Making Of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING Part 2 - Best Of Behind The Scenes With Tom Cruise

I need you to trust me. One last time. Few things inspire me quite like an aerial sequence. Since I was a kid, I always wanted to do wing walking. I saw a black and white film. I was like, man, what would it be like to do that? So, how to do this? How do we give the audience something incredibly unique? Yet also classic. That's always a challenge. We're using all of the knowledge that we have having made these movies and putting it into this sequence. And that's the goal. Take everything that you've learned and push it to that next level. To give the audience the greatest possible experience. McHugh and I went through every step of this aerial sequence. We chose the aircraft, an 80-year-old Stearman. We developed camera technology. That camera covers looking in this direction. Tom and I had to develop the choreography of the sequence. We're going to do roll. Loops. Hammerheads. We can do this now. Okay. We can do it. When Tom is on the wing, we have to communicate by hand signal because the winds are from 100 to 140 miles an hour. Stop, stop, stop. Now I come up. And I'm pulling up and now I grab it and I try to hold steady. The airplane's pitching. It starts going over. We are pushing it to that next level. If this is twisted while it's burning, I'm going to be spinning and burn. I have to kick out of the twist and then ignite it within 10 seconds. Start soaking the parachute. We're going to submerge the parachute into the avgas. Soak up the fuel so when the parachute opens and ignites it, it'll hold fuel and explode. For this shot, what are we looking for? It's quite literally establish the objects in your hand and burn the parachute. The more up we're looking, the more the burn we'll get. Yep. We're going to be real smart. I'm not saying be risky. I'm not. We don't take risks, you know. Obviously. Do what? You're going to have to set for this and look up and ignite it. Okay. Let's go. Working on a franchise like Mission Impossible was an incredible assignment for a composer. Everything we did had to be dynamic. Every composition had to have life. We were really pushed to the limit. Tom Cruise has been very clear from the beginning, this is an adventure movie. They go to every corner of the world. The music has to take you on that journey. We wanted to use world elements that give the score a special flavor. We have huge ensembles of East African Burundi drums and it's got a punch that is just fantastic. There is a chapter in the film that is in a submarine. We needed something that felt like bending metal, nothing that people would normally hear in their everyday life. We found the space base, this kind of bizarre instrument. It's this universe of sounds and frequencies. It puts you in that submarine. There is no sound like it. The Mission Impossible theme is ingrained in the minds of film lovers across the world. To have that in your toolkit is unbelievably powerful. The whole time we're paying homage to the original Mission Impossible theme, keeping fresh and modern. For a composer, just to be held to that standard, it's an honor. Stuff that I'm now talking about that I didn't talk about for years was my dreams. I remember being four years old and dreaming of making movies. I remember being 18 years old and making taps and thinking, I want to do this the rest of my life. This is my dream, my dream that I had when I was a kid. Suddenly it comes real. That is the key. The key is to reach for that. But also you have to work for it. The thing is that it takes a tremendous amount of dedication and passion. As I said many times, this is not my job, this is who I am. It's a privilege. People go, why don't you want a vacation? It's like, man, they don't know what it's like for me to be on a movie set. Jumping out of a plane is your vacation. It is my vacation. To be here and to be able to share it with people, that is beautiful for me. Do I get afraid? Yes, you get afraid. Do I get really terrified? Sometimes you feel that, but it doesn't bother me. The way that I prepare for things, I'm very methodical. I like to crawl before I walk, walk before I jog, jog before I run, run before I sprint. I work on gradients on things. Honestly, I've just never been afraid to be afraid. It's not something that makes me not want to do something. If anything, I know the fear comes from an unknowingness, so I'm reaching for a knowingness with things. Anything that I'm taking on, just producing these movies is going to be daunting. They're the most fun to produce. They're the most complex. There's so many moving pieces, plus I'm doing and developing all the stunts. Working with McHugh, we're working on story and character, training and supporting the actors. Making movies is amazing. The amount of things that I learn every single day. There's not a day that I'm not studying something, I'm not learning something about people, about myself. It's very exciting. It's beyond a privilege. This is what I grew up watching and what I loved about movies was going to the movies and seeing it on the big screen. When I was a kid, that was the only way to see movies. What Tom and I are really about is rekindling people's emotional connection to that. The act of going to the theater, seeing it with a big crowd. There's so much happening on that wing when I'm flying. There's so many things from decades of flying airplanes, aerobatic airplanes, parachuting, and just understanding cinema. When that airplane and we're doing things on the wing, I'm also perceiving what that pilot is perceiving with the airflow over the wing to ensure that the plane doesn't go into a stall, into a spin, because that aircraft, if it goes into that, it's unrecoverable. I also know my position on the wing and the amount of drag that my body's creating in various positions. When you see that airplane and it's going inverted and I'm in between the wings, I know the amount of, I can feel the airflow over, but I'm also paying attention to performance, the camera, where McHugh is with that camera, the aerial photography, plus how that aircraft is performing, plus I'm acting. I'm acting for that lens and for that shot. There's so many things that are happening at once and it just takes years and decades of training in doing these things and then development through this sequence because I hired the pilots, I trained the pilots on how to fly those aircraft with me on the wing and we worked together to how do we create these shots.