the one thing from watching all the films,
I just wasn't aware of people taking that famous pattern
and just eliminating the actual notes, and just focus on that.
So, just... And then back to our original.
So, the original Mission theme...
But spread halftime.
So, you know it, but it's not too obvious.
Yes, I think the one thing out of this film,
I'll never be able to write in 5/4 again.
I think it's officially in the coffin now.
I'll give it a year.
But it is so symbolic to Mission: Impossible.
And I think that... I always knew that was one thing...
I could be wrong, but I wasn't aware
that there had been a color that had been touched on
with just focusing just on that rhythm.
I think that...
And here we're back into it again.
And it's always nerve-wracking.
You've got this iconic theme,
and you don't want to be disrespectful to it,
you don't want to try to make it too clever.
You want to just look at that DNA and just go, "Okay...
"How do we make it work this movie?"
It's interesting. I was listening to some of the other scores
from the prior films,
and watching it to this movie,
and they just didn't work.
It's a different color, it's a different tone.
So, it was difficult
making a blend of orchestral and electronic.
And there's a lot of electronics in the score
which you don't necessarily feel as electronic, which is good,
because I don't necessarily want it to feel too modern or...
So, we're coming up to...
Now it's obvious what this time signature
and what the melody is,
but for months, we actually had it slightly different,
and it was more obvious what the melody was,
and it's coming up now.
So, it should be...
But I thought...
"Gosh, I wonder if we just kept peddling that same note,"
so I removed the actual theme,
and went totally committed, and went straight into it.
So, this here,
coming up, was a bit darker than what it is now.
Quite a lot darker, musically.
And this was a Mr. Cruise note here.
Here's a...
There's a big...
So, this was much darker,
and this was a Mr. Cruise comment about this...
"Musically, let's go for it. Let's kick some ass."
Great shot.
Still feels like watching that,
and I've watched that about 100 times.
So, action scenes
are always the hardest to write to
because you need to tell the story, but keep tension going.
And this is where, as a composer,
your best friend, the music editor, comes and helps sometimes.
Cecile had a lot of good ideas about this scene.
I had... Little sections in it were slightly different.
Cécile had tracked some of the suites that I had written,
and yeah, there's a lot of going back and forth.
And I think also, once you've written it,
you also then go back and you start looking at it again,
"Where can we put this iconic theme into it?"
So, you want to keep it for meaningful reasons.
So, here's a great spot because they get away.
So, these stabs, gosh,
we recorded so many different ways.
I think the last count I counted...
I think I recorded maybe over 180, nearly 200 stabs,
trying different ways of doing it.
And what we ended up with was number one.
Always learn.
So, there, we're introducing a new theme,
which, really, at one point, we started off...
That was being used as a Syndicate theme.
And then really, then evolved just like the story of the movie did.
It really became the power of the Syndicate
and what it really represents, that...
Which will feature more in later reels.
Love this action.
So, yes, this was one of the first...
This began as one of the first recording sessions, really,
because this was...
Our amazing drum section started on this,
with our bongo players, of course. Not a day goes by without the bongos.
I still have slight anxiety watching this.
From watching it, and also from writing it.
So, again, lots of motifs in there, all from the original TV show.
It's introducing a straightforward plotting theme...
Here it was written slightly different.
Originally, it was full-on action music here.
And then Chris and Eddie...
I believe Ed cut out the music
so that it became more of a sound effect moment.
So, I took all the action music out,
went to just the high notes and the stabs.
And yeah, it just creates much more tension
hearing the sound of the cars going around.
A bit of a victorious moment there.
And we're off.
Yes, that was all originally big...
This was a new idea here... Was silent.
And Chris and Eddie were in my room...
And again, that...
There's our theme.
It's part of the theme, just taking the second note out.
So, it's again going back to the legend's original piece of music.
Now here is... I forgot these boys. Sorry.
Frank, Paul and Gary, our amazing snare drummers.
This was a new idea.
This was originally, Loves Reduced was here.
And it just gave a different story to the scene.
It was much stiller.
You heard the sound of the waves more.
And we had it for a long time like that,
but then when...
Maybe a few months ago, we were watching it,
and the pacing of the movie, it slowed down.
And I believe this was... I would take credit for it,
but I have a feeling that Eddie had the idea
about maybe doing the plotting theme there.
So, I was playing with it in my studio
next to editorial,
and Chris was sitting there, and I started writing the snares
and there was happy faces, so we went with it.
And it's a great nod to the past, I think.
Just go for that original plotting theme
and make it as pure and simple as it can be.
