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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JULY/AUG 2023 M ission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team on their most dangerous mission yet. They are tasked with tracking down a new form of artificial intelligence that threatens all of humanity while fighting dark forces that hope to use the AI to secure their own global dominance. In addition to Cruise, Dead Reckoning also stars Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby and Esai Morales, among others. The feature was directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who once again brought in editor Eddie Hamilton to cut the project. McQuarrie, Cruise and Hamilton have a history working together, hav- ing collaborated on Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018) and Rogue Nation (2015), as well as on Top Gun: Maverick (2022), for which 'McQ' was a writer and Hamilton earned an Oscar nomination. Hamilton caught up with Post shortly after Dead Reckoning Part One's release, though he was already working on Part Two. He detailed his relationship with the director and franchise star, as well as his workflow and the challenges of working on two films simultaneously. You have collaborated with Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise a number of times now. Can you talk about that relationship? "I think that myself, Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise share a genetic, absolute raw, passionate love of movies and cinema, which when you meet another cinephile, there's this kind of unspoken understanding that you're kind of in that club… When I met Chris McQuarrie, I think he could see the enthusiasm and the passion. This film, we've been on it well over three years. We started in February 2020, so it is a long time, and I think that retaining your enthusiasm for the job and your love of the craft, especially when you are in a meat grinder of intense pressure to deliver a movie, is quite a good personality trait to have. And Tom knows that I care about the movie as much as he does — in some ways more. I have to work on every frame and every tiny sound effect and every syllable of dialog. And he is an amazing producer in terms of objectivity, giving notes, having final cut on the movie and approving every aspect of the film — every visual effects shot, every music cue, every sound effect. I think he loves the fact that I'm enthusiastic, and that I love movies and love the cinema-going experience." You started work on this back in 2020. Were you on-location during the shoot? "I sometimes am on-location. For example, I was in Norway when Tom did the jump, and I was there for the all of that photography. And interestingly, we didn't send those dailies to the studio because if you watch :20 of Tom doing this extraordinary stunt, it is slightly anticlimactic. But if you watch the little behind-the-scenes featurette that I edited, of all the prep that Tom did with all the jumps, the practices, the safety…then it becomes really quite impressive when you build up to that. So the little trailer that you saw at Christmas last year — the kind of behind-the-scenes glimpse of that stunt — was something that I had edited two years before to show the studio…So I was there to cut that little featurette at Tom's request, but also stay on top of the dailies. And then as they went to Abu Dhabi, when they went to Rome, when they went to Venice, I was not there because it was the height of COVID. It was much safer for me and the team to stay back in London. But all the footage would come in every day and I would start sketching it together and putting everything that I thought was great on a timeline, not worrying how it was all go- ing to work, just knowing that it was all awesome." Do you recall the camera they were using? "They used a Sony Venice camera with mostly, I think, C series Panavision anamorphic lenses. Some spherical for some very wide shots, but mostly it's anamorphic. When the camera is attached to the Fiat, for example, (they used) these little camer- as called Z Cams, and they have a spherical lens. Because of COVID, it made no sense to have peo- ple going back and forth, swapping mags and all that stuff. They needed to keep a minimum number of crew around the cast and around the cameras, so that's basically why we ended up using digital cameras. McQ's desperate to get back to film, but it's just how we ended up through circumstance. "Then, Warner Bros.' De Lane Lea were the lab based at Leavesden Studios, and they would take the files from the Sony Venice and from the Z Cams. We used lots of different mini cameras and formats, and all kinds of things. There was a lot of CCTV, obviously, filmed in the airport. I think that was all Z Cam as well. The Sony Venice is 6K, the Z Cams, I think, are natively 4K. I would get every- thing transcoded to Avid media MFX files DNxHR LB, which is 3,840 by 2,160, so it's ultra high defi- nition resolution. Then, all the master camera files would be archived to LTO and put on a gigantic server. So all the uncompressed media lives on a big server at the lab, which means the VFX team can pull the files and send them off whenever they need to." Were they shooting linearly, or did they have to shoot certain sequences early to leave time for VFX? "No. They closed down bits of Venice and bits of Rome depending on the day that it was appropri- ate to shut that street, so it's all nonlinear. Some days Tom was driving a BMW, some days he's driving the Fiat. Some days Hayley is driving the BMW, some days Hayley's driving the Fiat. What I do is, when I'm putting it together, I will feedback if I have concerns about connective tissue, like specific beats that we might need, so that the au- dience understands or doesn't feel like something's been removed accidentally. But otherwise I just say, 'It's great. It's amazing! Keep shooting.' I only really wave a flag if I perceive that (there's) something that they might need to pick up. "When they got back to London and started working on the sets, then I was actually at the studio quite a bit at Longcross Studios, where they filmed. I would have a trailer near the set and I would have an iPad with a feed from the set. McQ would have me on a particular channel, so I would be editing away, but also keeping an eye on the feed from the set. And if he had a question, he would say, 'What do you think of that? Do you think we got it?' And I could quickly look and go, 'Yeah, it looks amazing.' "I would feedback sometimes (from) our cutting room in Soho in central London, also with a feed from the set. And when they did go on-location — Hamilton (back, center) and the team that helps him manage media.