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I am Tom Cruise, writer/director's friend, coworker.
Why, thank you. I'm honored, sir. Likewise.
This is Number 9 for us.
This is the ninth film
that we've collaborated on in some capacity together.
Yes, and third time on Mission: Impossible.
Yes.
Came on and saved my bacon 'm Ghost Protocol.
We're all very grateful.
And this is Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
The first scene
that we really discussed in this movie was this scene.
Yeah. Yes.
And strangely enough, it was very much like the scene
that you're seeing here with one small exception.
Alec Baldwin was originally going to be the minister, do you remember that?
Yeah, that's right.
And Alec Baldwin was unavailable, he couldn't come to New Zealand.
And Sean Harris was available,
and now it is unimaginable to me that it could be anybody else.
No, that it could have been anyone else.
And also, we were talking about at some point maybe having
Benji and Luther there, also.
Yes, that's right.
It was originally going to be much more long-lensy, esoteric,
hard-to-see-the-background white.
It was going to be less about the environment
and much more dreamy effect.
And the more we refined the situation
the more it really became clear that it had to be...
- Yeah, I can't imagine... - No.
...not doing it without Sean.
And what it came from was this, of course,
is that the very first conversation that you and I had
at the very beginning of all of this
was I asked Tom, "What do you wanna do?"
and Tom said, "I wanna resolve the story of Ethan and Julia.
"People are still asking me about the story wherever I go,
"whenever I'm promoting movies around the world.
"And I wanna give them some closure."
And I said, "Okay, in order to do that
"we have to reintroduce that character.
"Let's not do it as something that's just gonna get cut out on a DVD."
And that dictated the entire emotional arc of the story.
It really allowed that emotional arc
that we were always talking about, which was, how do we get...
Without compromising what Mission is, build in more emotion.
Emotion.
How do we take them and pull back who Ethan is,
where he's at,
but without compromising what Mission: Impossible is.
The team, the action, the suspense.
And also, I love that you chose this,
the Odyssey, as the book at the beginning,
because we also talked about this being an epic.
Yes.
That we felt that the franchise had earned it,
that it's where it needed to go.
And also visually, you're talking about,
you know, this is your second Mission
that you directed and you approached it...
Right from the beginning you said,
"I'm gonna approach it as another director
"to honor the franchise,"
but also evaluating and looking at your lens choices,
looking at how the locations
that you chose throughout the picture,
- I thought, were absolutely perfect. - Thank you.
But when you talk about length and design of even the rooms,
look at the width of these rooms, the length of them.
And the lenses that you chose to shoot this.
Even the size of the wall at the beginning, it's just...
Right from the beginning, I like...
You and I are very much the same way.
It's like in the first minutes of a movie,
you're telling your character story
and you're educating them to the style and tone of the movie
-that we're making. - Yes.
So, immediately, it's like we're just...
They've trusted us to come in, and we're saying,
"Okay, we're gonna slowly take you through this.
"Here's the movie."
And we're also taking you down a very dark tunnel.
Yes, exactly.
And you and I were always laughing
as we were watching it thinking to ourselves,
"if this works, they're gonna be in the hospital room going,
-"'Mommy..."' -"What is happening?"
-"'What's happening?"' Yes. - Kids going...
"Is this Mission: Impossible?
-"The last one was really funny." - Yes.
-"Where's Benji?" - And there's fans of the franchise
going, "This is where they blow it."
"This is it," exactly.
"This is the one where they totally blow it."
-"Those poor guys, they just..." -"Oh, God."
"They took themselves a little too seriously,
-"they forgot what Mission was. . - Yes.
"They blew it."
And really what it is is we wanna take you down a road
of Ethan's worst fears
and his deepest regrets
that the first 15 minutes of the movie,
which we dreamed of being five minutes,
but we just kept putting other ideas in it
-and it kept growing and growing. - Yes. Exactly. Yes.
Believe me, we wanna be as abrupt as we can.
Wait, how long before the credits go?
Originally, it was 20 minutes before the...
- Exactly. - So we were looking for other movie...
The Departed was slightly longer than ours, and we felt just fine.
- Yes. That's good. Yes. - Die Hard.
Die Hard? Yeah, it's fine. They all did it.
- And this location... - Fantastic.
This scene, to your credit...
This scene, we shot it...
We went to this location multiple times
because of technical issues.
And we were able to cut this scene together, you remember?
Because of the ankle break we'll get to.
And you were able to watch the scene and you said,
"I'm not feeling the team."
This banter wasn't at the beginning of the scene,
we played it all for suspense, and all for speed.
We were just trying to get into the story as quickly as we could.
We violated our rule.
Which was,
you cannot assume that the viewer has seen another Mission: Impossible.
And we were assuming it.
We were taking the team for granted.
And you watched it.
You came into the editing room and watched it.
The biggest gift a filmmaker can have, like, a filmmaker's greatest skill
is having some level of objectivity when you're watching a scene.
Say, "How is an audience feeling it?" Not, "What do I want them to feel?"
- Yes. -"What are they feeling?
"What am I feeling when I watch it, if it wasn't my movie?"
And you watched it and you said,
"He's not connected to the team at all."
And as soon as you said it, then everybody we showed it to,
without being able to articulate it, was feeling the same thing.
We just weren't in it.
We were able to go back.
- Look at these guys. - Yes.
I mean, great actors.
And you remember one of the last cuts we made to the movie.
- We moved that moment... - Yes.
...to after the guy pointing the gun at you.
You put that in there. It was awesome what you did.
Showing the money, doing it. So, now we know...
- And Ethan felt oblivious. - Yes.
If it came earlier, the audience was ahead of Ethan,
because he's nodding like it's okay
when the audience knows, "No, it's not."
Yes.
And just by shifting that, Ethan says, "It's okay."
And then a second later, we realize, "No, it's not."
No, it's not okay.
And now we're like, "Look out, Ethan."
Yes.
You know, we're always talking about
how do we invest the audience in this story,
how do we get them to feel?
It's a structural, I think,
really quite extraordinary what you did, McQ,
because it's how do you get the audience to feel
-what Ethan's going through? - Yes.
Subjective as opposed to objective storytelling.
- Yes. - It was something I learned from you,
actually, going all the way back to Valkyrie,
because Valkyrie was almost a documentary-style movie
that was telling the whole story from orbit.
And when you came on to Valkyrie, you were...
One of the first big lessons I ever learned in that respect,
in Valkyrie, the bomb went off,
you drove away, and we went back to the compound to see Hitler.
And you said, "No, no, no. Don't go back."
And I said, "But, Tom, everybody knows this is not how Hitler died."
And you were like, "They will not believe Hitler's alive or dead
"until you show them, even if they know the story."
And that was true.
And that kept us in Stauffenberg's point of view.
- Tom Cruise University. - Yes.
Excellent film school, by the way.
And here you are, by the way,
for another symposium of Tom Cruise University.
Here we are, I had a broken foot in this,
you were incredibly patient through all of this.
- Oh, my God. - Oh, my gosh.
The broken foot... I was standing...
We have a box off-screen, in-between takes...
- Just resting on your knee. - Oh, God. Just...
Oh, my God.
And what's really amazing,
keeping that in mind, is how uneven all these cobblestones are.
And the other thing to remember is the phenomenal lighting
-by Rob Hardy and Martin Smith. - Yes.
Our gaffer Martin Smith and cinematographer Rob Hardy.
Incredible.
The choice of this sort of greenish light on one end...
White there.
- Yes. Well, it's tungsten. - Yes.
He's got a tungsten color that he really likes
that's given this entire movie this feel.
It's an almost sepia feel.
That looks like it's straight out of West Side Story.
- I love this type. - I love the look of it.
- And it gives this geography, also. - Yes.
Like, as we're going, I know where I am.
Yeah. And that first shot where Benji walks in,
and the camera does that 90-degree move around
was all about familiarizing you with the space.
This is a big obsession of mine.
As you watch the scene,
you'll see that the camera is constantly
setting you up for the three-dimensional space
before moving on to the next shot.
Yes, so that the audience knows where they are.
- Yes. - Which is, you feel the space in it,
but we're still feeling the character pressure.
Look at the length.
The design of the film having those lengths.
First of all, great actors,
- Ving, Simon. - So phenomenal.
Every time you just go to these guys...
It was such a pleasure,
always a pleasure working with them.
Any time you put the camera on them, you just...
Well, you're talking about two actors who understand,
A, the characters they're playing so well,
but understand the genre so well.
- Yes, and how to make this movie. - Yes.
And Ving, landing on his knees like that.
- My gosh. Take after take after take. - Oh, my God.
- Never complained. - Nope.
And you remember that your line,
that's an ADR line, you said, "I didn't know what else to do."
We were doing a lot of this on the fly
and we would feel these scenes and you'd say,
"Okay, we wanna make clear what your intention was."
And we added little lines like that later.
And then this,
-you remember, we were... - Yeah.
In our effort to make the movie shorter
we didn't let these moments breathe.
And that's a very important moment in the movie when Tom says,
"Why aren't we dead?"
You want the audience to know something more is coming.
You wanna feel Lane. You wanna feel...
It's one of our things we kept reminding ourselves
because we knew the film we were making, it was always...
Let's not cut it too tight.
- Let's let these scenes breathe. - Yeah.
I mean, we really had to...
You and I really kept pace on that and going,
"It doesn't matter. All the pressure that we feel
"in terms of length, what's important is story."
People make that mistake all the time, thinking,
"Well, I make it shorter, it's gonna feel shorter."
It's like you make it shorter and it feels longer
and I feel less involved in the story.
Well, you said something very wise when the studio was coming at us
and wanting the movie to come down in length.
You said, "It doesn't matter how long it is,
-"it matters how long it feels." - Yeah.
And when we cut a shorter version of the movie and tested it,
-the scores were lower. - Yes.
- The scores went down. - It went down.
- The emotion of the moment was waning. - It was not in.
This phenomenal Kristoffer Joner is an amazing actor.
Fantastic. Fantastic.
Such a lovely guy, too.
And this scene,
this was, again, one of the earlier scenes.
And do you remember, in Rogue Nation
we kept trying to write a scene like this.
We were trying to figure out a way to make a mouse trap scene.
Yep.
Where the audience didn't know...
- Yeah, do you remember we had it in... -...it was a mouse trap.
- We had it. We started out and then... - In a train.
In a train. We also had the box car. Remember?
That's right. That's right.
But look at... I love Ving in this scene, by the way.
I love him in this movie.
He's so...
Coming in to this movie,
the last one was kind of a buddy movie with you and Ethan.
- I mean, you and Benji. Right. - Simon. Yeah, Benji.
And there was a relationship between you and Ilsa
and a relationship between you and Benji.
And this is one where I wanted Ving to really have,
after five of these movies, to have his moment.
And that very quickly fell into line with all of these scenes
because no one knows you better than this character.
And this is the scene that we started with.
- Do you remember? - Yes.
We started with this scene, and Ving came in, and we're like,
"No, man. This is..."
"Take it."
"Take it," you know, "take it."
And he did. He was like...
- Do you remember that morning? - Yeah.
Because, look, when you're making a Mission movie,
a lot of stuff is writing every day.
These actors are incredible, but, also, when you have an idea,
you wanna seize it.
And not just go, "Well, this is the way it is and this is..."
But if you have something... So we're constantly working on things,
and you're constantly writing and updating.
And, really, what I love about you, always, as an artist, is
you're looking at other artists and you're celebrating them.
So, you always have that story in mind,
but you're looking at this actor and you're going,
"What's gonna really serve that actor?"
So, I love that.
Because you and I share that same love of a movie
where you want all of these actors to score,
but also for the audience,
to have these characters
that you care about and you're interested in,
at every scene, every angle.
Everybody's gotta have their entrance and everybody's gotta have...
Yes. We talk about that.
It's like, "What's that entrance going to be? What's that?"
And if you look at it,
it really serves these guys up, and ladies up.
You remember, here, we had...
There was more of a moment between you and Ving,
there's some great acting.
- But the audience started to suspect. - Yeah.
When there was too much conflict
they started to suspect something was up.
Yeah. They're like, "Ethan and Luther, they're too close."
Yes. Yes.
And the trick of this scene is that while the audience,
as you, somebody watching the movie for the first time,
you're looking at, where is this all headed?
- Yeah. - You might be figuring it out.
You might know that there's a trap,
you might know that something is afoot.
And we're hiding from you what our real intention is,
which is we want you, for the first 30 seconds,
to think that something terrible really happened
-so that you feel what Ethan feels. - Yes.
- Yeah. - This is the first time...
This is the structurally...
Start with the thing at the beginning,
now here, and the audience is going, "Oh, my gosh.
"This is gonna be a really depressing film."
- That's just it. -"These guys really..."
-"Oh, my God." -"What were they...
"McQ and Cruise just... This is terrible."
"They've gone off the rails."
And the truth of it is,
you never get to see the doomsday scenario play out.
In any movie, you never get to see the horrible ending come.
So you never get to feel the villain win.
And what I love about this is
we haven't even met the villains of the movie yet
and we've already met, in Caspar,
the European at the bomb exchange, and in Kristoffer,
you've met two fantastic villains.
- You've entered a world. - Yes.
And you realize at this point, "God, these guys are functionaries.
"They're not even the big bad guy of our movie."
But more importantly, we are still in Ethan's nightmare.
We're still, up until this...
Right until this second,
it's all Ethan losing, and then suddenly Ethan says...
Go.
And now the Mission: Impossible meme starts.
The time we took,
and how we were biting our nails through all of it, of
how much can the audience take,
how long can we do this to get deeper into the character?
And Wolf Blitzer.
- Wolf is awesome. Hey, we got Wolf. - So fantastic.
- He is so great. - I never thought we'd get him.
I never thought we'd get Wolf Blitzer.
It was awesome. It was incredible.
When he showed up, we were high-fiving.
It's so good. And he loved it. He was great, worked hard.
He was so delightful. And we gave him a mask.
- We sent him a gift of a Wolf mask. - Fantastic. Gave him a clear box.
- Yes, in a clear box. - He's got his own Wolf mask.
Yes.
Here we go. Credits, of course. I love these credits.
And this is the work of Filmograph, LA.
- I love it. - These guys are so fantastic.
- Oh, my gosh. Great work, guys. - Really awesome.
- And you, McQ. Look at this. Come on. - It's great.
This burning motif where we were kind of...
The discussion we had was one of
"imagine if the film itself is melting,
"the movie itself is burning."
Which speaks to the very last frame of the film,
I hope I remember to mention it when we get there.
But this whole idea that the movie itself is being consumed,
that the series itself is coming to some horrible ending.
And what we realized when we cut it all together, it was,
"My, God, there's a lot of action in this movie."
That was the first time I realized...
- It's interesting 'cause we're in it. - Yeah.
And we're constantly wondering, "Is it enough?"
Yes.
"Are we going as far as we want to go?"
Yes.
And here is the phenomenal Alec Baldwin.
The phenomenal.
And here's what's amazing, is all of this detail,
all of this sky and all this,
when you're watching this film in the editing room
before you've gone in and doing what we call color timing,
which is where you actually pull out the fullness of the negative,
none of this color was there.
This was a very gray scene, you remember?
Yes.
And Asa Shoul, and the nice guys at Filmograph...
Not Filmograph, Molinare in London, who are our colorists.
They brought out all of this color and detail.
- So gorgeous, too. - And one of the things...
There is Lorne Balfe, our brilliant composer.
One of the things that they were trying to do
was bring out more detail in everybody's face.
But in doing it, faces started to look muddy,
and I said, "No, let it be a darker scene.
"The light is gonna come."
- And so I love this scene. - Yeah.
It's got this very unusual dusky feel. That's a beautiful shot.
And, of course, I love the shot inside the aircraft.
And you remember, here, there was more plot after this
when he says, "Don't make me regret it."
And there was a little joke about,
-"And find out where the plutonium..." - Yeah.
"Who stole the plutonium in the first place?"
The Russians, they were like...
There was a whole subplot we had introduced, in case.
And ultimately what we realized is
this scene is really just about the friendship between these two men.
Yes.
And this was before we were really certain
that Alec's character was going to die.
We were still debating that.
- And we didn't really know... - All the way to the end.
