Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning

Today on Art of the Cut, Eddie Hamolton, ACE, discusses editing Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. 

Eddie’s been on Art of the Cut numerous times before for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning. He was also on to discuss Top Gun Maverick - which was one of the most listened to episodes in Art of the Cut history.

He’s also talked with Art of the Cut about Mission Impossible: Fallout,  Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation, and Kingsman: Secret Service.

Eddie, what a great movie and a huge an epic work for you!

It was a long two and a half years. Very intense. This year - from Christmas to the release - I had maybe three days off. There were a lot of seven day weeks.

Steve, when you were talking to the guys who did Deadpool, they were the same way. Last year they didn’t have a day off for ages putting that film together, I heard your interview, then I was imagining what the beginning of my 2025 would be like and it turned out to be rather similar to theirs in terms of the pressure to compress and get the structure as good as it could be. It was really hard, this one, I tell you.

It was a real challenge. The release is in the rear view mirror, so I’ve had some time to enter the slow lane for a bit and allow my mind and body to heal. I’m feeling much more rested.

How early were you on this picture? What kind of input did you have on the script? What were you doing that early? Previs?

These two movies - Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning - ran into each other and overlapped quite a bit. We started to film the biplane sequence in February, 2022 - three years ago before Top Gun came out.

We were in South Africa filming the biplane sequence when we had our first screening of Top Gun Maverick at CinemaCon.

I wouldn’t say I had a huge amount of input because everything evolves quite a bit. There was previs for a lot of the submarine sequence, and there was some previs for the biplane sequence.

However, the realities of physics hit you square in the face when you actually have to put Tom Cruise on the wing of a plane or in a gigantic submarine set or underwater, so the pace of any sequence that you build in previs is just not going to reflect the real physics of what’s gonna happen.

You inevitably end up massaging the sequences extensively once you start getting the footage and almost treating the previs as a rough guide to a series of events that happen, rather than any accurate representation of the time, or the duration of the piece or the pace of the piece.

In order to get the submarine sequence down to the correct length so that it played - in our test screenings the audience would keep saying it’s too long.

There was one iteration of that sequence, for example, where you actually see this quite advanced dive computer on Ethan’s wrist as he landed on the submarine and he set it for 10 minutes.

So there would be a countdown of when he would need to ascend to have enough oxygen and and all that. It was just an extra level of chatter that the audience didn’t need. A variation of that survived for months as we were working on the sequence.

Then, probably in the last few weeks of editing when we were really trying to compress, it started out twice as long.

Currently, it’s 15 minutes, so it was half an hour. Steve, the movie was much longer if we’re being honest. The first cut that I did was four hours and 10 minutes.

That was just the everything-in-the-blender cut. All the dialogue for every sequence was in there. Nothing was intercut yet.

Everything was just in its full, lumpy, uneven length. Chris McQuarrie never even saw that version of the film because we started to tackle the edit in smaller chunks.

Once I’d done a pass with Chris, then we sat down and watched the film. We were at like 3:20, so we had already managed to get 50 minutes out at that point.

My contribution came more when stuff started to arrive in the cutting room and we started to see what was physically possible with these sequences.

The other thing that we filmed in 2022 was everything with Angela Bassett. Everything in Mount Weather - that whole environment with the joint chiefs and the community and the fail safe story of the president trying to manage this expanding nuclear threat caused by the entity. That was a lot longer.

There’s lots of nice, juicy deleted scenes. There was this awesome subplot with General Sydney played by Nick Offerman, who was contacted by the vice president who was in a different location and was going to arrange a coup inside Mount Weather.

The scene that’s in the movie - where he comes out of the president’s office and says, “Son, I need your sidearm” - was originally the end of the scene where he was with the vice president. But instead we put it after the scene where they’re planning the sacrificial American city.

It’s that very noir sequence where the president needs to strategically target all the nuclear command centers of the other nations.

Then we took the end of the other scene and plunked it there so that you thought that the general might be the one to force the president at gunpoint to launch the missiles, so it’s a bit of a misdirect when he actually ends up saving the president in the first act.

The first two reels of the movie - effectively up until Ethan wakes up on the aircraft where he lands on the aircraft carrier - that whole opening, we spent 80% of our editing time working on. We spent weeks and weeks trying endless different structures.

It started out all non-linear and it ended up being mostly linear. We thought non-linear would be an interesting puzzle to propose to the audience so that they would be wondering what happened, but actually it was just really confusing and everyone had no idea what’s going on.

Originally, the opening titles came when Ethan bites down on the cyanide capsule tooth in the torture chamber. That’s where the opening titles lived for a long time.

