Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was filmed in a non-traditional, non-linear way, with the cast and crew often jumping back and forth between the beginning and ending of the movie. Filming movies this way is nothing new really; a lot of movies adopt non-linear filmmaking to optimize production costs and maximize their utilization of locations and the shooting schedules of their actors. But what makes Mission: Impossible a tad different here is the way the movie came together, with the action sequences being defined first and the story woven later around them. This is one of the reasons why the bike stunt was shot on day one.
In a pair of exclusives with Empire, director Christopher McQuarrie revealed that they kicked off filming for Dead Reckoning with the now famous stunt sequence. In case you’re struggling to recollect, I’m referring to the scene that sees Cruise leap off a cliff in a bike for real. The entire sequence was filmed 6 times and required weeks of prep and hundreds of hours of rehearsals, as was revealed in a featurette released last year. McQuarrie’s rationale for filming it first was to have the big moments in the can early on and use the momentum to figure out a compelling story around those stunts.
Doing that on Day One gave us all the time in the world to understand why he [Ethan] was doing what he was doing. If we sat around and tried to figure out these movies the old-fashioned way, you’d never find it, simply because it’s such a living, breathing thing.
Another reason for tackling this stunt head-on at the beginning was leaving a stamp of arrival. Cruise describes it as a moment that makes a statement about the seriousness of their two-part endeavor in a world where COVID was beginning to rear its ugly head.
I have a responsibility to audiences, the studio, my crew, my cast and industry. We can’t compromise just because all of these things happened. I can’t compromise the storytelling. It’s never the easy road.
McQuarrie was so unsure about the movie’s storyline that they hadn’t even assigned Hayley Atwell’s character a name. She ended up being named Grace much later in production. McQuarrie felt her character, described as an “agent of chaos” by nature, was completely out of place in the world of Mission: Impossible.
Hayley’s character didn’t have a name for a long, long time. She has her own objective, and she more or less becomes ensnared in this movie. What you have here is a character who absolutely does not belong in a Mission: Impossible movie, and she’s doing everything she can to get out of it.
I suspect there was a third, more important reason for doing this before anything else. As cynical as it sounds, the production probably needed to be sure that Tom Cruise survived the stunt and didn’t fall to his death in the event that something malfunctioned. The action crews of movies such as Mission: Impossible are usually state-of-the-art, but accidents have known to have happened, and the studio didn’t want to be staring at a situation of having lost their lead actor after the whole movie is in the can. They had a Part Two to film as well after all.
Talking about the movie’s non-linear nature, Vanessa Kirby, who returns to play The White Widow from Mission: Impossible – Fallout explains how the time gap between shooting different sequences also posed a problem. But the crew took the changes in their stride, always striving to get the best possible scene on camera.
We were shooting in a train carriage. And because of Covid we had moved on from that location, and then we realised we needed to get something else to tie in. We even came back a couple of months ago to that scene. It’s cool that you know that it will be the best version, and that they don’t stop until they get it.
Check out some more quotes at the Empire pieces using the source links below.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 12, 2023. Its sequel, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two is slated to be released on June 28, 2024.