It was something that we ultimately knew we had to do,
but didn't wanna do it because...
Look.
- We loved Alec - Love Alec.
- Can the movie recover? - Can the movie recover?
- But look at her. - She's great.
- That's Rob Hardy... - Look at her and Henry.
That hallway is Rob Hardy's nod to Point Blank,
- John Boorman's Point Blank. - It's awesome.
A film he loves.
And so I built him that hallway, so we could do a Point Blank shot.
- It's fantastic. - Everybody thought I was crazy
for building that corridor at the airport.
It's fantastic. Fantastic.
Great introduction.
Look at her. She's got so much power.
- She's really pulling it off. - Jeez.
This was another amazing
"didn't think we'd get her, very much at the last minute."
I know.
And you needed somebody who, from the very first moment
they appeared onscreen, had power.
And I love how you...
I love the design of the shot. Also, you have the two...
It's an over into an over into an over...
And it's about, here are the two power brokers.
Yes.
- And their players behind them. - Yes.
And they are negotiating the fate of the world.
- That's right. - Right here.
Who's going? How? It's their pawns, their players.
And right away, you just know the division.
One's on one side, one's on the other.
And I will give credit where credit is due.
You watch this scene,
and originally there was a slightly different cutting order,
and I was playing it as a moment between you guys.
I was playing more in the close coverage of you
and you said, "No, no, no." Just like, "Make it about them.
"Don't worry about us until 'scalpel and hammer."'
- You remember? - Yep.
I thought that was a really great note and it created this...
It made more of these compositions.
Which I love those compositions in that.
And it's very rare to have a star of the movie come in and say,
"Stop cutting to my close-up."
-"Cut me out." -"Push me into the background."
And she's...
That's Angela's natural temperature
when she's playing a scene like this.
And Angela and I were always working...
I was like, "Hold on to that."
Just let that come out...
Let's get to that. This shot is awesome.
- Entirely CG? - I can't believe it.
It was like the first time I've seen an entirely CG shot
-where I don't wanna shoot myself. - I know.
Great work of Jody Johnson and all the people at DNEG.
Fantastic, guys. Really. Guys, great job.
Great, great job.
I have a real problem with CG shots,
especially when the subject of the shot is CG.
You can put computer-generated backgrounds all you want
as long as what the eye is looking at is real.
That's a very important rule to me.
And there was simply no time to get that shot.
There was no physical way to do it.
To go from one C-17 to another.
And Jody assured us that they could do it.
- And he did it. - And he did it.
Blew me away.
When he showed me that shot I was like, "What?"
I know. And part of what made the shot work,
sorry we're drooling so much on a 30-second shot,
is all the imperfections we poured into it.
- All the heat distortion, planes... - Yep.
- I said, "This is the perfect shot." - Yep.
"Now, show me the shot I would really get."
'Cause so much of...
Yeah, the shot you have... You just were like,
"Okay, that's all I have."
Yeah. And there's... And when you're shooting air-to-air,
there's the shot you want and there's the shot you end up with,
and I just said, "Give me the shot I end up with."
Now look at Henry Cavill. He's like a 1940s movie star.
This guy is just a movie star.
- He is a star. - And he is a great actor also.
And he came on. This guy works so hard.
Yeah.
Dedicated every day, up for anything. It was very challenging.
- Always positive. - Always positive.
Very challenging film to make, Mission: Impossible.
Well, in Mission: Impossible,
every day you come to work not knowing what movie you're making.
Whatever movie we were making yesterday,
we're not making it today.
Yes, and the character kept changing
and he just kept right pace with us and on with us.
- Yes. Never questioned it. - Never.
He came to learn and...
By the way, the vapor on your helmet,
all of that, that's all CG.
- That's all incredibly artful. - Yeah.
That is real oxygen that I'm taking.
- That whole stuff there. - That is real oxygen.
This was an obviously challenging sequence, the HALO.
- Yes. - The HALO was...
- I skydive... - It was a lot of work.
It was a lot of work.
But I had to really get my skydiving up again.
And put in the hours.
We're doing jumping out at 25,000 feet.
We did an hour of breathe-up, going up to altitude.
There's many different things that can go wrong.
Hypoxia.
- Many things that could lead to death. - Yeah.
At this altitude and jumping the way that we're jumping.
And, also, there's a lot of debate about...
I'm doing the jump, everything's live, the whole thing.
Now, this is...
- This is all one shot. - This all begins...
We talked about this for a year.
How are we gonna get this shot?
First of all, you have to have someone that knows how to skydive.
The camera is on top of his helmet. It's Craig. Brilliant...
Craig is not looking through the camera.
Craig is a camera operator.
Brilliant skydiver, camera operator.
He's never done anything like this before
because it's narrative storytelling, still one shot.
Now he's backwards. He leaves backwards.
I'm coming right at him.
Now, I have to get...
From there, I have to get to within three feet.
Not two feet and 10 inches, not three feet and two inches.
- I have to be right at three feet. - To be in focus.
To be in focus.
Now I go past him in that
and we had, really, a window of a minute every night
-to try to get that shot. - Three minutes.
- We had three minutes. - Three minutes.
Three minutes to get that shot.
Three minutes to get the whole sequence.
And the rule with Mission is, everything is subjective,
which means I need to see Ethan's face when he jumps out of the plane.
We could have followed you out of the plane...
- Yeah. - We would not have been with Ethan.
I do the spin and now you're in my face,
I'm up on my back, he's going up and around.
It really is a dance between the two of us,
I had to always make sure that the sunset was on my left shoulder.
That's actually a guy there. It's incredible.
And Craig is trying to keep the frame for all of that storytelling.
It's nothing he's ever done before.
He hasn't done narrative storytelling, so keeping that frame open...
And we're traveling at 200 miles an hour at times,
toward the ground. I'm coming in.
It's like a sprint, boom, I have to hit him.
When I hit him, I have to hit him in a...
I don't know where I'm gonna hit him on his body.
I just have to try to take him out and down.
And not break your neck doing it. You notice that Craig had a...
And not break his neck, my neck, not entangle the chutes,
deploy his chute or my chute.
Any of those things could have led to serious, serious problems.
And what's amazing here is
Craig is keeping him in frame all the time.
And what you're looking at here is actually not shot over Paris,
it's shot over Abu Dhabi, and Paris has to be...
Yes. And thank you, Abu Dhabi and the UAE military, for this.
We could not have gotten this sequence without them,
-so many, many thanks to you guys. - Many thanks.
So people are saying, "Well, if it's all CG in the background,
"why didn't you just do it CG?"
You can see the horizon in the background.
Yep.
And what you end up with...
By jumping out of the plane,
the relationship between you and the camera is in a way
that we could never have duplicated on a stage.
No. No, we could not have gotten what we got.
We actually... The bottle exchange...
The bottle exchange is something that we actually...
We built the largest wind tunnel in the world
to train for this.
And actually we were planning on shooting some of the sequence there.
We were talking about it, and when we did it...
We did it, it just didn't work.
What was amazing is
-it looked like you were on wires. - Yes.
It was real, but it wasn't real. And that's...
We took one look at it and you went,
"I know how we gotta do this."
I remember that Ted was like, "How are we gonna do this?"
Everybody standing in the room was like,
"Oh, my God. I know what he's gonna do."
It was straight out of a Mission: Impossible movie.
It was like, "Oh, no."
Except, "m a Mission: Impossible meme,
Ethan is the one going, "Oh, no."
And in making a Mission: Impossible,
everybody else in the room is going, "Oh, no."
Yes.
"We're actually gonna jump out of a plane."
We have to jump out of a... We have to do all of this for real.
For real. While you're falling.
While I'm falling, we're gonna have to get and switch the tanks.
Yes.
Now, this is the Grand Palais in Paris, France,
which was kind enough to let us shoot there.
- There's DJ Harvey. - Beautiful.
- Great, great choice, McQ. - Why, thank you.
Look at this lighting. Awesome.
Peter Wenham, our production designer...
It was really amazing.
We only had a limited amount of time in the Grand Palais,
and so I said to Peter, "I want you to build a set
"that you can build in two days and strike in two days."
And all of this stuff
was stuff that we could very quickly roll in and roll out again
to give us the maximum amount of shooting time
inside the Grand Palais.
So what he's built here is fairly simple.
He's just using those plastic screens, the mirrors,
all of these projection screens. All of this stuff was portable.
And the only complicated thing really to bring in was that light ring.
And you'll see in the DVD extras,
there's shots in the sequence that we cut out of the movie.
There was a whole entrance into the Grand Palais...
And a whole swinging how we got there, not...
There's a big stunt in...
It was before we had the rest of the movie together,
and it was a fantastic stunt.
And when the whole movie was put together,
we realized, "No, we don't need it."
I know, it was like, "Let's cut that out."
- Yeah. - This sequence,
we were supposed to shoot it in three days.
That was never gonna happen.
And we shot it over the entire production of the film.
The last day of filming we were shooting, and every time...
- This shot was a reshoot. - Yeah.
We went back and reshot it
because we needed to make the geography clear in the bathroom.
The geography is just a little bit confusing.
With all the mirrors and everything, it was really...
Yes.
This is like Henry... The training...
And you're gonna see Liang, who we met on All You Need ls Kill,
who was All You Need ls Kill...
- He was Emily's stunt double. - Stunt double.
And incredible wushu champion.
And we kept thinking about, "Who do we want for this?"
We were gonna cast an actor, it was gonna be a misdirection.
But it was just too much.
What we wanted out of this scene was
that this guy basically kicks the living, you know...
Somebody was gonna get hurt.
- Somebody was gonna get hurt. - Kicked out of me and Henry.
Or more hurt, I should say.
The important thing...
This is not only a very entertaining scene,
but it's also...
What the audience doesn't realize what we're doing here
is we're telling the audience,
first of all, they're human and Henry can get beat.
Do you know what I mean? Like, he's...
This is just brutal.
- Yeah. - You're seeing two different styles.
- Henry breaks the mask machine. -"Scalpel and hammer."
Walker, he's the scalpel and hammer, you're seeing it instantly, okay?
But it's also putting into the audience's mind that,
as much of a hammer that Walker is, he is beatable.
- He's vulnerable. - He's vulnerable.
And you still have this brutality.
The way that the scene was shot,
McQ, it's fantastic, because if you look at the cuts,
we're only cutting when we have to.
And that's what we went in, saying, "How we wanna do this scene?"
It's not death by a thousand edits, it's playing out character,
which meant, for the actors, the takes have to be perfect,
and we have to be in... There's no cheating.
The burden is on you.
I'm allowed to just,
"Look, here's a mask machine."
- There's no shaky cam. - Nope.
All of that, the reason why this is not shot
in the style of scenes you're seeing there
is because the three actors
were so exhaustively trained and that, also,
you guys were really putting a beating on each other.
- Yes. - There was nowhere to hide.
No. And we wanted...
You're looking for the accidents.
And so there's moments where I really get kicked
and I'm down on the floor, almost in the latrine.
That was improvised. Those guys were so fantastic.
- Yes, those guys are great. - All of their dialogue is improvised.
I didn't know anything they were saying
until a week before we finished the movie
when somebody put the subtitles in.
I love this scene, I laugh every time I see it.
Look at Liang.
Look at this move what Henry is doing,
-it's just unbelievable. - Yeah.
And this is the great thing
that you do not see in a lot of these other action movies.
It's the vulnerability that you're both showing in this scene.
It's a testament to the both of you
that the fun of the scene is watching these two guys
that we know are the heroes of the movie,
getting their asses beat.
Yes. And it is. We're just...
With every time we're not just doing the choreography,
-we're, "How do we..." - And that kick in the chest.
Also, Henry just delivers.
Now, of course, here's the reloading the biceps
that he had done on the day.
- Just awesome. Just awesome. - Total improv.
Just creating that character and these moments
that he'd just create are fantastic. Look at this.
- Look at this. - I love how you double-cut this.
Yeah, it's the same action repeated twice.
- Yes, same action repeated twice. - So you could see it all.
- It was so good. - So you could see it all.
And you also think... That kick.
- That hurt. My face in the latrine. - That's gotta hurt.
And I remember that slip. That slip was not...
- No. - That's lit rally just...
It's very slippery in there, it's uneven,
and you guys just let the space kind of...
Yes.
The space is beating on you as much as...
But also... And it's like,
"Look at what Henry did to sell everything."
- Just into it. - Yes.
Just into the character,
like this moment you picked up on the last day.
There was a reshoot later.
I threw focus to the gun
and it allowed me to show him getting shot in the head.
Now, we introduced Ilsa earlier in the club,
and we cut that and made this her introduction
-which is fantastic. - It just is.
- Look at that. Look at her. - She is so phenomenal.
- Amazing Rebecca Ferguson. - I know.
- And in this environment... Yes. - Talk about charisma.
Talk about, also, movie star. You look at these guys, they're...
- All three of them together. - All of them in the film.
Just so talented.
And also in a white room with bright light
-there's nowhere to hide. There's... - No.
Both literally and figuratively.
You look at the light on Rebecca's face and...
Looking at all of you guys, there's such a...
These are such fantastic close-ups
which are all provided by the environment.
It's hard to look that good in a big, bright, white room.
- Look... - This blood was added later,
so we could control the amount of blood and where it went...
It wouldn't slow production down.
And until we had the blood in the scene,
the scene wasn't getting any laughs at this point.
No.
And suddenly when people saw the blood in the scene,
it had a whole other layer.
- This got a laugh... - Yes.
Where it didn't before.
And that's always how I'd pictured it.
And I was always frustrated
when we had to show this to test audiences
-without the blood before. - There's so much.
It's amazing how well the film played with...
- People don't understand music... - And this was...
- How that affects. - Yep.
- With this we picked up again. - We picked it up again.
You watched it and you went, "I can do...
"Let me try that line again." And you gave this...
It was like, "And now we have to hope they never met."
The delivery you're giving is like, "And you just...everything."
- Are we allowed to say... - Yes. Exactly.
But it gave a nice energy
'cause now I could hold on you guys in these moments.
And the way we had shot it before, it was forcing us to be cuttier.
We were cutting around things.
- Do you remember? - Yep.
To try and give pace to it.
And we said, "No, let's go back. We have the bathroom.
-"We're going back there anyway." -"We're going back."
And let's shoot this so we don't have to cut it.
Henry and I, anytime... Like, at the end...
When you're doing a fight scene, first of all,
you never admit how painful it is.
Ever. Like, when you're doing stunts, you never say it hurts.
I always hear about it a year later.
No, it's a year later.
But on the last day when we were in the bathroom,
I looked at Henry, and he's like...
Both of us had that moment of admitting
how painful it was every day.
This is one of the first things we shot with her.
- I love this. - And this line...
-"You should've come with me." - You came up with on the day.
- On the day, but we talked about it. - Yeah.
We kept talking about the relationship and he said,
"I don't know what it is, but it's in this moment."
And I came to work that day and went, "I got it."
And it was this.
And that was their entire relationship from the last movie done in two lines.
And, remember, there was a whole multi-page scene when we met.
And we cut that down to just a look you had with each other
and then cut the look out.
I know all about their relationship.
- And this... - I love this opening shot.
It says, "We're entering a different part of our film,
"a different part of the movie."
I love this. There we go.
- The rule for... - New Vanessa.
Vanessa Kirby.
Okay. Vanessa, she originally...
The entrance, she was singing...
Yes, we had a whole song.
- And she was fantastic. - There was a number.
She's fantastic.
- This we picked up later. - This close-up.
And what we realized was, the audience was just saying,
"Just get us to the story."
And the song was saying, "Okay, well, what's going on?"
It actually worked against the tension of the scene.
And so I said, "Take out the song and see what's left."
And it was all of these shots.
And I said, "I get it."
She can be giving a speech, and watch her hand.
You can see, with her hand right there,
-she was actually... - Yes.
That's the one indication that she was actually singing.
And we needed to feel the threat,
but also, we always talked about her and her brother,
her character's brother, as being
the son and daughter of Max from the first film.
And that was always gonna be a secret between us,
but when we cut the song out...
Yeah. There was always stuff that McQ and I loved
and we cut the song out and he put it right there, I was like,
-"Oh, man, you're gonna do it." - If you're listening...
lloveditllovedit
Yeah. It was a lot of fun.
