Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505509
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE www.postmagazine.com 19 POST JULY/AUG 2023 office building, where you wouldn't even know what's inside. And we will rent the whole floor for four years. We will partition it, and put air condi- tioners, and put all the networking in, and put all the Tom Cruise posters up everywhere, and then put the sofas and the fridge in the kitchen and make it feel like home, because we're going to be working there for a long time. But it's not in a facili- ty. It's very secure and very private. "In my loft at home, I have two large screens and then one of those 21-by-9 widescreen mon- itors for my viewing monitor. It's compact, but I did do a lot of Top Gun: Maverick in here, and a lot of Mission in here because we do work over Evercast sometimes. "I would quite often go to Chris McQuarrie's apartment in central London, set up the drive, plug into his TV and work there. But if we're only work- ing for a couple of hours on a Sunday, for example, I will just log into Evercast, which a lot of people do, and work like that…Eventually all the media will fit on a credit card." With so much action taking place throughout the film, was there a scene that was more difficult than the others because of the visual effects? "That's a very good question. To be honest, a lot of the VFX in this movie are rig removal and wire removal. Some of the train. There's quite a lot of CG in that big end sequence, and obviously when Ethan and Grace are hanging over the ravine. But, you know, there's a real train carriage, and Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell are actually hanging vertically 40 feet up in the air. They've got cables to support them. We can watch the movie with vir- tually no VFX in it. It's watchable, it's just there's a lot of camera rigs and cables and safety harnesses. Stuff that needs to be painted out. "None of this film was easy to edit. I will say every sequence was hard. Apart from Ethan get- ting the mission, which was quite a late addition, we had a different way of introducing Ethan Hunt originally. And then we came up with that much simpler introduction quite late in the day. "The submarine is very complicated (with) so many characters and specific shots of cutaways of graphics so that you understand what's going on. The sound design of the enemy torpedo pinging, and the music — it took forever! "The desert (scene) started out much longer and had to be massively compressed. The airport is phenomenally complicated because, again, so much graphics, and relying on graphics to help the audience understand the story and where the key is. Grace has pickpocketed the guy, and you've got to modulate the character — the chemistry between Ethan and Grace, and her behavior, and make sure that audience likes her, but they didn't like her too much. "It's a huge puzzle. Massive! Weeks and weeks and weeks, and months and months and months of work for every sequence. And then Rome — you (have) the huge car chase and loads of dialog scenes at the beginning of Rome…Nothing was easy. It all took months — ultimately years of work to put it together." Can you talk about the use of music and how it's used not only to enhance the action sequences, but also as a transitional element? "We work silent when we're editing the movie — just with dialog. We have virtually no sound and no music. (Composer) Lorne Balfe is watching the dailies and he's writing suites of music based on how the dailies make him feel. And there's a point in the process where we start putting music against the picture. Once we've got a cut that works purely visually, like pure cinema, then we start adding the music, and it evolves. McQ is as meticulous with the music as he is with the edit. We'll go in to the music editor, Cecile (Tournesac), and we will review every cue, and turn off the dialog and the sound effects, and just see is the cue, is the music telling the story? How can we improve it and is it fighting with the dialog? Is it fighting with the sound effects? "The transitions [are] something very interesting. Obviously, it's a long movie. The audience is trying to figure out where they can get up and have a [break] basically. So whenever you transition from one scene to another, the audience is like, 'Oh, I can nip out for two minutes, I won't miss much.' But if you use a music cue, which is propelling you into the next scene, you're kind of like, 'I can't go. What's happening?' "What we're doing is we're using these transi- tional music cues to kind of basically keep your brain actively engaged from beginning to end, so you don't feel like there's an appropriate moment to take a break. And that's McQ being aware of it, because whenever we tested the film, we would always be conscious of when people felt like it was a reasonable time to get up and take a break. McQ wants to dare you to do that. 'I'm going to dare you to get up and miss the next :30 seconds be- cause there's going to be some good shit coming up that you don't want to miss!' "It has been very rewarding because it's a long movie, but people say it doesn't feel long when they watch it, which, obviously, as an editor, is the highest compliment." Z Cams were used for parts of the Fiat sequence. ILM handled the film's visual effects work.