A lot of composers feel very nervous
when a director comes into the room
and they don't like playing music to the director,
or they don't like making musical changes when people are there.
I love it. I love having a room full
talking about
anything under the sun behind me.
It's good because you... Sometimes when writing a scene,
you have an idea
and you go for it, and you're working down...
You go down a different rabbit hole,
which, if you have the director in the room,
they can say right from the beginning,
"Oh, no, I don't think that will work."
So, it was a good collaborative process on this movie,
being able to work next to editorial...
And also, I think, for Eddie,
and Chris, being able to pop their head in and say,
"We have an idea. What if
"we took the plotting theme and made it dark,
"what would that sound like?"
So, that...
This here, coming up,
is again a little nod to the original Mission theme,
which some may not find as obvious,
but is the Mission theme.
It's just played half time and repeated.
But it was an experimental idea
of just trying to take that theme,
and instead of evolving to the second part of the phrase,
just keep peddling the same idea.
Now this scene coming up, right from the beginning,
it was always Chris's plan, no music.
Until... Coming up to...
A bit further on.
I thought I'd have a go
at seeing what it would be like
with the score coming off... The standoff.
And I think I wrote maybe two or three ideas for it.
And it worked in context,
but when watching the movie, it slowed it down.
It took you out of it.
And again, the sound effects are just fantastic
and you really feel part of it.
And it just shows you don't always need music for scenes.
Which I know some composers will cry at hearing that,
but you just don't.
It's always interesting, the whole concept of music
with scenes like this
because in one respect, the music can enhance it
and take it to another level,
but in one respect, it can pull you out of it being truly realistic.
And I just think this is just a great action scene.
I don't have a driving license,
but I can imagine that's what it would be like driving.
It's truly something else.
I probably wouldn't... Not be able to drive that well.
So, the original cue started here.
The original cue started here.
And I was trying to play with the tempo of the sound effects
when going through that tunnel.
So, it built to this, stopped,
and then I had a high note for tension
and then again, the music started
building up, building up, building up...
Bang. Straight into it.
And played through this.
And yeah, it worked.
It worked, but weirdly, it just took us out of the scene.
And it didn't quite work for the comedy.
So, we just held back
and then came in for this aftermath here for Ilsa.
That's another hard thing with Mission,
is the concept of writing music, the work around comedy.
It's been done very well in the past,
but we didn't want to...
We just wanted to try to figure out a different way
of supporting the comedy, but without doing comedic music
because that idea was just a different movie.
So, this scene here,
we tried, at one point, experimenting with
as soon as he puts the stopwatch on,
the ticking starts.
And we tried as an experiment
having the orchestra doing a pulse
at the same tempo as the stopwatch.
And it was interesting
because it was just adding more tension
and it was working time with a stopwatch.
In context, it was interesting,
but when watching it with scenes either side,
slowed the music down.
It slowed the scene down.
We're being given a lot of interesting and important dialogue
and the musicjust became distracting.
So, the simple low drone underneath
was a way of just supporting the scene without distracting it.
And sound effects had a great idea by adding that pulse.
It's actually a sound effect there.
It's always interesting, sometimes, when you can't quite tell
if it's music, or sound effects, or sound design.
It always makes the score, I think, just more interesting
when you can all work together
and not necessarily know who's doing what.
I always love watching scenes like this.
I think, if you'll notice, up on the bridge,
I'm not too sure if Chris pointed this out,
but you'll see somebody wearing a motorbike helmet
who has obviously been following Mr. Cruise around Paris,
Ilsa was actually there.
Which you would have to properly look,
but she's on the bridge, watching them.
Which, I think, as a film nerd, I love these little things.
So, this scene coming up,
musically,
this was a piece that I wrote
that actually, musically, evolved much more,
but Chris and Eddie had heard it
and actually took the beginning of it andloopedit
Which is very interesting
because it stops it becoming too emotional.
And here we go.
This is very minimal chord progression that's just going back and forth,
two notes.
Which the way I had written it actually was much more melodic
and it did more changes.
But they liked the beginning of it and the way it just...
After they had edited it, they had...
They made it more musical and just...
Looped it, so you just felt something was happening.
Now, back to Loves Reduced again.
I think this was...
This was always like this,
and it's always interesting when you watch a scene like this
because you think, "Well, I'll try a different approach to it."
Nothing worked.
Musically, I think
there was a version where it was slightly a bit more tension.
But it wasn't needed.
This was... It's visually a beautiful scene.
And it's letting you ask more questions really now
instead of playing it as tension or a cat-and-mouse chase scene.
It sort of is, but really we know that he knows she's there.
So this piece of music,
as I said before, was always about Ethan's journey,
and to me it was Ethan's theme.
