MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (2018) Behind-the-Scenes The Hunt Is On

Tom and I have been talking about for years creating a helicopter chase. That means shooting the star of your movie flying one of the helicopters. Super important for a movie like Mission to be doing it all practically and for real. There really hasn't been a helicopter sequence like this in a film. Tom is gonna do this in a chopper. This is insane. This is probably the most challenging sequence I've ever been involved in and I've been doing it for 48 years. I'm trying to think of anything that is not dangerous in the aerial sequence. If Tom is going to be doing things as dangerous as he's going to be doing, we want it to be in as dramatic an environment as we can find. It turned out that the place that really matched our movie was New Zealand. And New Zealand, stunning country, beautiful. Why is New Zealand the perfect location for Mission Impossible? Just take a look around you. It's supposed to be Kashmir in the film. You obviously can't go and film in Kashmir. It's a militarized area and they're very used to working with helicopters here. So it worked well for us. The gorges of New Zealand, I mean, it's some of the most beautiful and downright dangerous terrain that you've ever seen. It is with much pleasure that we of Kaitahu Whanui, the mana whenua, the people of this land, welcome you to our place. Thank you so much. On behalf of all of us, it's a real privilege. Tapu, it's a sacred place for us. And that wonderful mountain that you can see behind us has a huge influence on what we do up in this area, Mount Evansville. The touching of noses is really symbolic. You are you and I am I. It's not until we touch each other's noses that we share each other's breath. And you become part of me and I become part of you. I fly aerobatic airplanes and warbirds. I'm a pilot. But helicopters, I'd really never flown. I wasn't licensed in. The reality of this, guys, we don't know what it's going to look like until we start gradually working our way into it. Of course, Tom was first going to have to learn how to fly a helicopter. Then he was going to have to develop his proficiency to a level where he could actually fly aerobatics. So we went to Airbus Industries to get trained from their top instructor. We started Tom's training almost two years ago, learning to fly helicopters. We got him his license. And then he spent the next year or so practicing. I surround myself with the best people and have them challenge me. You know, the sight picture. So when we start doing the shoot, you can just come into that sight picture. Everyone was very concerned about Tom when he first came here. There was a lot of doubt on the, can Tom pull this off? Can he learn how to fly a helicopter? And usually to put someone like that into a situation like this is almost impossible, really, to imagine. Number one, it's never been done before. Am I good enough to be able to do this? Tom is very confident about his abilities, but helicopter is a bit of a different thing to learn how to control it over time. The training we put Tom through started seven months ago. He's been through several different instructors because you learn different things from different people. The mountains cause wind and they cause turbulence. It takes a while. There's no substitute for experience. From then on, it was basically be a 2,000-hour pilot in a helicopter in a very short period of time. When it comes to Tom and training, he takes every opportunity to train. When we were in Paris flying back and forth to the city, he'd use that to train. Anytime he has free time, he wants to go train. I would tell him, oh, that was pretty good. He goes, well, it needs to be better. Those pilots, they really put me through my paces and that's what I wanted. And in doing that, it also increases my ability. I've watched him a couple of times. Good pilot. His technique's very, very good. He's an amazingly quick learner. As soon as he was showing something, he was right on to it. He'll come out of this with 1,500 flying hours total, but he's probably got the experience of a pilot who's got 10,000 hours. The amount that he's learned and been able to do in this short amount of time has been extraordinary to all the pilots around. This is it. Thank you very much. Thank you. We were looking desperately for a helicopter. We wanted something that was highly maneuverable, but you also wanted something that had enough of an open glass canopy that you could see out and you could see in. That led us to the Airbus 125, which is a fantastic, fantastic helicopter. I wanted to fly the Airbus helicopter, or they call it the Squirrel. It's got a tremendous amount of power. The H125 is a very powerful aircraft. Did rescues up on Everest. Probably the most powerful little single engine helicopter around. I'm going to learn this aircraft so that I can do these things. That are extreme with helicoptering. The helicopter that I'm maintaining is the H125. I'm the one responsible when I sign it off. Whoever flies the aircraft is going to be safe in it. That's my job. I check it all the time. I can judge pilots by how they act around the aircraft. Do they follow a checklist? This guy does. Very impressive. Most