Some people that know the movie, friends were calling me, going...
My family was like,
"That's Max's daughter. I love it."
Now, if you wanna treat yourself, watch the background in this scene.
Rewind the scene and watch the background
from when Tom first walks in until when she finishes her speech.
These were shot months apart
because we were shooting this scene
and we took a one-day break to go shoot the foot-chase.
Yes.
And that was the day you broke your foot.
Yes, that's right.
And we came back to this and shot all of this months later.
So we couldn't get all the same extras back,
and I was agonizing over it.
Jake Myers, our producer, he's, "if they're looking at the background,
-"if they're looking at the extras..." - We're in trouble.
"You have bigger problems."
And these extras were actually phenomenal, incredibly patient.
- Yeah, they were. They were awesome. - Yes.
And Vanessa in this scene
is so good in portraying someone, just in her behavior,
as somebody who's excited by this, by chaos.
Yes.
And not at all intimidated by this person.
By the danger.
I love the brother-sister relationship here.
It's really fun.
- Frederick Schmidt playing Zola. - Fantastic guy.
I always wanna go and make a British gangster film.
We always talked about that...
He's just fantastic, this guy, and I love their relationship.
- It's just a nice color to have there. - Yes.
And we shot... Remember, all of this business at the bar
we shot with three cameras, simultaneously,
-so that there was a profile shot... - Look at that close-up.
- And these two close-ups. - Fantastic close-up. Look at her.
And Rob Hardy's use of short framing.
Rob Hardy likes to do what's called short framing
where he leaves a lot of...
You'll see everybody is pushed over to one side,
there's always a lot of depth in the frame.
Now, this shot...
Tom Cruise, you remember, we were talking on the day
and what we really wanted to do was make clear
that Ethan walked in here, knowing there was a problem,
and had to use the problem to his advantage.
- Yeah. - It was a very complicated idea.
And we were saying, "How do we express that?"
We came up with this line.
So, remember, I came to work that day and I said,
-"Here's what you do. You say..." - Yeah. You kept talking about it.
"I know what you're thinking."
And by saying "I know what you're thinking,"
you're telling us what you're thinking.
And you said, "Dude, okay."
And we started playing with lenses
and that's where we put this big, long lens on it
and designed that shot.
An intimate shot between the two of you
separate from everything else.
That was a shot that you, me and Rob
all worked together from lenses to lines to camera.
Yep. To figure that out.
Now, I love this, where the audience is like...
You think she is a maiden in distress. Do you know what I mean?
The first close-up. Here she is. You're just thinking like,
-"Okay, he is holding her, keeping..." - He is holding her, keeping her alive.
Now, you go...
Now, listen to the crowd.
I love what you did with the crowd noise, too.
The crowds are like, "Whoa." And I love that look.
Well, I went through with the sound department and I said...
There was a lot of just wild reactions and I said, "No, no, no.
"This is spectators watching a sport and it's getting crazy."
Yes. Yes. It was fantastic. The first time I heard it...
And, also, I love New's look.
- Great job, Rebecca. - Yes.
I love New's look at the chest.
'Cause we're always talking about how this...
It's like, "I could do this, too. We're in this together."
Yes, like, "Hey, there." Yes. And what was nice is you...
And now you've got Henry coming in, just the hammer.
- It brings everybody together. - Yes, I love it. And now...
You remember, we almost out this out of the movie?
- I know, dude. - It was almost gone.
I was so glad we got it back. It was out.
And there was a scene here that we just picked.
And look, I love that close-up, again, of her, it's just...
- Like, "This is exciting." - There's all this dialogue in the car
and we realized you don't need any of it.
It's just feeling them together and knowing...
And she's like, "This is dangerous,
"and you're fun and I'm having fun,"
and now we're going into another world.
It goes from the club to here
to this shot that you created, the whole thing.
Remember, it was all set up in a different way.
This was the hardest location in Paris to get
and we insisted on it because we needed the space,
we wanted to feel her environment and...
Her power and her environment.
And you hit the nail on the head.
There's a constant evolution of space.
- Yes. And look at this. - You're constantly...
Everything, every scene, you're moving into another world,
you're going deeper and deeper...
And she's taking us into a deeper place.
It's like, "Okay, what do you think of this?"
Now, she knows he doesn't know.
And all of this...
And she's gotta get him to do what she wants.
- That's right. - And so she is very excited by this.
All of this camera work, it's all calculated.
This, actually...
You restructured and redesigned the whole room in the morning.
- That's right. - And that whole opening shot in there.
I cleared out all the furniture and put all the...
Because the furniture was getting in the way of the guns.
But most importantly, this scene,
essentially, what you're feeling is Ethan has walked into a trap.
Yes.
And the trap is not springing, the trap is slowly closing around him.
And so if you look at all the framing of all the shots,
Ethan is surrounded in every one of these shots
or the ceiling is above him,
each one of these angles is calculated
to create a sense of gradually closing entrapment.
There's a guy behind him, guy in front of him and...
And Lane there.
This is where, reintroducing Lane, where she's...
And then look, she's completely free in the frame.
- Yes. - And...
And she's in total power. She's come in and changed.
- Made herself comfortable. - Yes.
- And is sort of... - She's fantastic. I love it.
She's completely at ease and comfortable.
All of this is very...
Henry is standing in front of the door,
there are men outside the door,
that's the one door Ethan could exit,
and so there's no exit for Ethan.
And that moment in the scene where we cut to the wide
after you look at the Lane picture is the moment when you realize,
I realize... "I've stepped in something now."
"Oh, my gosh."
"This is bigger than I thought."
And also his whole nightmare that he had at the beginning of the movie,
-it's this... - Yes.
He knew this was...
He was afraid this was coming.
And then here's the shot we both love.
- It's a two-shot coming up, right? - I love it.
- Where is it? There. - That. Oh, my God. Fantastic.
It marries the two of them in such a great way.
It puts her in the foreground.
All of these shots are about power dynamic
as much as they are about...
Here it is. Right here. It's Ethan realizing, "I'm had."
-"I'm had." - But he has to keep going. He can't...
We don't dwell on the moment.
- But I love how she just leans. - Yes. She just knows.
She just knows. It's like, "Show him," "I'm drawing you in."
And you remember this?
We had three plutonium cores
-at the beginning of the movie. - Yes. Yes.
And we had two plutonium cores at the end.
And that's why...
And we were driving ourselves crazy, going,
"What happens to the other plutonium core?"
And people kept saying,
"Just get rid of the plutonium in the beginning."
I'm like, "No, you have to have Mecca, the Vatican and the Temple Mount."
And we came up with the idea of the core as a down payment
days before we shot this scene. And that took us to...
This was...
When I wrote the break-out scene, you were the one that said,
"Remember, in Mission,
"it's always about showing what was supposed to happen."
And these scenes, what we call a what-if,
they always happen with narration over them.
They always happen with Ethan in a room or Benji in a room
saying, "Here's what we're going to do."
Dude, I gotta tell you, I love your design of this.
And it tells you that it's safe.
It tells you that it's not really happening.
Look at this shot. Look at your whole design.
We rehearsed this at a track,
out in France.
And your whole idea was this.
And you'll remember that when we were in Paris,
and we were being very sensitive to Paris with our presence there,
there were paparazzi across the river taking pictures of us shooting.
- We were there for several days. - Yeah.
And within an hour of your showing up,
you're seeing images of your own movie online,
and this, we were supposed to shoot first.
And you came up to me and said,
"We're gonna be killing all these cops
"and there's people across the street watching.
"What do we do?"
And, you remember, we shot the other part of the scene first.
- Yes. - We shot Part 2 as Part 1.
And the next morning we came in and Martin Smith put silk
up along the entire side of the bridge.
So everything you're looking at is actually added in post
and that's why there's this eerie light
'cause the sunlight is coming in through 300 feet of silk,
so that no one in Paris would know that this scene was being shot there.
'Cause we didn't want people seeing us killing police.
No, and I didn't want... That's not what the movie is about.
And it's the exact opposite. And I didn't want that for France.
- Yep. - We didn't want it...
No. We said,
"Eventually, they'll know it wasn't real,
"but that's gonna be a year."
Yes, but we don't wanna wait.
And also with the Mission movie, we come in,
we wanna celebrate the culture, celebrate the town,
-the city, the people. - Yes.
And that's the purpose why we went to France.
And it was wonderful.
- You saw the thing. - Oh, God. Yes.
And none of the guns had any blanks, you remember?
- And the explosion wasn't there. - Yes.
It was all added later. We shot it silently.
And we shot that gun fight entirely under the nose of everybody above us.
And nobody ever knew it was taking place until they saw the film.
And the music in that scene,
it's worth going back and listening to.
It's Lorne Balfe's, the first piece of music that really resonated.
He sent us a whole bunch of music
and that piece is playing over your dream at the beginning.
- Yep. - It's playing over that scene.
- And it became... - It's haunting and it's so big.
It's lovely.
And it's a completely original piece of music that came to represent...
Lorne, thank you for what you did, it's just amazing.
Yeah, Lorne, really phenomenal.
And you guys work so well together, McQ.
I had such a great time working with Lorne.
You guys worked brilliantly.
The surprises that you would send me as you're editing and going...
You'd send me those surprises daily, I just would go like,
"Oh, my gosh. This is just amazing."
And this was originally not a hard cut,
this was originally a long establishing shot
and there was more dialogue at the top of the scene.
- Great shot. - And we were...
That's a... And you're talking about 6:00 in the morning.
You had to go there. You only had about an hour
to shoot the establishing shots in this scene
before you went into close coverage
and we could hide that the sun was coming up.
So all of these close shots which...
And you can see in the background, the sun is starting to come up
on the stones behind Angela.
This is beautiful.
We were racing to get out of there before it was in direct sunlight.
This is at the Trocadero where we had our premiere.
Congratulations. That was such a great night.
Thank you. Congratulations to you, too.
Look how beautiful France looks, beautiful Paris.
Oh, my gosh, I love that.
It's not hard to make Paris look good, I gotta say.
No. But I thank you...
Thank you, Paris, thank you, France, for trusting us.
For allowing us to shoot at these locations to celebrate you.
For allowing us to fly over the city, for giving us all the street closures.
Yes, it was amazing.
It's really incredible. And they were incredibly gracious, very trusting.
And I don't think we damaged too much of the city.
No, no. Nothing.
- No, we didn't damage anything. - No.
We left some rubber marks on the street.
I was very nervous driving past those churches,
14th century, 15th century.
I was like, "I'm not going to drift into one of these walls."
-"That is not going to happen." -"This would be so bad."
"This would be so bad. I would feel horrible."
This great moment for Henry,
and it's one in which Henry is talking about...
Walker is talking about Ethan, but he's really talking about himself.
And it's the only insight into it. And what I love about...
It kind of goes back to,
you and I talked about it, Mission 1.
Yes.
- Yes, that's right. - That inspired this kind of moment.
That's right.
And the notion that this movie gets away with things
that I never thought we would were...
There's no point in the movie
where Ethan explicitly explains the plot of the movie to the audience.
And that's...
Without that, it's a very dangerous dance
because until Ethan says it, the audience is not reconciled.
We noticed that an audience, when we're testing the movie,
they're always trying to out-think and outsmart Mission: Impossible.
Yes.
And until Ethan says it, it's not true.
It's very interesting.
Sometimes we try to allow others to have that.
Yes.
And it always comes back to...
But you and I realized, it's like, if Ethan doesn't say it...
Well, because Mission's all about fooling you
and it's like, until Ethan tells you the truth, this is all lies.
It's all just a web of lies.
- This sequence... - This opening shot. Come on.
I love this introduction of a character.
Talk about introduction.
The reintroduction of Lane, seeing where he is.
And the difficulty that one has flying over Paris.
It was a restricted airspace.
It was very generous of them to let us shoot there.
Yes, and we landed at the building that...
Yep. And remember these shots were all done months later, on stage.
We had such limited time in Paris,
we had to choose our shots very carefully.
And so the first time you saw this sequence cut together,
there was nothing of Ethan in the truck, right?
So you felt the action sequence,
but what was really interesting is you felt no character.
And just these few close-ups of Ethan in that truck
as the motorcade is coming,
-it suddenly gave stakes to the scene. - Yeah.
And what I love is
this scene actually obeys a real 360-degree geography.
Yes. That's real.
You and Lane are actually looking at each other in real geography.
Yes. And he is in that helicopter.
- Yes. - That was shot in the helicopter.
Those are real French Special Forces who come with the helicopter.
Incredible. Incredible guys.
It's a great box set.
You get the helicopter, the French Special Forces.
Yes, I know. And the helicopter, he couldn't bring all the weight on it
because the structures, we had to keep it just a little off.
Yeah, it was weighted for four tons and I think that helicopter was 14.
And no helicopter had ever landed on that helipad.
And that's the Ministry of Finance which is...
Thank you for allowing us to do that, Ministry of Finance.
- Yes. Thank you. - I love all this stuff. Look at him.
- He's fantastic in this. - He is extraordinary. Yeah.
And then, here you go.
This shot was on a stage done a year later.
This was on location.
And you remember this was really the first day
-of you and Henry working together. - Yes.
And we're finding the characters and their relationship.
We didn't really know who Walker was...
I know. Didn't know who Walker was
and then he just started doing it and you'd go...
He was like,
"You're the one who caught him," with a smile on his face.
Yes. And you went...
I said, "Go home tonight and watch
"It happened One Night and Gone with the Wind."
- I said, "You're Clark Gable." - Yes.
And we started talking about actors from another era.
Yes.
And there, you see that,
that smile he's got, the confidence he had.
Henry starts to become...
He shows elements that he's a little bit of a rake.
Yes.
All of that was...
It was just discovering on this day when we had started going through it.
And also, you'll see the mannerisms that Henry brings to it.
Just the bruteness.
You see he's a brutal kind of fighter, brutal kind of guy.
Just how he cracks his neck.
He stretches his neck right before he's gonna go, he's just like...
- But not a gorilla. - No. No, he isn't.
There is an elegance, it's very interesting.
Yes.
And we...
Here's the lovely Rebecca Ferguson again.
All of this was worked out in this geography
and we shot it over two Sundays.
Chris, the design of this is fantastic, again.
- The length, the depth, the motion. - The trains...
It was...
It's just... The choice of locations, how you shot it.
When I saw this, I was just...
I'm so... I never tire of looking at these shots.
And look at this, the design.
You come over, here she is.
- It's all of this... - You're just wondering, "Who is that?"
You have so much going on...
And you know who it is, but you don't.
But you don't.
And it's taking your time, allowing the audience to absorb that now...
It's a perfect shot to have that here, again.
And the shift in Lorne's score...
When the truck tips over, it stops being the Mission theme
and it tells you, "Now it's on."
And that you discovered way at the end
as you just kept honing the music and honing the story.
Incredible work.
A big thank-you.
A big thing about this sequence is the sound design and the music,
and how they're mixed together.
We were getting a lot of notes that the sequence was too long.
And we couldn't understand why, and we realized that the music...
- That moment, there. - Yeah, it's great.
The music...
That it was all coming at kind of the same volume
and you were exhausted by the time you got here.
- Yes. Yes. - And we still had a whole chase scene.
You were already... Your ears were punished.
And so we spent days mixing this sequence
so that it was right to the edge, but never too far.
And you had to pick your moments.
When did music matter? When did sound matter?
When did they both matter together?
Look at this. All this here, Sean in there, caged in.
Caged in, in a great rig built by Neil Corbould,
our amazing special effects team.
Fantastic. Been wanting to work with him forever,
and finally had this opportunity to work together.
This rig, too. There's a rig that had casters underneath it, you remember?
And it was impossible to control.
It would blow as I was just going out, to help me make that turn.
This hurt.
These guys coming out like that, that hurts.
Yes.
And we shot this on a really sunny day.
And this, we shot in a tank at Leavesden.
These are all things we couldn't do in the Seine River.
- That's a tank. - There's a tank.
There's Neil Corbould's rig which is revolving at 180 degrees.
And look at that. The water comes in.
Sean had to do that several times.
And then, look, it's pouring rain.
And I was...
Remember, we were shooting it, it was agonizing.
And we kept wiping off the windshield, nobody notices.