And then Chris had asked about...
Every time he heard it, he always, kind of,
in his head, heard a lower version of it.
And I tried taking the same notes, putting it down a few octaves
and it never quite worked.
And then I thought actually it just needs
a new piece of music that supports it
and this is it.
They both work perfectly well together.
And it shows you how important it is recording things in separate stems.
This would've normally worked with that high texture on top,
but we've muted that,
and you've nowjust got just the low strings
and the underbelly of that piece just by itself.
And it's always interesting when recording things.
This piece was probably one of the hardest pieces to record,
which it is always interesting
because you always think that when you hear very busy music,
that is what's hard.
The simplest of cues can be the hardest
because the one difficult piece...
The difficult thing with this piece of music is
the waves work on it.
There is a motion, but it's typically British.
It's trying to hold back and not give too much away.
But there's waves happening with each chord,
slightly building and pulling away, building and pulling away.
And expand...
We had to experiment a lot with recording that
because sometimes the way you recorded it worked too much
and it became too classical and too emotional
and it gave too much away.
There, it builds and pulls away, builds and pulls away.
So we're getting close to our big jump scene,
which...
Was a lot of sore hands for the bongo players coming up.
It's good.
So again, there's our motif
and it's simply just taking that second note out of
Lalo's famous theme...
And this little string motif here had actually...
It's quite...
A bit Bernard Herrmann-esque.
He was the composer for the majority of Hitchcock's movies.
And it's just that bit of nostalgic feeling, really.
I think what has always been interesting about
the music to Mission in all the movies is how it's evolved,
going from Danny's... Danny Elf man's first movie,
and then going into
Mission: Impossible 2 that Hans Zmmer (M,
and I think...
I started working for Hans I think a bit after this,
but I always remember being at college watching Mission: Impossible 2
and hearing Hans' music and loving that score.
And weirdly enough, I then ended up working for Hans
for about 15 years,
and then I get to do my own Mission: Impossible.
So it was very exciting.
But it's always been interesting about how people
have different approaches to...
To the themes.
There's been songs done with it, there's been remixes done,
but it's how the scores have evolved.
Then Michael took over and then Joe.
As I said, just a fantastic job.
They've all done amazing jobs.
So it's very intimidating and scary when...
You've just got to forget about it. Weirdly enough, I think...
If you think about it too much,
you get petrified and you don't write a note,
so you have to, kind of, forget about...
What the challenge is.
I think it's only kicking in now how intimidating it is,
and now I'm feeling scared. But anyway, it's over with.
So now I get to enjoy it.
But, yeah, it's...
You're in a privileged situation. It's the same...
I've worked on Terminator Genisys, and again to be able to
work with Brad Fiedel's famous Terminator theme...
You've been humming it for most of your life
and then you get to start using it...
So it's very interesting
being invited into this family, which it is, you know.
Ethan Hunt is part of...
Some of the most amazing... Some of my favorite films.
Again, very difficult scene to write,
informative narrative scenes.
Baddie theme coming up.
Plotting theme.
This scene, interesting enough, was written with Chris in the room.
You talk about the scene quite a lot when writing.
Just there, you know.
Originally, that swell was slightly earlier.
It was just too on the nose...
It was too heavy for Walker, and experimenting...
Just by doing that darker tone and playing it later on the shot
makes it just creepier. It's fascinating.
Just positioning one note, how it can change a scene.
Yeah, a lot of...
We experimented with this a lot.
All those swells...
Moving them around
and that's one of the great things to do with technologies, you know.
We're able to write it and move it compared to 40 years ago.
Poor directors didn't get to hear the music
until they recorded it with an orchestra.
Now, it's a different way of working.
So I think it's better for the whole film process.
Love that line, "Number one plumber."
So, yeah, there are interesting high textures there.
That was Peter Gregson on cello.
He's an amazing cellist and composer also.
I've worked with Peter quite a long time now.
Yes, so here was...
There's some Walker motif there...
Which is played by Andy Richards, who I've always been a fan of.
He's an amazing pianist...
And has worked with amazing bands...
It's a who's who of people he's worked with.
And I had been listening to an album
by the band Demon that he played on,
totally not connected to this type of music,
but his style of playing...
So I knew right from the beginning I wanted Andy to play the...
Play the piano. So we recorded that in AIR Studios in a massive hall...
Recorded by Geoff Foster.
Geoff, I've worked with him a long time...
Geoff's worked on nearly...
Oh, gosh. You name a movie, he's worked on them.
On a lot of the Bond movies.
So Geoff recorded all of the sessions.
All of our sessions.
