Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) Behind-The-Scenes Sand Theft Auto

The chase had evolved from the work that Tom and I did on Jack Reacher. We learned a lot shooting that car chase and wanted to take it to the next level. And of course the next level for Tom was to do it on a motorcycle. And to find a way to shoot Tom riding without a helmet at incredibly high speed. That proved an incredible technical challenge. How do you get interesting camera angles? How do you film this in a way that hasn't been filmed before? So the stunt guys and the SFX guys came up with a number of rigs. We had to build cameras that would allow you to be where you were on those motorcycles throughout the entire thing. To do the work we want to do safely with Tom and the other stunt riders, we remove a certain amount of the traffic from the road to give them safe passage in post. What we can do is add back in digital cars. So rather than Tom weaving through two cars that are spread 50 meters apart from each other, it really looks like he's weaving through really tight packed action. Trying to shoot at actual speed and not pretend, so it creates quite a bit of choreography with the cars and making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time. If there's anybody not, it can be disastrous. We had dangerous roads with 2,000 foot drops. If you go off there, you're dead. We also knew that we wanted a car chase component. And we had the idea of using a car as a weapon. I had a little meeting with Tom before the film and I said, because of the nature of the work we have on this, we have to take you back to basics. And I'd like to re-teach you so that the end result, you come out 100% better than you ever were. He really embraced that. Every week we did a different track around Britain. And we went and trained him with drifting and all the driving stuff in the cars. I mean, he really went to another level. I have to say the way Wade set the car up and set the motorcycle up and the kind of training that we did, it was able to just take it to a whole new level so that we could do very extreme things with relative safety. We've got lots of action interspersed with various beats of comedy, with Luther and Brant driving their 4x4, with Benji kind of reacting in increasing horror as he realizes that Ethan really hasn't got the faculties to drive the car safely. It is funny. There's no way you can not laugh at these guys bouncing around like Muppets in the car, banging their heads. And so we've had fun with that, with the horn beeping every time they bang their head on the hood. And it just makes that whole scene, it lightens what is, you know, a fairly hefty car chase. In order for us to shoot that sequence on the robot steps, we first had to cover the steps with special ramps that we had to go in and install and then remove digitally. Otherwise we would have lost a BMW every time we went down those stairs. And then of course we had all those bikes going down the stairs as well and we needed expert motorcycle riders. I feel fortunate because I get to work with the best drivers, the best stunt guys, these incredible athletes. So we had the two bikers ride down, free riding, with Tom doing the slide himself. We've made the special wall over here, it's all foam. And then the wall itself actually hinges, the whole wall is on a hinge system. So it's got gear that it moves and if he actually does get stuck against it, it's actually got some movement as well. What was incredible was watching how trusting Simon was of Tom. I don't get frightened as such, as terrified. No, Tom's such a good driver, he's a very accomplished driver, he's trained hard for this as well. He totally trusted me when we were doing it, which I was thinking I don't want to tell him how dangerous this really is. I mean, I'm driving high speed, drifting, slamming up against the wall and at times we have cameras hanging off of it. Any time that you're looking at Tom through the windshield of that car, you're looking at Tom through one of three cameras that were attached to the vehicle. That meant Tom's visibility was like that. He was looking in between two cameras with another camera pointed at him. On top of that, the weight of the vehicle is completely different with that huge camera mount on the front. Making that even more complicated, we were on active city streets over which we only had partial control. We were driving right past people's front doors. We had the cooperation of all of the very nice people from Morocco. Do you see all the people in the windows? It's so beautiful. I mean, literally people are everywhere. It's like everyone is involved in this film. We were designing the sequence and got as far as doing a previs of this whole chase when I realized this scene would be a whole lot more interesting if Tom was chasing Ilse and not the villain. Rebecca rocked it. She came in here, she was shredding the canyon. She's really into this sequence, which helps us. I mean, she comes very enthusiastic. We have to beat her away from it at the end of the day. She just wants to keep going. May have created a new motorcycle rider here in the world. Ilse creates the crash. She actually was ahead of him and pulls over and stops and is standing in the middle of the road. Having the car drive towards me and what was it? Do you know how quickly it was driving? 160 kilometers an hour? And then breaking off just like a meter away. You've had a really magnificent 12 or 15 minutes of Mission Impossible set piece and you're ready for the movie to kind of take a break and slow down. And we talk about the A400 as a dangerous stunt. We talk about the underwater sequence as a very dangerous stunt. The driving in that sequence was incredibly precise and incredibly difficult. It was fun. It was extreme. It was high velocity the entire time and we loved it. We had a blast.