- No, you just... - Nobody cares.
- If you're on story... - That's exactly it.
Yeah.
- And here's Simon Pegg. - Here's Simon. Simon Pegg learned...
Learned how to swim with a rebreather.
Yep.
Got certified in a rebreather.
- He's certifiable, anyway. - Yes, he is. He's fantastic. Love him.
- And that was... - Again.
- Right before it started raining. - I know. All the cars coming in.
And then this alley... It's a very old alley.
- Part of the alley I'm driving into. - Yes.
And I just...
I didn't want to hit the walls. I'm going in fast.
- Yes. - I did not wanna touch those walls.
- No. It was so beautiful. - And then we had to build out...
Well, and then to wedge the truck in there,
they weren't gonna give us the permission.
So I said, "Well, what would it take for them to give us permission?"
They said, "Well, they don't want that truck coming down the alley."
And I said, "What if we did it in a way
"that the truck doesn't have to go down the alley?"
- And so... - That's me going in.
That's him going in, and then all of this we did later.
And we built, on the backlot, this, right here.
We built that so that we could wedge it
without damaging the old architecture.
And remember the first time Henry kicked the windshield?
Yeah.
He kicked it and it just went flying out in one kick.
It flew down the alley.
I was like, "Hey, Superman, try to make it look hard."
Exactly.
"Give it some effort."
And this was the beginning of our...
You know, things going wrong for Ethan.
And all of it, of course, is the necessity of,
"We gotta separate these two guys."
Now, this is high speed.
And you... And the alley...
Actually, it's not an alley, it's a brick wall.
You remember you had to take off and stop before you hit the wall.
High speed and then stop.
And we added the alley later.
And this is you just headed in the opposite direction.
- And this is... - Benji. Simon learning the boat.
Yeah.
Okay, not as easy as it looks, I just wanna tell you.
Definitely not.
And it was the sort of thing that our...
We had our heads down and we were shooting so quickly,
that it wasn't until Paris was done that we were like,
"This scene had boats and trucks and cars and motorcycles and helicopters."
It was crazy. Trains.
I know. I love that train. I love that train. I know.
Tommy Gormley, our amazing AD, had timed the trains
and knew when they were coming, knew when to call action.
And then, here we go. It was supposed to have a rig.
This is high speed. Yeah. For safety.
It was a safety rig,
so that Tom wouldn't have to drive on these cobblestones
on a motorcycle with no helmet.
The rig failed and this was the first day,
I said, "What do you wanna do?"
And you said, "My brother, we gotta shoot."
You got on the motorcycle and took off.
"We gotta go like hell, man."
That's it. And the whole design of the motorcycle chase
went out the window on Day 1, and we went to old school, practical,
-"We're doing it all for real." - High speed.
- Yeah. - No helmet.
- No helmet. No stuntman. - Averaging...
- Stunt drivers in these cars. - Yeah. These cars coming in. Boom.
- And Lorne's score. - It's fantastic.
Me coming down through here. Hammering, I'm hammering through here.
This is the Rue de I'Opéra and we shot this on the same day.
That Rue de I'Opéra is where I had the idea for the opera house.
Yes. That Rue de I'Opéra,
that inspired the opera house for Rogue Nation. I love that.
I love that we're coming back to that.
This is high speed.
I'm driving in between these cars at high speed. That was...
- Scary. - It's uncomfortable.
It's uncomfortable. I mean, when we finished this day,
you'll see we're all high-fiving each other that I'm still...
Oh, my God. And then here's the Arc de Triomphe,
which we shot the same morning.
Yep. Cobblestones are cold, it's dew,
I'm hanging on to this bike as best as I can, keeping the speed up.
- Cars coming at me, I'm saying... - You should've wiped out.
I'm saying, "Please just hold your line and don't hit me.
"Just don't try to avoid me, I'll avoid you."
And I was just going full tilt through here,
as fast as I possibly can.
Now sharper eyes will notice
that the sun is rising in those early shots.
They gave us the Arc de Triomphe for two hours at dawn.
And by the time the sun came up we had 90 minutes to shoot,
so any attempts of making that safer and easier for you
or waiting for the cobblestones to warm up,
-that wasn't an option. - No. We just had to go.
Yeah. And we got all of that in 90 minutes.
So I had bikes with tires warmed up.
Catapult.
And everybody asks how we do that. We do it.
Tom was on a catapult rig that hits that car and throws him over it.
It's a pretty painful stunt. And...
That's not acting.
Take the credit. Take the credit. You're a brilliant actor.
I love this shot, man.
Lots of discussion as to which angle,
-will they see the net... - How to reveal it.
How to reveal it.
Look, I love this moment, McQ. This is pure McQuarrie, right here.
And you remember...
I thought... I love that look between these guys, look at Ving.
And it was originally that music...
The music that was playing over the...
The Lorne music that was playing over the "What if" sequence.
And it was very emotional,
it worked very effectively here, and at the last minute, we said...
You changed it, which is like... McQ, I love this cue.
One of my favorite cues in the movie.
Lorne did this in an hour and it was so fantastic.
And it gave the whole movie... What it does is...
We were so in love with that other piece of music,
we lost sight of what Mission is, which is pulling the rug out.
- Yeah. - And...
And what we were leaning into was the regret that Ethan had
-in having to do this mission. - Yes.
And it's like, "No, they won. Let's give him that,"
and it's much more effective.
And I love that you took out all the sound, it's just the music.
You did a brilliant job on this mix, McQ.
It just keeps it, it's like... And you feel the team. I love...
Simon did this. Looking at him it's like, "Okay, he's good."
That's Walker.
It's all the communication and the whole thing.
The team has been introduced with no waste of time.
Now, this moment.
And this is Alix Bénézech,
who is just this phenomenal, phenomenal actor.
This scene was originally written as you and a man,
and you read the script and said, "Make it a woman.
"It'll be a lot more impactful if it's a woman."
And you made her.
She's just a traffic cop andifsjustu
Wrong place, wrong time.
No, that is not a reference to Pulp Fiction.
- Everybody asks me that. - What? No.
It's Ving holding a guy with a hood on his head,
they're like, "Is that a reference to The Gimp in Pulp Fiction?"
- No, it's not. - Never thought of that.
And she's so wonderful in this scene.
And a lot of what we did,
a lot of the dialogue we did in post, you remember?
Some of the off-camera lines, and this shot of Henry,
to add tension to the scene, we added this shot right here.
- That was shot months later. - Yeah.
And I kept watching this scene and feeling like
there's no danger in this scene before the shot.
And you wanna feel it come from Walker. You're constantly hitting...
And I'm thinking it was Walker. We hadn't...
Now, we haven't had this in a Mission before.
This whole story, and what you've done by putting this emotion in here, McQ,
I absolutely love it.
Thank you.
It's so...
You're just telling people in a way, there's consequences.
- Yes. - There's consequences.
It's like, "This is dangerous..."
The whole intention was that Ethan...
The notion of one life over millions
and not wanting anyone to get hurt. And it's not clean.
It costs and it makes it... It's not easy.
And that's a...
That's a great reaction by Simon going...
The Mission team, they're not killers.
- No. - They're trying to do...
It's the least amount of damage.
- Well, it goes back to Mission 1. - Yes.
It goes back to you grabbing the knife with Jean Reno
and saying, "Zero body count."
Zero body count.
And not wanting that...
And never wanting there to be casualties and I thought,
"I want all of this to cost Ethan.
"And how far can we take that?"
And then, when your suggestion was to make it a woman,
I was like, "Really? You wanna leave a woman behind?
"That's really a little hard." And you were like, "It's hard."
It's hard. He can't fix everything.
And you're feeling that like he saved her... I love this car.
When you chose this car...
You chose this car, I'm so glad we had. It's Paris.
Look, we love Rendezvous.
McQ and I, we love movies, we watch movies all the time.
- Check it out. - Our friendship is that.
It's Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous.
And so the thing is, it's also our whole homage.
And classic, gorgeous city, you want a classic car.
The green, you know...
The green was...
You remember Graham, who does our vehicles,
he brought a BMW that's slightly older than this one,
and it was that color.
It's fantastic.
And Peter Wenham, our production designer,
he said, "It's retirement green.
"It's like your father's BMW." I said, "Exactly."
- Exactly. - It's great.
- Look at this. - Yeah.
- This car has no ego. - No.
No, it's just for saying...
It was so much fun to drive that car. I had a blast driving it.
It's not flashy. It's a strangely non-flashy, very conservative car.
It's got a lot of power,
held the road well, and just in Paris driving...
Look what it looks like. ltjust looks right.
It just pulls me into the movie. It pulls me into the movie.
- Yes, and I'll tell you why. - It's character.
We had some push back 'cause they were like,
"Don't you want a newer car?"
We're like, "No, this is the movie, man.
"This is character, this is..."
- It's timeless. - Yes.
- And more importantly... - It's classic.
...newer cars, because of all the safety equipment in the newer cars,
the way they're designed, the Windshields are sloping,
they're smaller. It's actually harder to see.
And I wanted the car with the biggest possible engine
and the biggest possible windshield.
And that's how we ended up with that car,
and then, of course, Graham brought us the green one.
I was like, "This thing is so great."
I had so much driving through all of this stuff. Look at this.
This is Jenny Tinmouth who is driving the motorcycle.
She also did Rebecca's doubling on Rogue Nation.
Loved drifting around. Jenny's genius.
She's a two-time champion of the Man TT
which is the hardest, most dangerous motorcycle race in the world.
- Awesome. - And the loveliest person.
Yep. And hardworking.
She's a total killer on the bike.
Now, here, I just didn't wanna crash and hit any of these things.
Now, we only had a few cars,
so I had to do that move and dance it off the stairs.
Everyone was like, "How do we do it?"
I said, "I've got it. I'll go off backwards."
- They were like, "What?" - No!
You said, "I know what's wrong. I'll go off faster."
Yes.
Everyone is going, "No, no, no. Please don't."
And you were like, "I got it, I got it. I'll go off faster."
And you were originally supposed to go the other direction.
And we realized, if you overturn it, you'll stick the landing.
This location, the French were very nervous about giving us this,
and thank you to the city of France for giving us that.
And again, Jenny...
This is incredibly dangerous.
She has to get up to speed and has to stop in time.
It was really difficult to do.
And this was the moment.
This was one of the earliest moments we talked about in the movie.
In fact, breaking Lane out, we talked about in Rogue Nation.
That's right.
During the very last nights of Rogue Nation.
Yes, we were talking about breaking him out and now we're gonna do it.
Yes, because Sean Harris was so upset that he wasn't gonna be killed,
'cause he only wanted to do one movie.
Sean Harris who plays Lane, he's like, "I only want to do one movie."
"Promise me you'll kill me."
And then at the end of Rogue we couldn't figure out how to kill him
and realized it's not the right thing to do.
And he was like, "Oh, my God."
And Don Granger, the producer, said, "You don't have to worry.
"Sean's character's never coming back."
And I said, "Well,
"unless Ethan needs to break him out to accomplish his next mission."
And Don said, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I wanna see that movie."
And I ran to you, you were in your trailer,
Sean was waiting to shoot the scene where he's chasing you.
And I went to your trailer and I said, "Tom, I've got this great idea."
And you turned around and said,
"I gotta break Lane out in the next movie?"
I was like, "What?"
You said, "I've been thinking about it all night.
"What else are we gonna do with him?"
So I said, "Great, let's go tell Sean."
He was like, "You bastards, I'm never gonna get out of here."
And this location is on the other end of the alley
where we shot the plutonium scene inthelane.
- At the beginning of the movie. - This is all in the same location.
And for all this time...
We kept having a camera issue and a focus issue
and we kept having to go back.
We actually shot this scene three times.
Yeah, we had focus problems.
We had to reshoot, unfortunately, Sean's close-up.
Yes, but the value of that was
it allowed us, each time, to get deeper into the scene.
- And you remember... - And find different things.
The first time we shot it, and this is...
My credit goes to you.
The first time we shot it, he doesn't say,
"You should've killed me," until Walker picks him up.
And you watched the scene and you went,
"I think we should move that line sooner.
"That's the line that gets Ethan.
"It's the line from the dream
"and we're losing it by having it come later in the scene."
And so we went back and reshot it and we reshot your performance.
And it's... To your credit.
Tom Cruise...
- You're very generous. - No, no...
Tom Cruise, big movie star.
This Mission: Impossible, it's his franchise,
and only two times in all the years that I've worked with you,
have you ever come into the editing room and gone,
"I gave you something better, man."
And it was this. You came in and you were like...
I gave a very subtle reaction and you were like,
"No, dude, he's freaking me out."
Like, "I gave you a better reaction than that."
I was like, "What?"
I went in and I pulled up all the takes, and I was like,
"He actually did."
I was like, "To your credit."
You're not the kind of guy who comes and... Interestingly enough...
'Cause you've got great taste.
Well, but you will often say,
"I acted it. I can'tjudge it objectively."
It's hard for me to feel to be the effect of my cause.
Right there. Boom.
You were like, "No, dude."
And so we recut the scene
so that you were more distracted and looking away more.
And it affected...
It radiated out and affected the whole cut of the scene.
And you hear the music, I love the music and his performance here.
Yes.
And there's the movie and there's the story.
You see his performance in Rogue and you see him here,
you see the change that he brings.
Yes. And Sean, who is a very gifted actor
and not an actor who wakes up in the morning,
dreaming about being in big Hollywood movies.
Sean, when we would say to him, "This is for the trailer, Sean."
He's like... He doesn't wanna hear it. He hated it.
I was like, "Come on, man. Go for it."
-"Let's go." -"Go for it. Be the villain, man."
And he's trying to bring something authentic, and we're like,
"It's time to be in a movie, Sean."
Yes, exactly.
And right here is where he originally said it.
And he said, "You should've killed me, Ethan,"
and pulled him away.
And here, Walker said, "I can kill..."
As I'm walking away, there was a shot where he said,
-"I can kill 'em all..." -"And we can walk away right now."
And he says, "Death is too good for Hunt."
We got rid of that.
This is the first scene we shot with New.
- Yes. - With Vanessa.
We're finding the character, because, really...
We're discovering like, what...
- Who is she? - This was earlier in the story
when we were playing with this idea
that the movie was about how you were going
deeper and deeper into a hole as John Lark
to get what you were really after.
And Ethan was forced to become
more of a villain to catch the villain.
And we were gonna play it that way,
and you had a whole character you were playing.
And Vanessa, when she showed up,
the dynamic between the two of you changed, do you remember?
And, suddenly, the scene started to become more authentic
and, as a result,
I'm actually more connected to Ethan in the scene.
I'm feeling his vulnerability.
And thank God we...
We just went with what felt right.
Even though we thought the story was going somewhere else.
It's just that the scene was better, and do you remember her...
These moments.
He's on his back foot. Look at the power that she has.
Yes, the comfort and confidence that she has.
And I remember we played different versions.
We're finding it and stuff...
And she's just looking and it's like...
And she was having more fun, being more flighty, and we're like,
"No, you should be threatening, but not mean. Nothing malicious."
It's just... I don't know what's going on in her head.
- She's just a dangerous person... - You wrote this line,
"I had her, and you're gonna bring her to me." I love this.
- And... - She's so good in this.
And we felt like we owed a payoff to this.
- Yes. Yes. - And we agonized about it.
And we were thinking,
"Well, this whole movie has to boil down
"to a conflict between her and Ilsa."
And we realized that's not really the conflict of the movie.
This moment, this kiss was...
I love this because it's...
First of all, I love the thing, her line about family,
"What are you gonna do?"
And I love this kiss, like, "I own you."
It's not like...
She's achieved what she's set out to do
and there's more coming.
And there's more coming and that kiss says,
"I own you." And I love...
Here, we're finding it.
We're finding that where it's not flirty, it's...
- It's dangerous. -"You're mine."
- And now this... - This I love. I love.
This, you son of a bitch, you were like, "You know what?
"Before this scene, there should be a scene
"where she's following me and I get the drop on her."
I'm like, "I don't have time for that. I just wanna get to the scene."
And this whole location
is right next to where Jenny was driving down that colonnade.
- So good. - And I went there with an hour
and walked around and found this choreography
and I'm so glad we did it, so, thank you.