There's a bit of solo bongo action going on,
performed by myself.
I had to get in there somehow.
A lot of editing had to go for that to be in time, but anyway...
So again, that...
That motif there goes back to the DNA of the original TV show,
just presented in a different manner.
And I think...
It's interesting because I think you can keep discovering new things,
but then you just have to stop and just go,
"Okay, I think we have our food groups now."
And just focus on what we've got. I think...
I think we counted up how much experiments I wrote
and I think there's probably about another two hours,
two-and-a-half hours of music
sitting there.
Not used. Maybe not used for a reason, some may say.
It's always interesting when you have a famous theme,
you start working on it and arranging it in different ways.
It starts going down different paths that you didn't expect.
So another difficult scene to write, this.
You know, it's...
It's a reveal. You don't wanna be too big.
You've got another twist again.
And I think we recorded this a few times,
but the orchestra played it much harder
than the way we've got it here,
and we came back to it again,
and just played it slightly softer
and it just made it less over-the-top.
Andy Richards on piano.
Again, there's our motif... Taking the second phrase.
So, yeah, it's our Mission theme,
but just played more...
Dramatically, I suppose.
And again, you could've written this far more heroic
and gone for the, "They've won."
But we wanted to try to, kind of, just pull it back a bit.
Coming up,
this scene was played silently for a while...
And then I had a go at writing it,
and I went back.
I had an idea, weirdly enough, I went back to our opening titles idea
about the bongos.
It's always hard when you...
It's like when you find your favorite candy bar,
you want to eat it all the time.
It's like the bongos.
They are just such a good sound.
So coming up to...
One thing to write, that's difficult to write, is gunfire.
Frequencies are very difficult.
And I think that's the other thing, is that it's not just about,
"Oh, I'm gonna write a piece of music I think that works."
You've got to write around what's going on, sound effects-wise.
Again, the bongos, thankfully, cuts right through.
I had wanted here to try to write this bongo and piano duet...
The string motif there is a reverse of the Mission theme.
I know I'm going into too much detail and it's a bit too nerdy, but I...
It is good to know.
There again, just in a different key,
descending notes of the Lalo theme.
So again here, I actually tried as a big moment
and I think I tried writing a bit more emotion around it
and it just took away from the performances.
It's there, you don't need to throw the kitchen sink at it.
So less is more.
And it's our Loves Reduced piece.
You know, it's... This is...
About Ethan also.
It's constant sacrifices and challenges.
This was a killer for the poor bongo players.
We're going to triplets and then straight sixteenths.
So this is... This is kind of...
This whole scene is what I was talking about earlier.
Very difficult to write because of humor.
So trying to, kind of, not write comedic music, you're creating this...
You're helping the humor by pulling out, really,
and your pauses and...
So a fantastic...
Piece of... I believe it's John Tavener,
and it's a requiem piece that would've...
Which would be sung in this type of environment.
I had a thought that...
Nice and still, no score.
But when the score happens, especially when you'll see him running around...
We start using the choir now.
So here we go into the choir.
So I wanted to make the choir actually sound like they're singing,
but they're part of the score and they are...
They're actually singing Mission: Impossible in Latin,
which we do for our end credits also.
So we're coming up to the big shot, which is...
Which I think I'd heard and read about before I got to actually score it
because I think everybody in the world knew about the shot.
So that...
Again, it's our Mission: Impossible theme,
but I thought put it into the basses.
Loved this whole sequence here. This is so...
It was so much fun to write for.
It had to be blood and sweat and tears.
I played that scene to the musicians before playing it and there was tears.
So again, it's trying to write around the humor
and not write comedic music.
So we tried to, kind of, when it cuts to Benji,
to just a solo bongo player playing.
And with a little hint of our Mission theme on the basses.
So again, it's that, it's like...
You save your moments where you can do...
You save them, then it means something.
I love that pause.
And a hard nod.
So again, that was trying to figure out...
I always had it as that pause and I just...
I always laughed at it. So thankfully, Chris liked it also.
So here...
This piece here, Eddie and Chris had this idea.
I'd written...
I'd written this, this piece of music
near the end, which you'll hear.
But they had put it here. They said, "Try working it around here."
And it worked.
And especially in the next section coming up,
of the side shot of Tom rioting.
It's a great shot, and...
Musically, there was never enough.
Full tilt.
And again, it's one of these sections where you just hear,
really, the amazing sound that
our musicians, this brass section played on.
And how unique they are.
The ability to use live musicians is always a joy.
And it's the life they bring to it. And their instruments.
It's not just their playing, these instruments are...
Especially in the strings, they're worth millions.
