Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning Behind The Scenes

You can't imagine how physically punishing it was for Tom to be on the wing. Tom studies everything, every detail of everything. I put myself through a worst case scenario. Everything he does is a love letter to cinema. Everything he does is part of building a legacy of wanting cinema at this scale to not only survive but to thrive. He lives on sets because he chooses to live on sets. He loves making films. Having been on these films for 18 years, if I heard Tom was going to jump into the mouth of a clone T-Rex, I'd probably go, yeah. It doesn't surprise me anymore. If he said he was going to jump off the moon, I'd be like, okay. Working with Tom, there is no ego. There's no pride of authorship. It's not about anyone's vision. It's all about instinct. It's all about emotion. It's all about serving the audience in whatever way we can and listening to them. It's always about story and character, no matter what. But we always start with some sort of action sequence or some sort of location, a concept for places we want to go, things we want to try as filmmakers. Knowing full well that spectacle only matters for a moment. If you're not invested in the characters, if you're not invested in the story, you won't be invested in that sequence. And we know when we're watching it, no matter how much work we put into it, if we're not feeling it, you're not feeling it. And that really is the art of working on a Tom Cruise movie. You have to be thinking about how does the audience feel watching the movie. And that really is Tom's superpower. He's able to be the audience both while he's making the movie and while he's watching it. And at the same time, he's always surprised by the result. I think Mission Impossible has always been about authenticity. Aside from the stunts being real, which we've always been at pains to do, particularly for Tom, to do the things he does. But also that authenticity extends to where we shoot it and how we shoot it. And the queue is always keen to go to places and find the story in those places, let the story be told to us by the places. And you can't do that unless you go to those places for real, which we do. So I've been all over the world with Mission Impossible and it's been such an adventure for me. We have different signals for performance. Close up, longer, if I'm resting. What I love the most about these Mission Impossible films are the skills that you get to acquire while doing it. I've learned everything from drifting, jumping out of airplanes, motocross, fights, weapon training and everything. I think that's the best part about it. But also being able to travel to these different locations and experience these different cultures and meet new people. I feel like I've been all over the world these past couple of years. When we went to visit him on set for the scene in the water in the tank, he had to make sure that he could move in the outfit. And you know, he spent years working and training for everything. There's the attention to detail with the costumes, with the ways to light the scene. Shooting underwater bears always a sense of danger. I can't really choose one stunt that I would say is probably the most impressive. Only because I was watching Tom Cruise every day, topping every stunt he'd ever done in the morning and then going out in the afternoon and dunking on that. I will say there is one stunt in particular, probably what you would consider to be the last stunt in the movie. I'm always asked, is there ever a stunt where you've had to say no? There certainly isn't one where I've said no. There's definitely stunts where I wish I had not suggested them. And this is far and away the worst. I love shooting in Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. I'm a big snow fan. I love snow generally. I love snowboarding. So to be out in the Arctic, somewhere where no human being should ever really be, it's so inhospitable. Very, very cold, obviously. Minus 40 degrees Celsius. There were polar bears walking around. We had to stop shooting whenever a polar bear came near us because obviously you have to respect their territory. And so we'd back away and let it walk through the set. But just to see that was extraordinary. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. This film feels like the accumulation of all the missions that have gone before it. And as Tom, as the eternal student that he is, he's always learning from what he did last and how to better it. And I think when this film was filmed on IMAX cameras, it's designed to be seen on the bigger screen. And you can see all the work that's gone into making this the ultimate Mission Impossible. It's everything that the mission stands for. The kind of fully immersive action-adventure franchise that at the heart of it has the team spirit and friendship and the importance of self-sacrifice for the greater good. This movie is mind-blowing. It's just epic. Tom does incredible stunts in the sky, underwater. I have some amazing fight scenes too with fire around. What else? There are so many incredible characters in the movie. I'm excited because I got to do some scenes with Simon Pegg too. And yeah, what else? The movie is so rich. It's so hard to pinpoint one particular thing. Audiences can expect the biggest practical action film ever made. They can expect a rip-roaring adventure, fully immersive. Tom Cruise being more Tom Cruise than you could ever imagine him being. The way that he puts his life on the line for these movies. Your seat, I mean the literal edge of your seat from deep underwater to high in the sky. There's no place these great filmmakers and the crew will not go to entertain and enlighten. What you're going to be seeing with Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning is the culmination of everything we have learned over the course of working together for 18 years taken to its absolute extreme. This movie is the total culmination of the last 30 years of this franchise and everything has led to this. You're going to see the biggest action you've ever seen. You're going to see these characters that are just amazing. The story is very moving and it's incredibly entertaining. This is something else that no one else does apart from Tom which is it's real. So what you're impressed by is the fact that it's happening. You're not impressed by how clever something is made to look like it's happening. And I think you feel it in him, in every cell of his body when he runs or when he does something. You can feel it. You cannot have Mission Impossible without having a sequence in which Tom Cruise is running. To be able to shoot at Parliament in Westminster Bridge was really something. Here we are rolling. Here we go, we're set and... 3, 2, 1, action! Artie's going to have to go see it. It's called The Final Reckoning. You can expect the very biggest Mission Impossible ever.