Because, what's beautiful is, look at her performance, you have to.
It has a yearning.
She has a problem.
And it's a problem in conflict with Ethan.
- And the other beautiful thing... - And there's a yearning
that she just has, there's a romance,
there's an emotion there that you feel, and they...
And they're trapped in a maze.
They're trapped. And I love your design of this
because it's... Here's the problem.
It's like, "Here are these obstacles that we have
"and will we ever connect, you know?"
And, "Can we see the forest for the trees?"
And the interesting thing about this, all of which...
There's something that Tom had said more than once,
which is, "I'd rather be lucky than good."
She's wearing green, you're wearing green,
we have all this beautiful green.
None of this was planned before we shot it.
She chose that outfit and you chose that suit,
separate of each other
when you did the White Widow scene,
which was a week before.
Yes, and I remember
I didn't like the suit at the beginning
and then you're like, "We went the day before for..."
I said, "Keep it."
Jeffrey, thank you very much.
Jeffrey Kurland, our costume designer.
He's a fantastic, fantastic guy. Genius.
- Thank you, Jeffrey. - It all looks like design.
And it's actually the movie gods smiling on us,
right down to Rebecca's eyes, your eyes.
It was...
Look at that, the lighting...
And by the way, some of that is natural light
and a lot of that is Martin Smith, our gaffer,
and Rob Hardy...
As the light was changing throughout the day.
Tricky.
A scene takes a minute to watch, but it takes all day to shoot,
and the sun is very uncooperative in that regard.
- And we... - We always wanted
someone like Ingrid Bergman, do you know what I mean?
That was who we wanted, always.
She has a timeless vulnerability
and she has the great "It"
that an actor like Rebecca has
is, "I don't know what she wants, but I want her to get it."
Yes. Exactly.
- Whatever it is she wants. - Well, shejust draws you right in.
She really does.
She's very strong that way. And very trusting.
Our dynamic, many people have pointed out...
We've made so many movies together,
and are after so much of the same thing
that a lot of times we've had the conversation
without actually articulating it.
And Rebecca is often there going,
"You know, no one understands what you're doing, except you.
-"Can you just..." -"Just tell me."
Yes, but she never gets frustrated by it.
She's just great like, "Okay, boys, come back to Earth.
-"Tell me what's going on." -"Let me in. Let me in."
And originally, here, at the end of this scene,
there was another scene
to remind you of Angela Bassett and Alec Baldwin,
who'd been out for a while.
And as we were going to...
As we were compressing the scene...
As we were compressing the movie to make the movie shorter,
I experimented with lifting that scene out.
Another thing that's going on in this scene
is that same music is playing over the wedding.
But now what's playing, we've taken out all the high strings.
And now it becomes... Same music, but more emotional.
And as you walked away, this dissolve
that originally took us to a scene about you,
takes us into this dream.
And this was Rob Hardy and I.
We came to work that day going,
"We have had no time to plan this dream."
Originally, it was in a black space,
and she came out of darkness, and you came out of darkness,
so we didn't know how to actually shoot that with the elements we had.
And this is all left-over stuff from
-the Grand Palais... - It's fantastic.
...that was just sitting on the stage.
I know, I showed up on the set like...
-"What the hell are we doing?" -"What are you doing?"
You guys threw this together in about 20 minutes.
Yeah. And I was like, "Trust me. Trust me. It's gonna be cool."
I was like, "This is awesome." And it is.
It's this whole section. And then, as you wake up...
And it's another rule we've broken in Mission: Impossible,
we've jumped ahead to another place before we've established it.
- Yeah. - And you come out of it going,
"How much of this has been a dream?"
It was a really impactful cut
that we discovered in the editing room and just went with.
This was shot right next to St. Paul's.
- Yeah. - We shot it in about half an hour.
- Same day. - Yeah.
And this is one of my favorite cues in the entire movie.
But also, structurally, taking Angela out... I love this cue.
I love this cue, I love this shot that's coming up, by the way.
Well, all of this business...
- I'm feeling the team... - Yes.
-...but nothing is stopping. - No.
And I'm feeling all of their collaboration together.
The choreography's excellent. I love this, how the lights go on.
And we're dealing, bringing in Alec.
We don't have enough time to talk about it,
but we had a whole different story point
that we were going to go through here.
- But then, having Alec here... - That's right.
It was gonna go someplace else entirely,
and the movie was struggling to get there.
Yeah.
And interestingly, Alec,
in the wide shot there, was not holding the dossier.
- Do you remember? - Yeah.
We moved on to the closer shot and went,
"Oh, my God, I forgot the dossier. We'll fix it later."
And they put it in his hand digitally, later.
It was perfect!
So much fun. And all of this, you remember,
we had to shoot this location with no time...
My foot, my ankle... I couldn't even walk.
-'Cause they'd done the running... - This was the...
- The day before. - I did the running the day before
and I couldn't walk in any of these things.
I literally couldn't walk.
Like, in-between takes, I'm sitting down.
So here, Tom has a broken foot
and had finished the foot chase the day before,
and Alec is overdue for a double hip replacement,
to come and shoot this scene.
So the both of you are out of your minds in pain.
And by the way, to understand the pain of a hip replacement,
it is like having a knife stuck in your hip
when your hip is giving out like that.
And Tom is absolutely blind with pain.
He had finished the foot chase
on an ankle that he had broken five months before.
Yes.
And that's why I blocked this scene
-the way that I did. - Exactly!
I was like, "Okay, I've got an idea.
"How about you don't walk in this scene?"
Yes, exactly!
"Let me lean on the table!"
Please, just anything to support myself.
Yes.
And this location, we had in our pocket...
It was a great location.
And we never knew what scene we were gonna shoot...
Didn't we know about this location in Rogue?
Yes.
So we knew about this location on Rogue Nation...
We did.
And you had to design this and the entire gun fight...
- On the morning. -...on the morning.
Again, because our schedule was so compressed
and because we were still figuring out...
The story. Where are we?
...the story right up until days before we did it.
Your performance here is great.
And what's lovely about this scene is...
And Eddie Hamilton watching it, he was going,
"But they would already know this information."
And I'd look at him and say, "Yes, Eddie,"
and he goes, "Oh, I get it. Okay."
That this is all for Walker's benefit.
- This is all for Walker. - It's all real.
It's all true emotion,
-but it's all a performance. - Yes.
And Eddie was so caught up in the scene
that he kept saying,
"Why would Hunley be telling them this if they already know?"
I know. So you see, the second time,
how we're all performing, everything is for Walker.
And here's...
This is why you have Alec Baldwin.
- He's so good. - Oh, God. This guy...
ltjust brings such gravity to everything that you do.
And again, you remember,
this scene was originally written as him coming to help you.
And I realized
-there's no conflict in this scene. - No.
And when we changed that, when we turned it into this battle...
Now, two things I gotta give credit to Alec Baldwin for.
Alec said...
He said, "I have one request
"if I'm going to do another one." I said, "What?"
And he goes, "I wanna die. I wanna die helping Ethan."
- Yes, saving me. - And on the day, I said,
"Okay, so Ethan's going to pull a gun on you,
"and they're gonna take you into another room."
And he goes, "Why? That's like another half a page of dialogue.
"Why are you pointing a gun at me?"
He goes, "Just take a needle and jab it into my neck."
And I was like, "Wait, we have a needle.
"We established it at the beginning of the movie."
And that's the kind of collaboration you get out of Alec Baldwin.
He's on story, and he's like,
"Look, if it gets me out of the scene faster
"but makes the story better, make the story better."
And also, it meant he didn't have to walk around on his hip.
But he just also understands story
-and understands this movie so well. - Yes.
That he was able to...
I mean, look at the stuff that he brings.
Yes. And this whole scene was shot over two days.
All this dialogue took so long because of all the coverage,
and all the little bits of storytelling that are required.
I love your performance in this.
- And Alec, too. - Thank you. Yeah.
Rob Hardy, who loves to shoot in wide lenses...
For people who don't understand focal length,
a wide lens is like the human eye.
And a long lens has a much softer background.
And Rob had started to get more comfortable with long lenses,
and he shot this entire scene on one long lens, even the wide shots.
That's what gives it this unique look.
And when I came to the location,
I said, "We're gonna have all these pages of dialogue here.
"When the gun fight starts, the environment needs to change."
Because we've had this motif of evolving...
- Yeah. - But we can't leave the space,
so let's turn off all the lights.
And Rob and Martin Smith, the gaffer, were absolutely horrified.
They said, "Well, then it's gonna be dark."
I said, "No. Remember when we came and scouted this location,
"there were these two construction lights,
"and it was the only light in this space.
"What if we have these emergency lights come on?"
And that changed the whole space without really changing it.
It was a fantastic idea.
Because you feel this progression in story and visual progression.
And I wouldn't have thought of it
if those construction lights hadn't been on.
That's making movies. You have to be able to relax.
It's intense, but you have to be able to relax, and know a good idea.
- Relax and don't get comfortable. - Exactly.
Relax and get to a place where you're just like,
-"I'm looking at this space..." - Relax, don't get comfortable,
but you've gotta be in present times, seeing what you're seeing,
seize opportunities and seize mistakes and turn them into opportunities.
That's exactly...
- Yes, and accept disaster. - Yes.
- You've gotta welcome chaos... - Yes.
...because it's coming one way or another, as this movie proved.
- Here's a shot done in-camera. - Yes.
We used a motion control camera,
so that we could do the same shot two times.
We are always trying to find a fun way to do the mask gags, that isn't CG.
None of this required any CGI whatsoever.
That shot's all done practically,
and it's just a simple split screen,
one of the oldest techniques there is.
- And all of this... Yeah. - This you wrote, right the morning.
Right, this whole staging was just, "How do we get out of here?"
The whole thing of
"How much do we see Lane? How do we not see Lane?"
And, "What's Lane's behavior?"
Yes, and, "What's Lane's behavior?"
If Lane is Lane and not Simon,
and you can see he's handling him there,
but wasn't handling him earlier, we played with all these...
We have to keep honest and then go, "Okay, we're gonna be off."
Yes. And Sean Harris, in the moment, coming up,
he said...
Here we are, establishing...
This is all taking our time to establish this,
to establish the knife.
That was the shot you kept saying,
"I wanna see the knife.
"I wanna know it's there.
"And I wanna tell the audience something's coming."
So that even when Walker's been caught,
-he's still dangerous. - We know it's there.
Still subconsciously thinking about the knife.
Now, look at this. This scene is so much fun.
- This is so much fun. - And here's Sean playing Benji.
- Playing Benji and he said... - Playing Sean. It's so much fun.
Yes, and Sean's method was to say,
"Well, I think I'm Benji now,
"and Benji thinks he's giving the performance of a lifetime,
-"so he's overdoing it." - Yes.
And I said, "Sean, no offense, you should overdo it more often.
"You're really good at it. You're really good at it."
And, you remember, we shot a much longer scene...
- Yes. -...that explained the whole movie,
-and you didn't need it. - No.
- And nobody asked for it. - No.
But we made clear what everything... How did the plutonium end up there?
Thais the first swear word in a Mission: Impossible movie.
That is true.
My apologies to all the mothers and fathers out there
who brought 12-year-old kids who didn't know that word.
I'm sure there was at least one of them.
I really like their performances. They came on this clay.
- Yeah. - And they just...
- Each take, they brought it. - They brought it.
Every take.
I was so worried we'd be in this cell
for a long time finding this scene.
- And we didn't have the time... - They crushed it.
They crushed it. And when you have those moments...
And there's one coming up later
which I'm gonna point out, involving you.
When you have those moments,
when you have a complex scene and very little time...
Look at Sean. Look at his eyes.
And there's the plot of the movie.
"The Apostles will give you the plutonium."
And people, I love that their response to this has been either,
"It's the most convoluted plot" or that, "It's the simplest plot."
- Yes, exactly! - Depending on who reviews the movie.
Okay, hold it.
I love this moment from Sean.
I love this moment. Henry realizes... The audience...
- He's starting to tremble. - And I like his...
- Sorry. I love to watch it! - It is... Yes.
When you wrote that line, it's just...
Look at him.
Everybody here was having fun.
- Okay, now, Alec. - Alec. Improvised line.
That was improvised as well.
And it was, again, Alec, what he brings to it...
Just having so much fun playing this character
and being in the movie.
And the audience are in the palm of his hand.
Every time I've watched this movie with a crowd.
They just... And you just love it.
And the choice Lorne made here...
This music is the end of the movie.
And it was a really bold one.
And, you remember, we pulled it back a little bit.
- Yeah. - Because it really felt like
the end of the movie.
But it was a great instinct of his to feel like it's all over,
and this is what the movie was about.
- You feel the team together. - Again, you feel like "Okay..."
- You're feeling delivery. - Yes.
All of this sense of delivery is bringing you...
It's unpreparing you for what's about to happen.
And that's all very much... That's a calculation.
And again, a sense of being surrounded.
And you're looking very carefully,
Walker is not the one that's surrounded.
In that shot, he looks surrounded.
But the truth of the matter is,
the trap is actually going the other way.
And, you remember, we spent a lot of time about,
-"Where will the table be?" - Yes.
"Where will they be standing? What's the depth of the space?"
It all radiates outward from this moment.
- And everything else... - It's very tricky, him walking...
- Where is he walking from? - Where is he walking from?
- You and I had too many discussions... - Oh, God.
- I don't know where I am in the space. - Yes.
- Where's he walking from? - Yes.
- And we argued about which way... - Yes.
We debated, "Which way did they come from?
"Was he here? Was he there?"
And we ultimately wanted him to land in that space
without too much shoe leather.
And these shots of Angela,
we stole in a scene that we ended up cutting out of the movie.
Originally, she was just on the phone.
This was tricky.
- The cue, the design of this... - This is where... Now the lighting,
it becomes "Enter the Nightmare,"
and you'll notice all of the light is provided by flashlights,
or these bright lights that you're seeing in the background
-where everything becomes silhouette. - Yeah, man.
We had to move those lights constantly.
And when do you bring Ilsa in?
- At which point, you know? - That's right.
Editorially, and also getting these shots.
And then...
- And making Angela's agenda clear. - Yes.
Remember, we added a lot of the lines in post
so that you understood she was not in league with Walker.
People were starting to think that they were in it together.
Yep, and that she's not.
- She's got her own agenda. - Now he knows what's coming.
Yes.
And this is one of the earlier shots we designed in this scene.
Now, how much time did it take to know this is going?
And all of this was shot in a day.
All of the gun fight, everything. We had no time.
And it's little pieces, but they can't be cut.
You remember, I said, "We don't have time, I'm gonna do shaky-cam.
"I'm gonna get us out of here.
"It's gonna be silhouettes and confusion."
And I tried to do it, and I simply couldn't.
- The camera just kept settling. - It didn't work.
- It just didn't work.
And we're like, "Okay, we have to stick with..."
-"Stick with what we know." - And just keep going.
We're all just, "Let's go, we're in this area, just do that."
And you guys had to leave this day early
-to go to Graham Norton. - Oh, my gosh. That's right.
Do you remember? So we had extra pressure.
- Yes. - Yeah.
Here it is.
- Great performance. - Fantastic.
And...
All of this was happening at...
Some of these shots where you're not in, you're already gone.
You guys had to leave and go to Graham Norton.
It was all such chaos,
and little shots on the table that we got, months later.
But again, all of this was figured out,
choreographed and shot in a single day.
And it was only from having experience of shooting gunfights
that I had confidence to do it.
But also, we'd never had a real gunfight
-in a Mission movie. - No.
- And had deliberately avoided it. - Yeah.
We were very sensitive to guns and gun-handling.
But the movie was sort of saying this is where it was going.
This is where we needed to go for this.
Yes, and I loved this,
I loved that necessity provided us with...
I was, like, either that Luther ends up saving you...
It takes him into a different place than we've seen him before.
And then, these moments with you guys were really nice.
And originally, you remember, we did it all
silently.
And you called me in the middle of the night.
And the audience was saying, "We want more of a moment
-"between Ethan and Hunley." - Yeah.
- They wanted him to say something. - Yes.
And we were, like, "What's he gonna say?"
And you called me in the middle of the night,
and you said, "I know what it is. I know what it is."
And it was, "Go."