So, there's a whole life to them.
And each one of them has brought this score alive.
Just to...
A level that I don't think any of us could have dreamt of.
And the brass there in particular, just amazing.
So, again we start with a little hint of our Loves Reduced
theme...
We're coming up to... Now, this was a difficult section here.
Musically,
Chris had said to me, "I want this to feel like the end of the movie."
Musically, it's got to be as big as possible.
That's always intimidating, trying to write the end of the movie
for the middle of the movie. So, it was a big challenge, but...
I think we got there.
As Chris said, "I want choir, go for it."
Here we go.
I think where The Shard is, whilst they were filming this,
you'll see The Shard in the background.
I was staying there that night.
On a... I don't know what the term is.
It's the holiday you have before your wife gives birth.
There's a term for it. I don't know what it's called.
I was there and it was funny seeing all the helicopters in the air.
So, interesting thing with that one, we recorded that a few times.
The slight positioning of it was always interesting.
For Walker's wave.
We tried putting the melody maybe a bit later.
It's always interesting just moving something a few frames earlier.
The different feel that it can give.
So, some other things that we did which was quite interesting,
as well as doing our percussion sessions,
we did some sample sessions.
With all of the musicians and...
Getting different mic'ing set up with the players
because I think that once... We all know how the instrument sounds.
But especially with the bongos,
as I said before, we tried different mallets, we did bamboo sticks.
We did drumsticks, we did hands.
Also, we did playing on the floor.
The floor at AIR Studios is...
It was a... Not a church,
technically, it's a Methodist hall.
But the floor has got amazing parquet flooring.
So, we managed to get all of them playing
single hits on the floor.
And actually, make individual instruments out of that.
So, during some of the chase scenes,
it's very high textures giving us those sixteenths,
which sound slightly electronic, but they're not.
It's actually very organic.
Again, a very hard scene to write.
It's always difficult writing less than more.
And...
And this was our
underbelly texture of our Loves Reduced.
And it's just those four chord progressions,
which you could easily start making it go into different directions.
And giving it more inner lines.
But it's... I think it's the simplicity that works.
It doesn't overtake the scene.
This is a Chris idea coming up.
Our plotting theme.
Which we didn't always have.
It was... I think we played it as a bit more, there was always a pulse,
but we never had the plotting theme there.
So, it's always a bit of fun when you can bring that theme back.
'Cause it just reminds us we are in Mission: Impossible.
And it's never tiring, hearing that theme.
And there's that baddie theme again.
All part of that original theme.
Unlike most Mission: impossibles, that's the first time we hear a...
I think the last time we hear a harp. So...
But it got in there, one chord.
So, this scene, the Kashmir scene,
that one traveling shot was a hard one to write.
And Cécile...
Amazing music editor, had actually tracked something from an earlier cue.
Actually, no, that came from a suite.
And...
It's always interesting. I tried writing with the same notes
but just a different way of presenting.
It was just much louder and a bit more aggressive.
And no matter how we kind of tried to rewrite it to picture,
the original always worked, so we just stuck to the original.
And also, here I thought of an idea
of just taking the actual melody and doing it as
actual chords...
Something which I don't... I wasn't aware I had done,
but it was just a great way of just keeping it in our family.
Withoutjust being too overly musical.
And having lots of... There's our bongos again.
And our short strings again doing that little motif of the descending notes.
Which all relate back to the actual original Mission: Impossible theme.
So, this sequence, this was a big one coming up.
I think every sequence is a big one from now on.
But this one was a hard one to write.
It's the back and forth. It's also the...
You don't want to lose the tension.
And musically,
it's hard because if you stop a pulse, you've lost it.
So, you've got to start trying to figure out other ways.
This sequence coming up,
I think actually it was one of the first scenes I actually wrote,
long, long time ago.
And it's always fascinating with filmmaking
because then the scene evolved,
gets re-edited and it then tells a different story.
So, you look at it again three months later,
and it doesn't work.
So, thankfully, you have time. So, you can just totally rewrite it again.
But that whole introduction there. Those long brass things, I think,
whenever I did that,
that was something that always worked for Chris.
He liked it and I think that's why it's always important
to always try to be near your director and editor.
I think that when you're playing ideas,
nine times out of 10...
I can tell if it's working or not by their facial expressions.
They might not be able to describe it.
It's very difficult with music, to talk about, and sometimes
people use musical terms and...
It becomes a different matter then.
I think it's always easier talking about the feelings and emotions.
That, I then understand, when somebody's talking about
the tonic triad or the fact that it's in
a diminished seventh, I get lost with that.