Avid timeline screenshot of Reel 1 (the first 20 minutes) of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

You need to go to the credits on a bit of a win rather than on a bit of a cliffhanger and a downer. Then we’d come out of credits and go to the scene where Ethan is covered in dust holding up the key and getting arrested.

You’d come out to credits. You’d think, “What happened? Did Haley Atwell die? Why is he covered in dust?” He looked very distraught and shell-shocked. Then we had the scene on the jet with Briggs afterwards where he says, “I’m sorry about your friend.”

You may have thought he was referring to Grace: Haley Atwell’s character. People just wondered,  “What is going on?” It wasn’t a great way to go to credits.

Then we’d go to Mount Weather and Ethan would leave on Marine One. He’d look at the key, then doze off, and we’d cut back to the moment where he’s in the chair, foaming at the mouth and the fight sequence would play out.

Then they’d chase Gabriel through to the coffin. He would run to Luther. We used to end with Luther - with the countdown by the bomb - then we wouldn’t actually see what happened to Luther until much later in the movie.

When Ethan drowns - after coming out of the submarine - you would go to the bit where he gets the bends and you see him drowning. Then we did a closeup on Ethan’s face and we cross-faded to him running into Luther.

So that scene where he says goodbye to Luther came much later in the film as a reminder of Luther as a character in the movie. But it was just too much for the audience to take in. It was a left turn. People were confused by it.

It was a massive downer. We ended up just keeping it completely linear. Then we had when Ethan falls asleep on Marine one there’s the little flashback to Luther and they talk about “you made the right decision” and he’s got the poison pill in his hand, but it was a big old journey of experimentation to find that.

I wish the opening of the movie was shorter. It’s a lot of “vegetables.” The first 45 minutes of the movie is a lot of setup and a lot of exposition - callbacks to the other missions.

Eddie Hamilton, ACE and director Chris McQuarrie

We set up the entity right at the start. That was something we added quite late in the edit as well - this idea of showing the entity graphic and hearing all the callbacks to the other movies where they’re talking about the threat.

If you didn’t set up the entity right at the beginning of the film, in any scene where people are talking about it, you would be like, “what is it?” Even when she talks about it in the mission brief, it was still a question of: “what is this thing?”

So we wanted just to put it right up front. This is gonna be the threat of the movie, so that you saw the graphic and you heard people talking and the concept of this powerful threatening AI was seeded right at the beginning.

So it was quite fun going through and finding all the lines for that and building it, but it was a late addition. Then we introduce Ethan as a character by having the president saying, “Thank you for your service.”

It was a long Sunday of me going through the other movies trying to build that montage, setting up Ethan Hunt as a character and reminding everybody of all the crazy adventures he’s had with his team over the other movies and seeing all the stunts and finding the right rhythm for that and the emotion for it and intercutting it with the knife falling.

At the time you might thinking, “Why are we seeing this knife? Why are we seeing the black vault from the first movie so much?”

But obviously it all makes sense later because we’re just sowing seeds and showing you stuff and getting you used to the imagery.

Post team. Tom Kemplen (VFX Editor), Abbie Everatt (VFX Assistant Editor), Lydia-Marguerite Mannering (2nd Assistant Editor), Grace Couzins (VFX Assistant Editor), Eddie Hamilton, Alfie Godfrey (Composer), Cécile Tournesac (Music Editor), Catherine Farrell (Post Supervisor). Front row seated, left to right: Alyssa Jouett (Trainee Assistant Editor), Max Aruj (Composer), Chris Frith (Associate Editor), Tom Coope (Associate Editor), Rob Avery (First Assistant Editor)

That was not in the original script?

The mission brief in any of these movies is the always the last thing that gets nailed down because you are modulating how much vegetables to give the audience upfront. Originally it was longer.

Originally we talked about the nuclear threat and the entity taking over the nuclear command centers in the mission brief.

The released version of the movie doesn’t do that because it was just too much. Everyone said, “All you need to do is say, ‘Please turn yourself in.’ and ‘This key is very important.’” We need the entity source code. Gabriel knows where it is.

His side kick, Paris is in the hospital, so you just set that up, then you realize Ethan’s got the key and that was all we needed.

Then when we get to Mount Weather, we introduce the idea that the entity’s taking over the nuclear nation, so we, we took that idea and delayed it so that it was just less for you to have to process.

Earlier on, it was just overloading people with an exposition dump - which the mission brief always is - but we tried to give it that emotional thrust at the start, so it wasn’t all vegetables.

There was some kind of sweet treat at the start - this very emotional, warm hug of a music cue and all the great images of the other movies.

It’s just a nice trip down memory lane. 30 seconds of the greatest hits of Ethan Hunt doing stuff and his relationship with Julia and we glimpse Ilsa just to make sure that she isn’t forgotten.