And it worked beautifully, so Alec actually recorded that on an iPhone.
Is that the final...
- That's the final? - With an iPhone!
He did an iPhone recording when he was in Long Island, I think.
And he gave me several versions of, "Go."
And e-mailed them to us.
He texted it to me.
- That's technology. - That's amazing. Look at that.
And again, the dynamic of Ethan.
Ethan saving Ilsa,
or Ilsa saving Ethan.
And then, Ethan ultimately delivering Ilsa.
That motif that we brought back from Rogue Nation.
And we wondered...
I love this. The editing. They're already there.
I wondered how...
You know, we talked about it.
How's the movie gonna recover from Hunley's death?
It's a broken ankle. Every time I look at this, I'm thinking...
His right foot is broken in every shot of the foot chase,
except half of one shot, which I'll point out to you. Broken foot.
St. Paul's Cathedral, thank you so much.
- Everybody at St. Paul's... - Oh, my gosh, guys, thank you.
...who let us do this. It was an enormous act of good faith.
And this shot here was originally coverage
we were gonna cut from this shot.
And when we watched it on the monitor,
we realized it's the first part of a very gradual reveal
of what's actually happening in the church.
And we saw this, I started laughing.
And we said, "Oh, my God," this is...
And most importantly, we debated wedding or funeral.
- You remember? - Yes. Yes.
There was a lot of debate as to which one...
Which one it was going to be.
And the funeral is what got you out of...
- It helped the transition. - It helped the audience.
And frankly, it's a little more inappropriate.
- Yes. - Broken foot.
- Look at this. - That was not an easy shot to get.
Again, St. Paul, gorgeous location.
- All of these shots were shot later. - We came up with this...
- Yes. - Yeah, we came up with this...
Well, because again, you were...
Every day you'd come to set, and you'd be, like,
"Okay, what's Benji saying to me here?"
And we would play with different things.
So, everything that you improvised to Benji,
we then had to shoot later.
Yeah, you would throw me lines, and we'd just keep playing.
Yeah, we were just playing with what your conversation was.
None of it was really planned.
- This was the day you broke your foot. - Yes!
- We had nothing better to do! - You went and shot...
You went and shot Henry after I broke it.
I was like, let's just shoot Henry walking around
to burn up the rest of the day.
And I shot versions of it with the case and without the case,
because we didn't know
-what's gonna happen. - Is he gonna have the plutonium?
- We didn't know. - We didn't know
if there was gonna be an exchange, we didn't know where...
Is this where they lose the third plutonium?
This is actually 120 feet from one building to the other,
but magically, it doesn't look like it.
Nope.
We were originally gonna have a big crane
that you were gonna get on and swing over, and I went...
And when I was scouting that roof, I went, "Wait a minute.
"This looks like it's 10 feet away."
And of course, everybody in London knows how ridiculous that is.
And again, 360-degree geography.
It started on that roof. This roof, right here.
- Yes. - This is where it happens.
This is part two of a two-part shot
that we stitched together.
- And Tom's ankle is broken. - I start...
This was shot five months after...
- Here it is. This is the start. - This.
And here's where it happens.
- I go in, Take 3... - Go!
That hurts.
First time I grabbed the pole, broken, I know it.
All of this is being shot simultaneously.
All these cameras are rolling at the same time.
- And it's all done in one take. - I have to get past camera.
Yes, exactly, "I gotta get past camera."
- Gotta get past camera. - And I went to see you,
and you were laying on this...
You were laying on a couch with your foot up
and a bag of ice on it.
And you said, "Did we get the shot?"
And I said, "Yeah, yeah, we got it." You said, "Good,
-"because we're not coming back." - Yeah.
"It's broken."
This woman, Theon, she is so perfect.
The extra casting in these scenes...
It's a very big deal. You don't think much about it.
But look at all the extras.
Especially the extras in the church, they're extraordinary.
A shout out to all of them.
One wrong extra can really take a scene apart.
Everybody in this was really excellent,
and helping to convey...
We came up with this, right before...
lmprov.
And originally, the jump was only eight feet.
You were gonna smash through the window,
-and you were just gonna keep going. - Leap out.
And then we were looking at it going,
-"Why is he hesitating?" - I love this.
It's like...
- The lady in the black dress. - Yes!
- I love it. - Black and white dress.
Yes, the lady putting her hand on her mouth.
And again, that was you and I
sitting and we were riffing on different reactions.
Riffing on different things. Let's go through different reactions,
and coming up with an idea to go,
"How do we start winning the audience,
-"but without breaking character?" - That's right.
Finding the character comedy that we love.
- It's not jokes. - No.
- It's humor. It never breaks wit. - It's character and it's wit.
- Yes. - So how?
I loved doing this, but it hurt.
It hurt, and you remember
you were originally gonna jump through the glass,
bounce off a train, and tackle a guy in the train station
before we knew that the tracking thing was in his neck,
and you couldn't do it, anyway?
And I said to you, I go...
This is a cool shot, McQ.
I love the design of this. So cool.
And that was the last shot...
That was the last running shot right there.
So, you see me going, "I'm going for it. This is it!"
That's right. That's right.
That was in the morning.
Lorne, by the way, talks about this in his commentary.
There's a really nice piece about how this is all composed.
You should definitely check it out.
But, you remember, you were gonna jump
-through the train bridge. - Yes. That's right.
And you and I talked about it and I said, "You know what?
"Here's my problem with the stunt.
"Two things. I can't see your face, and it isn't that great a stunt.
"Why are we gonna do this?"
And there's so much other stuff coming up.
- And thank God we did. - I know.
Because that was when the tracking device was on his coat,
and not on his neck.
And we would've cut it out of the movie, anyway.
It was how you and I are constantly evaluating
how is this stunt,
you know, subjective? But more importantly,
it was before we had the idea of you jumping out the window.
So we still got the jump,
but we got it with character, and not spectacle.
And not spectacle.
And seeing something that...
- I like his performance here. - Performance is wonderful.
And then this, remember, we originally...
Dude, I love your design, though.
Always, you write it, you're like, "Okay, no.
"He's staring at me."
And when I get there, and it's just so funny.
Every time, we get a laugh.
And I was totally inspired by that,
just in the writing of the scene.
'Cause I thought, we've seen this scene before.
We've seen other characters jump on the bottom of elevators.
But this notion that...
Our expectation is
that he's not gonna know you're there.
And you're totally vulnerable.
- Puts the vulnerability on you. - Yes.
And also, the way we originally edited this scene,
we saw the photograph before you did.
And it forced a cut
that took away the emotion from Ethan.
And by following Ethan's emotion in these scenes,
and letting Ethan's emotion dictate the cuts...
It pulls you in.
Lighting in this is extraordinary.
- Yeah, lighting is exceptional. - Looks really great.
I loved filming this.
We built this roof on a backlot.
- And that was... - This was real.
And everybody was saying, "You don't need to go on the real thing.
"We have the backlot shot."
-I was, like, "Really?" -"Really?
-"We're doing this." -"Wait till we get there."
- And you wouldn't have this. - That.
And this shot, we shot on the fly, no pun intended.
There was no time to create...
There was so much to do that day.
We were doing it all by walkie-talkie,
and we were finding the shot.
We basically climb up the side of the building.
- On that rickety ladder. - Yes.
It was the day, the last running day that I had.
- And we did this shot. - It was horrible.
There is no elevator up to the top of that.
You actually had to climb a wooden ladder.
It was so cool.
And this was...
We originally had a scene in between this.
That kind of got into character and subplot,
and all of this other stuff.
And we took it out, and it kept on story.
Just made a much more effective...
There's a lot of... You and I debated back and forth.
The relationship, the choreography...
And kind of went, "I'm glad.
-"I'm happy with the decision." - Yeah.
I'm really happy because they were absolutely the right decision.
There was a whole scene between you and Ilsa.
And it didn't need to be there.
We always wanted to have some sort of
combat with Ethan and Ilsa in a way that feels...
Just that moment.
That comes from how they care about each other, not...
Yeah.
It's the conflict between how they feel about each other,
and what they must each do.
And I think what we realized is,
there's more of their story to tell yet.
- It was kind of resolving their story. - At the end, we felt that
with the story that's gonna come with Michelle...
That's just it. It's what you felt.
The way into the scene was...
People were saying, "But what about Julia?"
And we were asking that same question again.
- What about Julia? - And we need to resolve that story.
- So, for future Missions. - Yeah.
I'm sure you've got at least 10 more in you.
And this scene was when we talked about bringing Julia back.
- This was the second scene. - Yes.
I knew that if we were gonna introduce her,
someone had to tell the story to Julia.
And I knew right... To Ilsa, rather.
- And that's Ving. It's Luther. - And I knew it should be Ving.
And the day they showed up...
You know...
Ving's never really done anything like this in Mission.
And I didn't really know...
It was another scene, like, when Sean and Henry showed up.
Rebecca and Ving were just crushing this scene.
And something I like to point out,
what's being said is often just as important as who is listening.
And as good as Ving is in this scene,
Rebecca's reactions to what Ving is saying...
Beautiful. Look at that.
What Rebecca's doing in the movie
is communicating emotions that Ethan can't.
Or Ethan won't.
And you're deepening their relationship,
by showing the understanding that she has of him.
It's a very fine line you have to walk,
'cause you don't wanna make her weepy, either.
- She's talking about character's... - Or compassionate.
- There's caring. - Just compassionate.
- As there's an empathy. - Yes.
That Rebecca has, that Ilsa has for Ethan.
And Rebecca is just so good
-at communicating that... - I know. Look at that.
Without ever sacrificing her character.
- And Ving was so good here. - Both of them.
- Yeah. - Really.
- Look at that, look. Look. - Look at this...
- And then this shot... - I love that reaction Luther and I...
- Yeah. - Yes.
And that reveal, that shot was...
Look at this great location.
It was this parking garage that was just filled with water.
And one of the challenges of that is there's a lot of lights in there.
- And it's freezing. - And space heaters and everything.
That's a very dangerous environment to work in.
Yes! Electricity.
You guys think the helicopter chase is dangerous.
Everybody could have been electrocuted.
The movie could have... Everything could have ended this day.
That could've been it.
I don't care how many rubber boots you're wearing.
And the other thing about this scene that we just went through,
it's the exposition that's setting you up for the third act of the movie.
We're introducing new stakes, yet again.
And these scenes are always a challenge.
And normally, we tend to shoot these scenes
in as confined an environment as possible,
so we can go back and reshoot them and re-tweak them.
And we didn't have the option to do that, we really...
- We had to nail it. - We really had to know.
And a lot of times, we'll overshoot the story
-so that we can cut it back. - Always.
But, and this...
- It was right there. - It was right there.
- Yeah, we felt, by now... - After three of them!
After three of them, or in your case six of them.
Six of them.
But also, by now, in the movie, the rules were clearer...
- Yeah. -...and the options were fewer,
and what needed to be made clear.
And also, we'd spent a couple weeks in the editing room
-during the break. - That's right. During the break...
- We had a hiatus. -...we had to go through...
- Yes. -...how...
We had a hiatus when Tom broke his ankle, and it allowed us...
- Time to cut working. -...to cut... Yeah.
But what I love about a Mission movie also
is you can go to Kashmir, push it in a computer screen,
and then cut to these beautiful shots.
This is actually... We're shooting in New Zealand for Kashmir.
There was a whole great scene that you wrote and shot that we loved
where we come upon a camp
-where you see... - The border?
- The border. - Yeah.
And you see that Lane and Walker
have basically annihilated these people at the border.
And it was haunting, and it was in the first trailer.
Yeah, it was in the first trailer...
- I loved it. -...and in our deleted shots reel,
we've included some shots from that scene which you'll see.
- It was very cool. - And the truth of the matter is,
-it's just not Mission. - No.
- And what it was for... - It slowed everything down.
But what it was for...
It was before Walker killed Lane...
- Hunley. - Yes.
And it was to establish
-what kind of villains they were. - It was before we decided
-that Lane killed Hunley. - Yes. That's right.
And the scene was meant to establish the brutality
of Walker and Lane, and they had murdered all these people.
- But again... - You didn't need it.
...you didn't need it, and also,
it's better to see the character do it.
- That's correct. - That's where I feel it.
That's right.
And so, all of this dialogue was...
And, you remember, we went back and shot it again,
this is a typical scene where you're getting an information dump.
And we shot it a little earlier in the London part of our shooting
when we were at the studio,
and because you shoot it in this confined environment,
you're allowed to go back and change it.
And we had to just... We had to tweak little bits and...
And, you remember, we debated long and hard about motive.
This is really the only nod to the villains' motive,
their plot in the movie,
which is always a very difficult thing.
And originally, Kashmir is actually
a very complicated political environment.
And we thought, "Yeah. They would all know that.
"So why would they be explaining it to each other?"
And we decided, what people understand is water.
And this I have to...
This is my apology to...
Apparently, when we did the map, even though we vetted the movie,
saying "Indian-controlled Kashmir"
was actually an insensitive way of wording it.
And some people approached me on social media,
and so I apologize.
Going back to the map, and if I offended anybody with the way...
It was really all just a matter of making people understand
the different countries that were involved.
Where we are, the geography.
I just, as an ignorant American, I didn't know enough.
But we did vet it, and nobody said anything.
For example, when we did Russia,
the Russians, when we showed it to them, they said,
"This is how you be careful with the map of Russia."
- Yes. - Yes.
So we did check. Nobody gave us the flag,
-for anybody upset about that. - Yeah.
- Love the score here, by the way. - Yeah.
This is New Zealand.
And this camp,
except for the deep background, all of this was built practically.
And all of it is arranged around a single shot.
When we went down to that location,
we still hadn't worked out
a lot of what was happening on the ground,
but we knew that Ethan had to meet Julia,
and we knew that Julia...
We wanted to put her in the absolute best spot we possibly could.
The sun rises behind those mountains behind them,
and as a result, it only gives us five hours of light a day,
'cause it was the wintertime.
So, it's very low light, very warm and very beautiful,
but there's very little of it.
So I went a couple days before, and arranged the entire camp
around where Julia would be standing...
- For this moment. -...right where Tom is now,
and all to give you this moment.
And this was the third moment.
- When we first... Yes, knowing... - That moment right there.
First was the dream, second was the scene with Luther,
and the third thing we knew was this scene.
So this is one of the earliest scenes we actually wrote for the movie.
This shot, I love. Look at her.
Look at the light... First of all.
First of all, she's a brilliant actress.
Michelle Monaghan is incredible,
and came to us at a point
when we hadn't worked out a lot of this business in the camp.
We knew this scene.
Remember they were gonna have a baby at one point?
- Yes, they were gonna have a baby. - Two days before we lost that...
I cast a baby and I looked at it, and was like,
"This is just too much business in this scene.
"It's getting in the way."
- And it was also Luther... - He's fantastic, too, in this.
- He's amazing. - It's like...
Well, this is a very tricky scene because all the actors are playing
a lot of subtext along with the text,
and you have to do one of the most challenging things in the movie,
which is, you have to tell the audience you're lying,
but not lie.
You see what I'm saying?
Notice that there's...
Yeah, and also to tell her, "No, I'm working."
- Like, this is... - Yes.
And so, you look at the way we positioned the cameras.
There's a camera over Wes' left shoulder,
that becomes about the conversation between the two of you,
and there's a camera over Michelle's right shoulder,
which becomes the conversation between the two of you.
There's two separate conversations happening.
And part of the thing about the light that's really tricky is
we shot this later in the day...
Great performance by Rebecca. Go on. Shot it late in the day.
We shot it late in the day,
so they had lots of time to do their side of the scene,
and you had eight minutes before the sun went down.
For my whole take!
For all your coverage in this scene.
And you said, "Just shoot them first, you can shoot me later!"
I'm standing in front of a tent, "Get this light! Get this light!"
That's very generous. That's...
But that's what you and I do. We know it...
It's like, serve them up,
and eight minutes, you and I looked at each other,
-"We'll get it. Let's go." -"We'll get it."
Well, I was like, "It's eight minutes.
"I mean, the sun's really going down.
"I'd like you to have more time."
Also, keep in mind, in that eight minutes,
you have to play the scene three different ways,
because remember we said
it's like play one where you're just being totally straight...