I think it's far easier just talking about clear emotion.
And see when it works for somebody.
If you're in the same room with each other, you're able to...
Same way writers work.
Writers' rooms.
They're able to kind of bounce ideas often.
And you start figuring out what works.
'Cause I always think that the director's got a soundtrack.
He or she has got a soundtrack in their head.
And we've just got to translate what that is.
I think that sometimes they say, "Well, you write the music and...
"Hopefully it works." But I don't think so.
I think they know what they want in their head.
And ourjob is just trying to translate that.
Because they've been living with it far longer than us.
We get invited into this process after
they've been working on it for years, so...
This was a Chris and Eddie idea.
Playing it emotionally...
Coming from Ethan's emotional point of view.
Musically.
You could be playing this with tension.
You're going back and forth, you know that they're trying to track down...
The bombs. But very clever idea to play it
for pure emotion and just grab onto that...
I think that's also the fascinating thing about this process is,
is how
you can look at scenes differently.
Because of the way the music changes it.
And composers, sometimes they get tunnel vision.
And they see it as a different way, and it's not always right.
You know, this is a very emotional scene.
And playing it action-wise would never have worked, so...
Now we're off.
I think this is Chris's favorite piece, this little motif there.
Again, very hard because of the way this was originally,
I think it was much longer, so you've got to
re-look at the scene after you've written it.
And I've got to say,
it's one of the reasons why you've got to also have a good team around you.
Every department. It's not... The composer gets the credit.
You've got to have a good musical team around you.
And thankfully, I have a great team working on this.
There was regular sleepless nights for them.
Max and Stephen and Queenie. Shane, Sam and Mike...
Constantly keeping the music up to date with the picture changes.
Because that's one thing that gets forgotten about,
is that the picture changes, the music's gotta keep up with it.
So...
So, yes, we're heading to the helicopter.
Which was a lot of work, a lot of notes.
A lot of notes for our poor copyist, Jill,
who... I think it was the most amount of music printed on a film.
And Shane who orchestrated the score, a lot of work.
And it's the storytelling that's being told.
I think that...
Like this moment here...
We just thought, here is where we go for it with the plotting theme.
Cecile really did an amazing job with this whole sequence.
A lot of the ideas were hers.
And then that
then had to get conformed
to an evolving cut.
I think sometimes people think that the composer sits down and
you're sitting there and you just start writing,
and everything is simple. It's far from that.
You're keeping up with a cut that's changing every day.
So, you...
You need a good team around you that can make sure that it's up to date.
And then, musically, it's gotta change.
Because the story being told is just totally different.
And that drop there, we wrote that a few different times.
Building to the drop. Pulling out from the drop.
So, it's...
It's a difficult one to tell sometimes.
Because I think we had originally had it...
It would stop before the drop.
But again watching it several times,
you feel, "No, you gotta build for that drop."
So, yes, this was generally just a very difficult sequence to write
because there's a lot of going back and forth.
And you wanna keep, you still need to keep this tension building.
There's a lot of sound effects going on.
And you don't want to also
be telling too much musically because we've got a long way to go
with this story.
So, it's very difficult.
So, you're fighting with the sound effects of the helicopters,
which is always a hard one.
So, you start looking at your colors and
the stabs which we had from, I think, right at the beginning of the movie...
Chris really liked,
and as I said early, we recorded a lot of different stabs.
But we went back to our original ones.
Because they started becoming too musical.
Very interesting, it's just a very simple concept of one note.
But with everybody playing random notes, how they change.
So, again, here we're having to keep the tension going,
and a sense of a pulse going.
But there's dialogue going, so we can't be too intrusive.
So, also, when listening to this, I think it really is...
A 12, 14-minute cue. But we actually recorded it
in sections, so we split it up.
Probably to like five-minute actual cues...
Simply because if we recorded it that length,
I think the poor musicians would die during the recording process.
So, we keep it in shorter spells.
There's our plotting theme.
Also, I think we wanted to save this plotting theme
for as ballsy as one can have it for this sequence,
we tried maybe early on in the film.
We've always done it short notes...
Very delicately, and just a hint. And now...
You get the full power of it.
And again it's going back and forth.
But I don't think people also understand, it's very difficult.
As soon as you cut a different scene,
then the music's gotta keep the same tempo.
Eddie has been amazing at,
also the way he edits, is keeping that sense
of knowing that the music's gonna
need to fit.
He cuts with a very strict tempo.
He doesn't cut to a tempo.
A click track. He's got an internal tempo, which I think is amazing.
So, when watching it,
you start being very aware of a sense of measure.
Tempo measure to it.