aerial chases you'll see from a helicopter, we don't usually turn the cameras in. Really we needed to develop a whole new program, a whole new lens package and mounts. So we've developed these rigs over the last couple of months where we can basically hard mount cameras. Well, in the 15 years that I've been doing camera mounts, we always try to get the camera mounts as close to the aircraft as possible. Because the tighter in you get, the more stable they are. But now we're seeking to put them way out in space. And that's been a challenge. We had to go experimental mode on this. Everything is way beyond what you could get certification on a normal everyday commercial flying machine. We have to imagine with all these components, with the minimum of vibration, we'll be safe for film. I think it's the most important challenge. There's no instruction manual. There's no expert in it who can tell you how best to utilize the tools that you're using. We were completely at sea for the first few days and every day we got a little bit better. Back up, friends. Head to your helicopter. The days are very short here now. It's eight or nine hours of daylight in New Zealand in the winter. Every minute of daylight is precious. The most dangerous part of the aerial sequence is really that there's more than one helicopter in the air. You had the two hero helicopters, Tom's helicopter and Henry's. My helicopter, which was following them. A separate camera helicopter, which was filming the two hero helicopters from the outside, air to air. And you had a medevac helicopter that was flying above all of those helicopters in case anything went wrong. Once all the helicopters are floating in the air, it becomes a little harder to organize. So it's really important for all the pilots to talk about the sequence they're about to do before every run. So just to clarify again, we're going to go in. You're one, two, three. I'm hearing five helicopters and five people while I'm trying to talk to Tom and give him direction. We have several deep canyons that Tom flies through. I think someone mentioned if anything happens, there's no way to recover you. Tom is performing three jobs. He's the pilot, he's the camera operator and he's acting. Then you add to that the fact that we're flying through very narrow terrain and in very unpredictable wind conditions. We're flying in the mountains. It's some of the most dangerous conditions to fly in and you have to really know what you're doing because the mountains can kill you. It's extremely narrow and we're shooting with an extremely wide lens. The sense of claustrophobia in there was very extreme. I was inches away from sides of cliffs and right on the tail of Henry's helicopter. He got within a rotor's length of my rotor. So all it takes is one mistake like that when you're too close and the helicopters will hit each other. First time we did it, I just watched it in playback. I saw how close they were to the canyon walls and suddenly I went, oh my God, I can't believe that. Through the mountains, through the gorge. Oh my gosh. The skill which it takes and the nerve to pull off a stunt like that and get that close to mountains and that close to cliffs, remarkable. I'm telling you, it was freezing when we were flying around in New Zealand and the things that we were doing, it was extreme. Henry freezing himself to death in the back of this 145 helicopter, being tossed around. I'd never heard Henry complain about it. He was always very committed when the camera rolled and incredibly professional. And did that a number of times in absolute, sometimes blizzardous conditions. He was an absolute trooper. How was performance? Performance is great. Tom was determined to learn this aerobatic maneuver which was a corkscrew turn. And do those spins at very low G and be able to pull out at very low level. Which is basically, it's an alpine descent. The risk of that is you can overspeed the rotor head and the blades. And if they overspeed for too long, they just literally pop off and then you're just a rock that drops. We want to just feel like we've just been thrown off the cliff. So we'll go really fast, like 80, 100. There was a lot of resistance to me doing this particular stunt. The extreme nature of the flying. I did a lot of preparation and every step of the way I made sure that I just didn't come in going, oh, it's me, I can do this. I was like, we're all professionals here and you have a right to see my ability. I'm going to look down and I'll take it over the waterfalls. I enter it right away. It's Tom in character as Ethan Hunt whilst flying inches away from the bottom of the valley. You have to really be on your A-game. Okay, guys, let's go. We ready? To see a helicopter just dropping out of the sky like that and corkscrewing that far down, I, on a number of times, was like, he's going to die. That was really nerve-wracking to watch, but he did it. He pulled it off. How was that, McHugh? Uh, very upsetting here. Well, I guess that's a three. Absolutely. I know that everyone sighed a massive sigh of relief when we finished there. I think we're all very proud of what we accomplished. A aerial sequence where the star of your film is also flying the helicopter. No one's ever going to do this again.