Play one where you're completely lying,
and play one where you're kind of in the middle.
It gave us color to play with and we used all the middle.
It's so well acted.
This is a... Really, you're... What we used is one take,
and it's really a testament
-to how great you are in this scene. - Thank you. And your direction.
I mean, everybody in this scene is phenomenal.
Well, thank you.
And the tricky part of it is, "Where do you cut and when?"
Because it could be totally misdirecting if you got it wrong.
The editing on this is so good, the design, where you place the team.
Michelle came in and she just... She's unbelievable.
And I love what you did with Rebecca,
and having Ilsa feeling for Ethan, her friend,
this man she cares about, this relationship.
And to Rebecca's credit, she didn't know what that story was yet.
- No. No. - So she's like, "What am I doing?
"Aren't I looking for a nuclear bomb?" I was like, "No, no, no.
"There's a whole other thing going on here and I need you to trust me."
And so everything she's doing there
is getting emotional about the scene and going,
"Why am I getting so emotional? There's a bomb!"
- Exactly. -"Why... What am I...
-"Okay, I'll do it." - I know.
And she's really wonderful that way, she's very supportive,
and very trusting.
This, you remember? We had minutes to shoot some of these things.
And all of this was under the pressure of the fact
that you had to go train for the helicopter scene.
Yes, 'cause I'm also training every day.
Obviously, it's before I broke my ankle,
I'm training every day for the helicopter,
so all the stunts on the helicopter I've been...
I went to Airbus, I got my license in 12 days,
but spent the next year-and-a-half training to become...
- My favorite cut in the movie. - Love that cut.
It's great.
- Sorry, you were saying... - No, no.
I trained after that to be a commercial pilot, aerobatic pilot...
There's a story there that Wes is telling about...
Yes, go on. No.
- The story that he's telling... Sorry. - No, no, no.
That there's not jealousy in that scene.
It's an understanding that his wife's past has come back,
and I don't know the story.
Lorne's score here is unbelievable, landing on these entrances,
it's really wonderful.
I love the sense of team
-that was coming together here. - Yes.
And this is as the movie... This is early in the movie,
and it's our second location,
and it's as we're starting to find the team rhythm of the movie.
- Yes, and the story. - Yes.
Shot that in New Zealand.
How to make this truck look fast? Lots of cuts.
Yes.
There's Henry, I'm going down.
Down the hill and we forgot to shoot this dialogue.
So this is months later on a hillside...
- And she's pregnant. - She's pregnant.
And that was the hill that was gonna be where your helicopter rolled down.
- Great. - And this was back in New Zealand.
"I'll figure it out."
- That's the Mission motto. - That's the Mission motto.
It's like, "That's the cue," I was like, "What do we do now?"
"I'll figure it out."
And that was your suggestion, by the way.
- It was, "Don't look. Don't look." -"Don't look. Don't look."
And I was like, "I know what it is. I know what it is."
He goes, it's something. It's like, "Tell her not to look."
I was like, "I know exactly what he said."
Yes, exactly.
Great note.
And do you remember, originally, when the helicopter took off,
we didn't follow you?
We cut to that shot sooner to show your face,
and it was Eddie Hamilton who was like,
"No, no, no. Stay with the helicopter."
- And that was not our instinct. - No.
Our instinct was, boom, how do you get to the shot sooner?
And it actually had a real impact.
This is one of the lovely discoveries
that the teams that begin forming in this third act
all came from the necessity of who's where and doing what.
The whole design of the bomb and the doomsday scenario
all came about from, "Well, I need Ethan and Ilsa to be..."
"I need Ilsa and Benji to be doing something.
"I need Luther and Julia to be doing something."
Brilliant design, McQ.
That's the stuff that you do so damn well.
- It's all character, it's all story. - Thank you.
- It's all necessity. - Yes.
And it all comes...
That was tricky to figure out actually.
- That hurts. - That hurts. That does hurt.
That was tricky to figure out,
like, instead of just letting go.
And I have to say, you don't wanna let go.
- No. -'Cause you're going down your back.
- That, we came up with... - That shot on the day...
- Do you remember that? - Yep.
You were saying, you were just like...
You had this shot and you were trying to articulate it
and you were like, "How do we show Ethan on the bag?"
And it's like a hill somewhere, I go, "I got it. I know what you need."
We went and scouted,
and we got dropped off on the side of a mountain,
and it was cold.
And you were waiting while we were trying to get the camera in place,
and what you've got to appreciate is how close Tom is to that hillside,
and if that bag snagged on those trees,
the only option the pilot had was to cut the payload with Tom.
I love this pull-away shot.
We got that the second day.
- Do you remember? - Second day. Yep.
We did it once, and I was like, "We can do it better."
He wasn't close enough as I was climbing up the bag. Do you remember?
- And it was too long. - Yes.
It was too long, and that other helicopter
-wasn't in the background. - Yes.
And I said, "Guys, we can do this better."
And we went back and got it,
and we ended up using all the shots in conjunction with each other,
but a lot of our obsession was...
I'm glad you wait. Editorially, it's like,
I like you're taking time with me breathing.
It was exhausting climbing up that rope.
The movie is taking its time here.
Well, what I was about to say is our obsession was
-anywhere we can hold in the shot. - Long cut. Yes.
And we were being discouraged from shooting this moment.
- Yes. - They were saying, "It's boring."
They're saying, "No, it's boring, don't do it."
You could see in the EPK, I'm yelling at them.
-"This is what I'm gonna do." - It's like, "I can do it!"
-"Just get out of my way!" -"Just get out of my way!"
Look at that.
- This is really great. - This was fun.
- This is all fun. - It's the truth.
You and Adrian worked on this forever.
- It was so much fun. - Gosh. Look at this.
And another thing is that...
This is obviously all stuff that everybody would be dead
if they were doing it for real.
And so we had to find our moments in the story
when we were doing things that were not real...
- This is all on a stage. - I like that shot where he falls.
Yes. And what's really incredible is,
you can't tell the difference between...
- That's real. All that's real. - That's real.
And that's what's really effective about the work
that Jody Johnson and his team did.
- Yeah. - Because we had to get you
to the place where it was real.
All this is practical here.
But some of it, you'd be surprised.
- Yeah. - Some of it, you'd be surprised.
And then what's really nice...
You remember, we shot a whole bunch of stuff on a backlot
of close-ups of you
because we felt like the more close-ups we had,
the more connected we were with Ethan.
And we shot a ton, but we threw it all out.
It just wasn't working.
Remember the first preview we had,
everyone's, like, "He's talking too much."
Yeah, exactly. "Why is he talking so much?"
- Which we're grateful for. - And we thought, "Oh, yeah."
- We just threw it out. - We thought audiences needed it.
And so look at all of this stuff. These are...
All these camera angles are designed to show you
that not only is there not another pilot in the helicopter,
there's not another seat for another pilot,
and it creates visibility that creates completely unique shots for you.
And then, of course, we have to teach the audience just a little bit
- About helicopters. -...about flying a helicopter
and how difficult it is.
And we had... We shot a lot of stuff
of, "How much did Ethan know about flying a helicopter?"
So we could shoot...
Ethan knew nothing...
- Yes. I performed, I know nothing... - Yeah.
To different levels of, "I know a little bit."
I have some sense of how you were.
I have to say this is all in New Zealand.
When we were flying out, we had, I don't know, how many helicopters,
11, 12 helicopters get out there.
The design of this with the bag, it's great tension, great design.
I want to also thank all the helicopter pilots...
- Marc Wolff. - Yep.
Marc, Q, Andy, all the guys that taught me how to fly,
that trusted me to fly, that trusted us to be able to do this.
And the locations, and getting these locations...
Coordinating these...
- And coordinating that shot... - Yes.
The amount of work of three helicopters in a counter move,
all of this stuff is incredibly painstaking, very dangerous.
And then, of course, it was just luck.
The fact that when we went to that lake, it's called Lake Quill,
and it was mirror smooth.
'Cause there, you can see the wind is starting to kick up
-and the texture of the lake changes. - It was mirror smooth,
which also, helicopter pilots, makes it a little difficult
when we're flying that low over it.
You can't tell how far you are over the water.
- So you really have to know... - Watch, when Tom does this dive,
what Tom doesn't understand...
To Tom, it looks like he's flying into the sky,
and this shot, look at that.
- That's a reflection. - Yeah.
So, when Tom's looking down,
he can't tell how far away he is from...
It looks infinite.
And so you had to do this bank away and this wing over...
We're very nervous. It was one of the scarier shots.
Knowing the instruments, it doesn't look it, now the spin, of course...
The spiral, the spiral.
- Don't try this at home. - No, please.
And I'm trying to keep as close to the side of the mountain as possible
and go as low as possible and keep it moving.
I mean, that is a very tricky maneuver.
And he's doing all of that. There's no stunt pilots used in that.
All of that, every shot you see...
This was fun.
That's shot from a boat.
- Remember that? - Yes.
Now, we're so close. Look at Henry also doing this.
He's hanging out of that helicopter.
- Try it... - And again, it's very cold.
- It's so cold. - I at least had heat, Henry.
My hat's off to you. Guys...
He's Superman. He's used to doing that sort of stuff.
- He's awesome. - Yes.
All of this, not all of it but quite a bit of it
was shot on our backlot.
This was another thing where I knew with these tents,
if we couldn't finish it in New Zealand,
we could finish it at home.
And, so, we had these tents built on the location.
But we would only go there when... As weather cover or anything else.
The rest of the time we spent with
Julia and Luther.
And this, we spent a whole day.
Actually, more than a day 'cause we got rained out, you remember.
Yes.
Just shooting little bits and pieces
and talking about their relationship.
And we shot a little bit more of it.
- I'm surprised we used most of it. - Yeah.
This is a place called Purity Glacier.
- It's very... We're... - That's hairy.
The rotor blades are just...
Sometimes they're a foot, two feet,
three feet off the rocks.
If either one of us made a mistake, it would not be good.
And the balance of the editing of this sequence.
- Yes. - You remember?
We were in a place, we were testing the movie
and there were times when it felt too long.
And it was always about finding the right mix of
what was happening on the ground, what was happening in the air,
and how do the two things intercut,
so that they felt like one was affecting the other.
- Well, we go back to Valkyrie. - Yes.
Which is the end of Valkyrie,
the editing, the last, you know, 10 minutes of Valkyrie,
the last five minutes of Valkyrie,
really, this skill that you have
in terms of balancing that many characters
in this kind of story.
- Well, and it's about fights... - I love that moment with Simon.
I love it. I love Simon in this.
With the nuclear bomb, he's just fantastic.
- And watch this, cuts like that. - Yes.
What we do is, what Eddie Hamilton and I will do in post is
we will experiment
with cutting from one thing to another
and once you find a good cut, it tells you
what happened before and what happened after.
And we experimented many times with what cuts to what.
And there are numerous versions of those cuts
and this is the one we ultimately set.
This shot, I had to take out
a whole wall behind the camera to get this.
- And so, it took hours to get... - Haunted house.
It's just... It's deceptively complicated.
Getting a shot like this, the timing of everything just right.
It's so good.
And I originally did it as a oner,
from the time she came all the way down the steps
and then just, I got carried away. Let's be honest.
But again, here, this intercutting...
Okay, now this cut.
You made a very good suggestion here,
which was, he says,
she gets hit, and he says, "Ilsa, come in."
And, you were like, "You don't need it."
- Cut to here, keep the story... - Keep the pressure going.
- Yes. - What's happening?
And we realized, yes,
you didn't need to know that her...
I said, "Well, her radio has been knocked out."
And you were like, "Nobody cares!
"It doesn't matter, man. We're on story, we gotta move."
And I really didn't think we'd get away with it.
It just goes.
It's... What a balance act,
to come up and be able to...
And all the other material that we shot,
which we ultimately looked at and said,
what's really on story? We were very, very ruthless about it.
And there are things we really loved in here.
And a lot of those that you'll see in,
again, in the deleted shots reel.
- I don't like deleted scenes. - Yeah.
Just give you a little sense of, there's a lot more work behind it.
And each out is painful because each shot took so much to get.
And the ruthless efficiency of making movies like this is saying,
"I love that shot, but I don't need that shot."
- Story is king, always. - Yes.
Story is king.
That line, Michelle improvised on the day.
So good.
And did it as a joke after we yelled cut.
And I was like, "That's a good line. Let's put that in the scene."
So good.
And this, Rebecca originally woke up in this scene
and she startles when she opens her eyes
because Lane is right in front of her.
And they're having this dialogue
that ultimately led into this and I realized
it was just all too much of a scene between them, and we didn't need it.
- Look how great Rebecca is. - I know.
She's really strangling herself in that.
And all of that is Rebecca
just feeling the scene,
the contempt she has for Lane.
She's so effective. Both of them are so effective in this moment.
There's a whole history between these characters.
It's expressed in just a moment of screen time.
- And of course... - I like this set, too.
Yes. And all the weight of the movie
comes to this point where you're not quite sure...
Are they gonna do what I think they're gonna do?
- Yes. - And I had a...
- Are we going to kill Benji? - Are we going to kill Benji?
And I had a delightful time on social media.
When I posted the picture of the funeral,
they said, "Who do you kill?"
And people were saying, "You're gonna kill Benji.
"I know you're gonna kill Benji.
"There will be rioting in the streets!"
And I would reply, "Oh."
Maybe that was a mistake,
and I shouldn't have done that.
So, to everybody I tortured,
- I enjoyed that. - Yeah.
This is so well shot...
This moment, Rebecca here.
- Come on. - Oh, my gosh.
- And yes... - The intensity of that.
The amazing camera work that's going on in there
because, again, we had very little time in these locations.
And we didn't know what was happening.
When we were shooting the helicopter chase,
we didn't quite have the scene in the house worked out yet.
A lot of this stuff, when we were shooting this we were...
We were feeling our way even with the aerial stuff.
We don't know what's gonna happen with the team.
We shot this, we had this...
- Simon is so good here. - Yeah.
And Rebecca, and they're...
How quickly they become a team at this point in the movie.
And the very important thing,
I almost didn't have her tied up in this thing
because I didn't want the damsel in distress.
And I realized what a damsel in distress really is
is a damsel who needs to be saved.
And taking it too far,
Rebecca never ends up in any real danger.
And so we made friends with that idea.
- Yeah. - And it's just...
It's not how she gets into trouble.
- It's how she gets out. - Yes.
All of this, we had so many miles of footage
around these glaciers.
This was a place called Volta Glacier.
- Incredible. - And this.
This is real.
That's really Tom and Marc.
They are a rotor width away from one another
when they were doing that shot. It's incredibly, incredibly dangerous.
Look at this.
A lot of these shots...
Were very, very, very difficult with a fine line between
what you can really do and what's gonna kill somebody.
Yes. We tried to push that
-for the audiences. - As far as we could.
And as a result, some of the rigs we built
were the best amusement park rides
that no one will ever get to ride, except you.
Yeah. There were some really cool rigs.
I was like, "We could charge for this."
Yes, we could have...
- Yeah, look at this. - Seven months pregnant.
At this point in the movie, Rebecca ended up getting pregnant,
right around the time you broke your ankle.
And the movie should've been over
long before this was an issue.
And, because of the ankle break, she's seven months pregnant,
and, I mean, gave it her absolute all.
McQ, I just love the story that's going on here too, though.
Look at this.
Okay, she's getting hit.
And Benji gets to kick, and that kicks him off. That's...
And you remember? This was...
- A lot of this was workshops. - I know.
With you and me and Wade.
Wade came to us with the choreography,
and we came up with the idea of the box
and we would just add layers to
what was a pretty simple fight choreography.
We weren't trying to be stunty and showy, we were just...
And this dilemma
-of trying to choke the villain. - That's fantastic.
That's just McQuarrie. I love it.
You came up with that.
And you remember what it came up from?
Is that, Sean Harris, early on said, "I wanna kill Benji."
Yes, exactly, that's it.
He goes, "The only thing I wanna do is kill Benji."
And I go, "You know what, Sean, you can't kill him,
-"but that gives me an idea." - Yes.
And I knew I was gonna have Sean some way or another,
choking Simon.
And that's all I had going into that room.
And I said to Wade,
find a way for him to choke him,
- Wade came up with the hanging gag. - That's fantastic.