His relationship with his team and the friendship with Benji and Luther is set up there a little bit. The other thing that we did in the first act - which you as an editor may have felt when you were watching the movie - is the exposition about what happened to the submarine, which is at the beginning of Dead Reckoning.

But the idea of talking about the Sebastopol - the crew sinking themselves with their own torpedo – was originally two separate scenes. Ethan talked to Benji and Luther, then he had another similar conversation with Gabriel later on.

It became very clear in our early screenings that it was the same information given in a slightly different way in two scenes, so we ended up cutting it pretty seamlessly, I think.

It seems to flow quite naturally when you watch it, but originally those were two separate scenes and they had slightly different emotional context.

So you are having your hand held through all those vegetables and exposition quite elegantly. Ultimately, although it is a lot and I wish there was a way to get it shorter… and we did.

We went through the scenes a thousand times trying to remove any line of dialogue that we could, and we managed to get a lot out and compress it right down.

I don’t know if people quite get that when Ethan stole the rabbit’s foot in mission three, that turned into the entity ‘cause it had code in it and it’s maybe slightly opaque ‘cause I know some people have contacted me and said, “What was that thing that Ethan stole?”

I thought we had explained it, but maybe on a casual first watch, you don’t. Some of the stuff isn’t quite landing for people, but it is all there. I promise you, we worked as hard as we could to compress it as much as possible and make it smooth and give it enough pace so that you didn’t feel like it was dragging.

You are leaning in the whole time and a lot of the audience may - hopefully by the time they get to the end of the movie - and you’ve had that kind of breathless biplane sequence. You have the ending with Luther’s voiceover, which I think is just a slam dunk, brilliant emotional resolution to everything at the end of the film.

I remember reading that. That idea was always in every version of the script that I ever read. I remember reading that and thinking, “If this works, it will just be such a great way of giving the audience a lift at the end.”

Then the whole scene at the end in Trafalgar Square, which plays with no dialogue at all - just that incredible music cue from Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, the composers.

I think by the time you get to that point, you’ve hopefully forgotten that there were all those vegetables at the beginning. Hopefully having understood all the exposition, then you can enjoy.

A lot of people, I think fairly say that the movie starts once Ethan is on his way to the submarine, but the problem is he’s then separated from the team, so if we literally started the movie with him on the aircraft carrier talking to Hannah Wadham then there would be no opportunities to have him together with the team until much later, so it’s a whole puzzle of things that you are trying to wrestle into shape and make work just to keep all the mouths fed.

I wish there was a way we could compress it more, but we tried every conceivable way of doing it, I promise you, and it was either confusing or longer, so we did get it down as short as it could be.

You mentioned how you had intercut stuff after that first pass at the movie. Does that help you also speed things up when you’re intercutting?

Let’s talk about the dialogue sequence where Ethan’s in the torture chamber and we’re intercutting with Ethan talking to Benji and Luther, which in the linear nature of the story happened before you are almost flashing back, although it feels continuous because there’s one music cue and the information’s coming at you seamlessly, so you’re not really thinking about the logical timeline of things that you’re seeing.

You’re just getting the information and enjoying the journey and the fact that the villain is putting all this pressure on Ethan and explaining that he’s responsible for this. It wasn’t that hard to intercut.

We had lived with the two scenes individually for quite a while and I remember thinking, “This is gonna end up being intercut.

There were just lots of other things that we were dealing with first - turning over visual effects for the rest of the movie - because there’s hardly any VFX in that sequence ‘cause it’s just dialogue, so it kept getting pushed down the road. Eventually we got to it.

We pretty much did a good pass on it in a day I would say, then just endlessly refined for two or three months.

The scene with the team fighting, and Ethan fighting the acolyte on the submarine in the treadmill scene, which is quite fun.

Then you have the team in the cottage fighting the Russians. That was always intended to be intercut.

We tried versions where we didn’t intercut it. We would either put Ethan’s fight first, or we would put the cottage fight first, and what you felt was, “We are tired of action.”

One fight would end, then you would go straight into another fight and the audience would think, “I’ve just had a fight and I’m exhausted from the fight. I don’t want to go to another fight scene straight away.”

We watched that version and we - like anyone watching this who understands the basics of editing -  would put their hand on and say, “Have you tried intercutting these two scenes?”

McQ really wanted to explore all options to make sure that we’d tried it, we knew it had to be intercut, but the rhythm of the intercuts and how much story to have in between each thing. We tried so many versions of it.

Everyone would just say, “It’s too long.” That’s always the note you get. As with a lot of action scenes, it’s just too long. It goes on and all this choreography that the actors have learned, you end up cutting it out - for the benefit of the movie, obviously.