So, once you start writing, you start
being able to hit these cuts.
This is again a tricky section here.
We have the helicopter going down,
had a few ideas for this.
Weirdly enough,
musically, we've started instead of going down,
we started musically trying...
Having the orchestra rising to go against
visually what we were seeing.
And it was pretty exciting.
Here's our plotting theme.
But, yeah, it's...
And then again cat and mouse going back to
a quiet scene.
And still keeping our tension
going, all in the same tempo.
Another build, keep the tension going.
And then...
We have to get ready for another musical explosion happening.
And it's always difficult also because you just don't wanna...
You don't wanna feel exhausted by it.
So, somehow you have to,
when during those quiet spots, keep us involved, but just
somehow create a breath and also these moments here.
Yeah, that was a lot of work.
We tried different things, when the explosion happened on the engine.
Trying the musical shifts after it, doing the musical shifts on it.
Just changes the feeling.
There's the bongos.
Love this shot coming up.
And again here, we played this with more action at one point.
And then I wanted to try kind of doing our Mission: Impossible chords there.
And it just brought a bit of more fun to it.
I think that writing action music that's fun is also very difficult.
Because I've done quite a lot of animation movies, and so I know,
I think fun is a difficult tone.
And this sequence is very good.
I love the way it's edited, it's very clever.
Now, here, that shot there, again.
Very interesting, we...
We experimented several times,
with whether you musically pinpoint
his hand, Lane's hand going through the wall,
or you don't acknowledge it.
It's interesting when you watch it now, because it's...
It's...
You remember every process that you did.
Where it was highlighting it, then building to it
and then it was afterwards, so...
Again, like the, "Pull up! Pull up!"
Musically there, our climax was building
to before the "Pull up!" I believe at one point, and then...
I still find this whole helicopter sequence amazing.
The fact that he's flying it.
We take all these...
Stunts for granted, nowadays, we think everything's fake.
Unlike these Mission: Impossible movies, where he does the stunts.
Again, tempo's still going.
I think we had about three seconds of no music.
That's the longest we've had, probably half the movie.
Difficult to write around Lane.
Sometimes, the register of his voice.
So you always have to keep that, be aware of that.
I always like...
When writing to picture, I always like in my writing, Cubase.
Which is my sequencer.
And in Cubase, I always have...
I have the dialogue imported, as well as the sound effects.
So, as well as hearing it, I can actually, I see
the waveform of the audio.
And I think that's an interesting way to work around
because you're able to as well as visually see
the spacing between dialogue and sound effects.
So, I think it's good to work that way.
It's a different way of working.
Maybe some may regard it as being a bit too academic.
But I think it's interesting to work...
Being able to clearly see
where you're going and work around that dialogue.
I love this shot coming up.
Again, these little inserts.
We spent a long time trying to, you know,
figure out our musical tone, there.
Should it be more, just less melodic?
Or should it just go for the action?
The way this is edited, I just... I love it.
One thing about this whole sequence, also,
is the fact that Chris always wanted it
to never feel like the music let us off.
So, when you listen to the score, without the sound effects,
there's always a constant rise
as soon as Lane starts fighting, right till the end of the sequence.
That's always, there's always an element or a texture,
constantly rising.
Even though we, the music may pull out.
There's always something always rising.
Yeah, it's always interesting when you,
when you remember the recording process of it.
Because I think there's a lot of
orchestral effects that we tried.
I think that you can always, we did measured...
Measured trems, and instead of doing measured trems, like here,
I simply had the whole, the whole string section,
so all 92 of them,
each randomly choosing a note and...
And not doing a measured trem but playing the sixteenths,
but randomly rising up.
And it brings great texture.
Yeah, going, thinking about the...
You know, the amount of people that it takes to do a score,
I think because you see that credit saying, "Composer,"
it always comes off as being a very singular role.
But I think our music department,
probably it would be around over 280 people
have worked on it.
And it's always a very big, it's a very big team
normally on a movie, but this team was very big.
But there's so many people that never get full credit.
They're sometimes not even mentioned at the end of the movie,
unfortunately sometimes, 'cause there's not the space for all of them.
But there's always a big team needed.
And being able to work in London, also.
Amazing musicians.
And recording studios.
Here again these two chords, something that I wrote with Chris in the room.
He had heard it and...
Again, you could be...
The way he talked, I just kept trying to think,
"Okay, we don't want to be too emotional."
This is just going back and forth, two chords.
There's a slight clash in there, the...
So you feel there's emotion but there's hesitation.
There's the solo bongo player again.
This is a very difficult sequence.
I realize I say everything is a very difficult sequence,
but that's the journey we have.