And it was one layer after another,
all because Sean was just...
Sean was so funny. He goes, "I'm the funny one.
"He's not funny, I'm funny."
-"I could be funny." -"I could be funny."
"I could be funny."
Wade did a great job.
Wade Eastwood, thank you, my friend, thank you so much.
Now, all of this chaos, all of this mayhem,
where it's just one thing on top of another,
is the simple problem of
how do I get these two guys together in the same place,
after they've been in a helicopter?
And you said, this was great, you said...
Five days before we went to shoot Pulpit Rock, you said,
I think, "What if we messed up Walker's face?
"Like, what if he was more of a monster?"
And I said, "Well, we can't cut him."
Because it will be blood and there's a rating issue.
- And you came up with this. - So, what if we burned him.
And then we found out where the oil tanks were in the helicopter.
And Sarah Monzani and her team, they built this prosthetic for Henry
five days before he was on camera. Incredible.
To get him to a point where he is a monster by the end of the movie.
And Henry, to his credit, was like, "Yes." He loved it.
There was no hesitation, he was like, "Absolutely."
He was like, "Let's do it. Okay." And we were throwing things.
Like, "Hey, today your face is going to be hamburger."
-"All right, okay. That'll be cool." -"Let's go. I get it."
-"That will be cool." -"That will be fun to do."
- I love this moment. - Yeah, so wonderful.
- The two of them. - Lovely.
Just two great actors. So great to work with.
Such a fun time.
And this was 15 minutes before wrap on the last day.
- Fifteen minutes to midnight. - That was it.
And I put three cameras. I put a camera between their feet.
And I put a camera pointed at each of them.
And all the energy you're feeling in this scene,
is the actors knowing that if we go one minute over,
it will cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars
that we don't have in the budget. We can't go one more day.
- We pushed it to the absolute limit. - To the absolute...
- And the crew was amazing, you know. - Yes.
Working so hard to get it. I gotta tell you, incredible.
I love this shot that you have. This is at Pulpit Rock.
- We're now in Norway. - Now we're in Norway.
And what I asked for, it was the only time I asked for a location
after the fact. Everything, I scouted the movie. I said...
- This shot. - Henry is so wonderful in it.
And how we managed
to kind of hold that as a reveal even though his face is burned much sooner.
Everything was sort of designed around coming to that moment.
But here at Pulpit Rock, I said to Ben Piltz, our location coordinator,
"I need something they can fall off of, not down."
And New Zealand didn't have a straight drop.
They had a lot of sloping drops.
And he brought me a picture of Pulpit Rock and I said,
"This is something we can fall off of."
And it's a real testament to Jake Myers.
The rest of our production team, that they were able to absorb the enormous
physical difficulties of shooting a movie on top of this location.
Everything had to be brought out by helicopter.
A whole camp had to be built up there.
- It's a very, very challenging shoot. - Very challenging.
- We got lucky with the weather. - With the weather.
Because my broken ankle... I still had a broken ankle here.
This was your first day back.
This is actually, all the climbing and everything.
My ankle's broken here, I'm wearing a brace.
If you can see, my right foot is much bigger
because I'm wearing a little brace.
- I can't tell. - I know. All that...
Right ankle's broken and...
And you remember when you went over the cliff,
he's holding your ankle and you looked at me, you went,
-"My left ankle, right?" - That's right, yes.
Yes, yes, "My left ankle, right?"
Yes, yes, your left ankle. You'll be okay.
But I couldn't pivot on it, and do you remember the weather?
Because we were supposed to shoot this in September.
- And now, we're in November. - November, and you had...
This was, like, eight weeks after I broke the ankle.
- We had... This is six weeks after. - Yes. Six weeks.
We had three days on Pulpit Rock.
Three, and we lost a day and a half to weather.
Everything that you're seeing that we shot actually on Pulpit Rock.
- We shot in a day and a half. - It's incredible.
And other pieces we shot, little pieces, all the tighter stuff,
we shot at Leavesden.
Again, great visual effects work. Great production design.
This is a moment we came up with later.
Look at that. I like the Walker smudge.
And do you remember that? Look to the left.
- That's Pulpit Rock. - Yes.
But the other shot. Now, look at this. This is real.
- This is real. - Remember, Tom's right ankle's broken.
Pivoting on his ankle is extraordinarily painful.
That is your first day back on the job after breaking your ankle.
- That's painful just to watch. - Look at that, so beautiful.
And Lorne's score there is really wonderful.
If you remember, we were coming towards the end.
Lorne had scored all of this. And you said, "I'm missing the theme."
And we went back in and just tweaked
so that the Mission theme was starting to repeat through it.
We got so focused on the drama
you were like, "Don't forget, it's Mission."
And here's where we found it. We found these little places for it.
All the score was done and Lorne was able to
just surgically drop the moments in.
All those shots were under 10 minutes. I just wanted to say.
I remind you guys who are listening. This is all in the last 10 minutes.
The clock is literally ticking.
And they were yelling at me, they were like, "Stop interrupting."
And I was like, "Say the line right."
The clock was ticking. Oh, my God. There was so much stressing.
Rebecca's so mad at me.
Rebecca is so mad at me.
"Can we make a decision on this?"
- Yeah. - They're so good.
And this moment of, "What do we do?"
McQ, elegant.
Thank you.
This was in the script. But it's elegant.
You don't need to see me take the thing. It's cut to the white.
Yeah. Well, there was no dramatic way to do it.
There wasn't a cliffhanger way
of you pulling that out with your teeth.
Now, here's where we got lucky. We knew all of this in the script.
One of the few things we did know in the script,
was that you were looking at the sun. But in Pulpit Rock,
it was cloudy, foggy, hazy...
It was never... There was no sun.
We didn't even know where the sun would be when we got to this moment,
and on the day... By the way, your note...
This was originally cut different,
you were like, "No, no, no, cut from Ving."
This was one of your great suggestions was cutting from "My man."
Originally, it was, "My man," to, "Screw you, Lane."
And now, we rearranged it.
So that it went from here to here.
And it bonded the two of them together.
That cut is about their friendship.
And here, what's amazing is the shot coming up.
The clouds parted as we were lining up the shot. That's real.
- We were so lucky. - We were so lucky.
- How lucky were we? - Oh, my God.
- I'd rather be lucky than good. - That's exactly it.
Now, this shot...
Again, all these things, it started raining right after we got that.
And we got that shot and it started snowing.
Well, when we got in the helicopter to leave, it started snowing.
And that was it. It was snowed in for the rest of the season.
We had to leave equipment up there for the whole winter.
- For the whole winter. - Yeah, some of our crew
had to hike down in the snow. Thank you to our crew who did that.
Yes.
I wish I could have done it, broken ankle.
And this was... So, this was the fourth scene.
- Michelle Monaghan again. Thank you. - This was the thing that,
like, in terms of what scene... The very earliest days,
we knew this is where the movie was going to end.
Or, at least, this relationship was going to be resolved.
So when you have something this specific,
the whole movie has to build up and work to it.
And then, you remember, we shot this
and we shot the wedding at the beginning of the movie
-on the same day. - That's right.
And this scene had to be finished for us to get on helicopters
and fly a skeleton crew to Milford Sound.
- To film the opening. - Yes. To film the opening.
And in between, I was training,
and I'd already... I was falling off the bag in between this.
When you guys were shooting those other things, I was off.
And you were running from both things.
And you literally are beat to hell in that.
Yes, I am.
That was already me going. Now, look at Michelle, it's like...
- She's so wonderful. - Oh, my gosh.
She's wonderful in this scene and the thing that was really funny is,
if you go all the way back to Mission 3 where
Ethan and Julia are having a party at the beginning of the movie
and talking about where they met.
Or Julia was talking with her friends about where they met.
And you're reading her lips in the other room. They met in Lake Wanaka.
And to fly out to the Milford Sound location, we actually took off
-from Lake Wanaka. - That's right.
That was amazing. That was a moment.
We took off from Lake Wanaka. Do you remember?
Yes. When I saw the Lake Wanaka sign, I was like, "Hey, look where we are."
- She's so good in this scene. - Look at this.
And we couldn't bring Michelle back, you remember,
she had a commitment to her show, The Path.
And there was no way to bring her back.
You'll see some of these shots are just slightly a little soft.
And there's an opportunity there to reshoot. We didn't have it.
And there was an opportunity to use shots that were more in focus.
But the truth of the matter was the performance was
so much stronger and overpowered that...
- And no one... Who cares? - Who cares?
Also, you'll see intercut in this scene. After this scene with Michelle.
And Rebecca ad-libbed this moment coming up.
That was really quite beautiful.
And these flash-forwards, this lovely moment.
These three actors really understand the kind of film they're making.
The kind of story they're telling, there's such a warmth...
And look at that frame with Ving.
Rebecca and Simon, every time. There's Michelle...
And that's all real, that's all shot in New Zealand.
That's in New Zealand, I love what Rebecca does here.
But it's interesting... This is great.
And this was an improv moment.
I watching it on the monitor, and I saw her do this.
"What is she doing?"
- It was so lovely. - It was wonderful.
It was such a nice moment of a connection.
It was such a great instinct between those two actors.
These shots... We thought it was a whole scene.
And we thought, potentially, it was gonna be the end of the movie.
Well, you said to me, "The movie can't end with Ethan Hunt lying in bed."
It's just not like... It's an action movie.
I know. And we wanna feel like,
I wanna feel like, "Where are all these characters?"
Yes.
You were like, "There's all this unresolved stuff."
And I was like, "You're right. You're absolutely right." We wrote the coda.
- We shot it. - We shot it. Didn't include it.
- Didn't work. - It didn't... Well...
You felt clearly that the movie wanted to end here.
It ended here.
And when you saw it you went, "Yeah, I totally see it."
That's the end of the movie, but then the audience was asking,
"Where are the other people?"
We had this dilemma of, "What are we gonna do?"
- We were there in the editing room. - I was lying in bed.
You know, we were in the editing room. We left and what are we gonna do?
- And then the next morning... - I suddenly realize,
what of the scene do I need? I just need her dialogue.
And I need to see the Widow and I need to see Lane.
And I came in that afternoon and you were like,
"I'm not gonna tell you, I'm just gonna show it to you."
And this is what he did with all of that, it's just fantastic.
- Those great McQuarrie gifts. - And then, watch this.
This last shot of Tom was originally a profile.
And Eddie Hamilton. I said, "Get me a close-up instead."
He goes, "Well, I have one, but it's not long enough 'cause it rolls out."
- That's the camera rolling out. - Yes. That flash.
And, typical of Mission: Impossible, you deliver the last line of the movie
as the camera rolled out. Congratulations, my friend.
- Well done. - Look at this cast.
- Our friends again at Filmograph. - Thank you.
And the curtain call, which you and I talk about on every movie.
- We love curtain calls. - Yes.
- And we try to do one on Valkyrie. - I know...
- And it was the wrong kind of movie. - It was the wrong kind of movie, but,
you know, I just love having it. Just to be able to celebrate these actors.
And as an audience to be able to just give me the highlights again
-that I can relive. It's so much fun. - Yes.
And the Mission: Impossible theme and the feeling one gets.
The punch you get out of, and again,
being able to go back to moments like this,
is really fun, and it takes you out of the movie with the same feeling
that brings you in.
I gotta tell you, it's Number 9 with us, McQ.
It's such an honor to work with you. I just think...
I love your sense of story, your taste, you're so elegant
as a filmmaker, as a storyteller. I have so much fun working with you.
It's constantly... To be able to hit that ball back and forth.
I have such respect for you. You're my dear friend.
And I just greatly admire you,
and I feel very privileged to work with you.
I'm so...
I look at this movie and, you know, it's...
All the years of love of story and character.
And, you know, just filmmaking.
Because you gotta be very passionate about filmmaking to make this.
You never get lazy, you never rest on your laurels.
Every day, we're swinging, and I just greatly appreciate it.
I really thank you so much.
Thank you and I mean that most sincerely going all the way back to
first movie we worked on which was Valkyrie
and coming at it with a very different sense and a very different sensibility
and anybody who wants to look at the four films I've made to date
can see an evolution, and that evolution is owed very much
to both, all of the wisdom that you've brought
from all of the films you've made and all the filmmakers you've worked with.
You come with an enormous wisdom but you don't come
with a set, set of rules of how to make a movie.
You come very much in the spirit of a mentor saying,
"This is something that will serve you. Do what you wanna do."
So you create, on the one hand, a very challenging environment.
You're always pushing people beyond what they think their boundaries are.
But you also have a safety net for them and you're there going,
"You're gonna be okay. We're gonna get through this."
-"It's gonna be all right." -"You're gonna live."
"Come with me if you wanna live."
And you can see, I would not be the filmmaker that made this movie
had I not been making movies with you since Valkyrie.
And you can see a clear delineation between the first film I made
and the three subsequent films I made with you.
And so, all of those things that you're saying which are,
on the one hand, very kind, they are also greatly influenced by
my collaboration with you. So, I thank you.
Well, I'm very honored by what you said, and it's really...
From the moment I met you...
In Valkyrie, the typewriters are going.
"This guy, God, he just knows so much about filmmaking,"
and you honor filmmaking and storytelling.
- As I said, it's a great privilege. - Well, thank you.
You've said something before. You said it when we were promoting this movie.
In that one clip, where you said, "I'm addicted to making movies."
And that really is what it is.
It's like, we can't really help it.
We can't. We just start on a story, and you just can't let go.
And, of course, we really thank the whole crew, guys.
- Ladies, gentlemen. - Everybody here...
This is a film that belongs to each and every one of the people
that you're seeing here
going all the way back to our amazing sound department.
- James Mather and all of his mixers. - Yes. Incredible. Guys...
This stunt team, the art department, the costume department.
Wade and Jake. All of you guys, thank you.
You know, Brock...
Tommy Gormley, first assistant director.
- Thank you so much. - It really is a team effort.
And this movie, more than any other movie I've worked on,
either one that I've directed or worked on with other people,
-this was the most difficult. - So ambitious.
The most challenged. And so many things being thrown at the movie.
- Broken bones, pregnancies, weather. - Oh, my God.
- Two winters. - Two winters...
- No, actually, we had three winters. - Yes, you're right.
And it was three winters and a very... Because of New Zealand.
- Yeah. - And just the cast.
Guys, brilliant actors, a privilege every day to work with you all.
I know... McQ and I, just, every moment.
Like, just... Thank you.
Grateful to have every single one of you.
- And by the way, Eddie Hamilton. - Eddie.
Our amazing editor. Eddie and I,
you'll find it on this disc.
Eddie and I did a separate commentary which you should listen to
just to listen to Eddie, who is absolutely wonderful.
- And also, Lorne Balfe, our composer. - Lorne Balfe...
- Also has a commentary on this disc. -Incredible.
Guys, it was A-plus across the board, guys.
Can't wait for the next one.
Oh, God.
Stop.
Enjoy the credits, McQ.
You remember a minute ago, when you said, "I never rest on my laurels."
- Yes. - I want to.
And you call me
and you start talking...
And then I'm in a helicopter.
And it's on a mountain.
Yes. And now we're working on Top Gun.
I guess the secret's out now.
- Or it will be out by the time... - Right now...
- We're now working on our next one. - Joe Kosinski...
- Joe Kosinski. - The brilliant Joe Kosinski and yeah.
- Jerry Bruckheimer. - Jerry Bruckheimer, Ehren Kruger,
we're all tinkering on the script upstairs.
Can't wait, our next one, and we'll be talking about Mission
-and many other stories. - Oh, God.
Many other things.
You bastard. You bastard.
The adventure never ends.
- No. - It's like that moment.
And you take such delight,
you son of a bitch. You take such delight.
'Cause Tom knows I would literally never make a movie again,
if he did not create the pressure cooker that makes me go, "All right."
You know, every time you were pitching me, it was like,
-"I don't wanna hear this." I know. - At the premiere in Paris.
We always sit next to each other at the premiere.
So, at the premiere in Paris, it's you, me and Heather's next to you.
And right here, as the movie... As the credits come on,
what did you say to me?
-"We could do better." - You went, "Yeah,
"we could do better." It was, you're like, "Yeah, like, whatever."
"Yeah, we can do better."
And cut.