If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, I suppose.
The reason this was difficult was because...
Again, it's trying to write a scene and not necessarily overwhelm it.
There's many schools of thought regarding something like this.
You could write it more musically.
And there's something just barbaric about this,
and primeval, I think.
About these two guys fighting, and...
I wanted to try to make it very percussive and...
And treat the orchestra more
as creating colors, instead of playing music.
Okay, we've got these vast beautiful shots.
And I had been experimenting with...
The chords, actually that we hear from the beginning, at the airport.
These are the same chords, but they're just with more gravitas.
And it was something that Chris liked.
So, I thought, "Okay, I'll try playing with this more."
And also writing to a scene like this is always difficult.
Because it can become very Patch Adams,
where you know you have to be hitting
certain points, but you don't want it to just be
a constant punctuation of visually what you're seeing.
So, you have to choose your hit points.
And there's our chords from the beginning.
But again, this principle of having something constantly rising.
So each chord, they are similar, but there's always
a rising note in them building up to this
absolutely horrendously painful shot.
So, again, this piece originated from
our Kashmir wide shot, earlier on in the movie.
And it was tracked here.
And I rewrote it and again,
rewriting it with Chris in the room,
very useful.
It's always useful when your director's got a good singing voice,
and he can actually sing melodies to you.
So, technically he should be on the cue sheets.
Again, that's our Mission theme,
but it's just the second phrase of it.
And it's just this...
More relentless feeling of it.
I love that silence.
And this takes us all the way back to the beginning.
This was an idea that I had to make
our Loves Reduced, which is that
piece of music that we've been hearing,
during the wedding
and many of the other scenes, I just wanted
to make a bigger, more orchestral, bolder version.
That high note there was actually an idea from
Geoff Foster and Matt Dunkley,
who conducted the whole score.
And it was layering the idea of trumpets with saxophones.
Those high notes there.
Played in AIR Studios.
Instead of just being...
It's weird to describe, instead of just
that military sound that a trumpet would give,
the saxophones slightly soften it.
So, that is an interesting color.
Always difficult writing the ends of a cue.
It's, it's...
It's at the beginning and the end, there's always a hard task
and that is one of them.
The way that you exit that scene.
You can leave it on a happy chord, a sad chord, or...
I always try to leave it on a question.
If it sounds finished, the scene is completed.
And that's not what you're seeing.
You want to keep a sense of, "There's still questions."
So, again here is our low chords.
Originating from our Loves Reduced.
With a slight difference, we have a piano featuring on it.
I think writing emotion was a big challenge on this movie
and I hope it's worked.
I think that...
Containing it and not necessarily
going over-the-top with the instrumentation
has made it feel more real.
It has, to us.
And Tom's acting, it's just been amazing throughout the movie.
And I think it's a different side to Ethan
that we have seen in any of the other movies.
And...
And the job, to me, is just being there to support,
not to overtake.
And we're gonna be...
Coming up to...
Away of...
Again, like many scenes, how I say,
"Well, there's different ways to write it."
But this is coming up to...
And now, this is the two worlds joining together musically.
This is a high Loves Reduced texture.
And the low coming together.
Again, very difficult to perform with live musicians.
It goes against everything you kind of think.
You constantly want to be playing it with more emotion and bigger rise,
but we spent a long time just trying to
do these natural kind of builds.
That was the second time I went to set.
Albert Bridge.
And again, always exciting to see how it's actually done.
I think that night after they were filming it,
I then started writing on the piece of music
that you are about to hear next.
Which again was a hard one to write
because this was the one opportunity to be faithful to Lalo's theme.
And...
And not be too clever with it and just present it
in an honest way.
There's that little piano motif there, Andy Richards.
We're off into our famous
trill on the flute and bongo roll.
So, doing this version, it was...
I went back to the original and I thought,
"I'll go to the original, straighten it out."
And...
Literally throw the kitchen sink at it.
I have to be honest, this...
It's every musician is playing on it.
But the only difference compared to other movies is that
we've got the choir.
We got the full
Kids' choir and the men just sang Mission: Impossible there.
And we're coming up to them all singing it.
In Latin of course, which just makes it a bit more acceptable.
Mission: Impossible in Latin, what a way to end the movie.
That was the end of Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
Thank you all for listening.
I hope I gave a slight insight into the scoring process.
But and also there's, I tell you what.
One thing that always gets forgotten about is the whole end montage,
which Cécile made
and crafted very tastefully.
And you'll see a lot of names in the music department mentioned
and a lot not mentioned.
But I hope you got to see a little insight into
the whole process of how a score comes together.
So, thank you all for listening.