Originally we had 11 intercuts. We analyzed: how long is each beat in minutes and seconds. We had 11 intercuts initially.

This is two weeks before we locked picture, which was very late. We locked picture two days before the final mix finished. It was that kind of craziness, but it still felt bumpy and a bit too long, quite frankly.

So we ended up doing 13 intercuts in the end. And delaying a lot of the action Tarzan, the character Dega, going through the window, into the kitchen, all that stuff. So you watch it and it all just works fine and plays and makes sense, but it was, a lot of trial and error getting there.

We tested it and people liked it, but people were still saying, “It’s still a bit too long.” Then the real trick was finding that music cue which plays over the whole thing, which just builds and builds to a climax. It does stop for the little cutaways to the captain on the submarine and stuff, but that was quite a tricky music cue.

It was maybe the third last cue to get right in the movie, like a week before we finished the final mix. They were scoring in the week of the final mix, then we were dropping music in on the last day of the final mix, basically. It was one of those crazy scrambles to get everything finished.

Sound team at the end of the final mix

Did you temp with something from the composer?

McQ just plays it dry. If he hasn’t found the right cue, he just plays it dry. Our first test screening we did probably had only a third of the score in there and the rest of the movie just played dry.

I think our first test screening was three hours and 10 minutes or something. It was very long and there was maybe a total of 30 minutes of music in that.

Not much at all. McQ doesn’t mind stuff playing dry. He really wants to feel if a sequence can play without music, so he’s very happy to sit and run the movie very dry, but ultimately - in order to give the audience the full rich meal that they have bought a ticket for - you do need quite a bit of music in these movies.

One of the earliest things that we figured out was the submarine music There’s this musician called Constance Demby - who’s passed away quite recently actually - but she built these instruments out of curved metal and played them with a violin bow to get these kind of haunting screeches and wails of music from this metal instrument called the Space Base.

We ended up licensing some of her music, then overlaying it with Russian throat singers. One of McQ’s notes to the composers was that it would be quite fun if the orchestra sounded like they’re playing underwater.

So it’s all the frequencies that would work underwater, which is why we ended up with that quite dreamy, very unusual sonic treatment when Ethan’s descending to the submarine, then when he’s going into the submarine.

Obviously there are places where we stop the score entirely and it becomes a bit more suspenseful. That’s actually something that we figured out relatively early.

Then the last things we figured out were the biplane, which was very difficult because in the sequence where Gabriel is pounding Ethan on the wing and doing the dives and the rolls and the hammerheads and all that and Ethan is zero G and he’s spinning around.

It’s one of those things that seems very obvious now, but what we ended up doing is whenever we were close with Ethan, we would be hearing the intensity of the engine and his jacket flapping and the pounding of his body on the plane, then whenever we cut to a wide shot, there would be a howl from the horns to sell the jeopardy.

The very last thing that we got to work - and this was something that came in at the 11th hour and the 59th minute - was the music that plays as Ethan is in the coffin confronting the entity. 

There’s a whole story behind that scene. Obviously it’s quite short now. It’s only a few minutes, but there was a version that was much longer and originally we had a lot more rhythm in that cue, but the guys came up with this quite haunting kind of dark menacing score, which builds and builds all the way through when you see the nuclear destruction around the world.

It’s quite unnerving and it suits Ethan’s state of mind when he comes out of the coffin because we filmed the stuff outside the coffin a year earlier than the stuff inside the coffin. So we weren’t quite sure what was gonna happen inside the coffin.

Originally, we had the idea that the entity would scrub through Ethan’s memories, which you do get a little bit because I did a rewind effect through what you saw in the movie - certain things that the entity is getting from him.

But originally it went back to  a whole montage of Ethan as a baby, seeing his mother, seeing his father, seeing him take his first steps, blowing out birthday candles - a very kind of Terrence Malick Tree of Life thing - seeing his father die in a car crash and seeing him meet his first girlfriend. It was really beautifully shot, beautifully cast.

Everything with Ethan was filmed from slightly behind or in shadowed silhouettes so you couldn’t quite make out his exact teenage features, but you felt all the emotion and you felt the grief of his mother when his father died, and how when his dad died, he ended up defending a kid who was being bullied at school, getting in trouble with the local law, and then ending up running away from home and joining the army.

Avid timeline screenshot of Reel 3 of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

It was great for people who want to know more about Ethan Hunt and the character and how he grew up, but the audience didn’t need it.

The movie is still too long but we did compress it as much as we could. It was just one extra element, so it had to go ultimately, but it was really good stuff.

On the special features of the Blu-ray, there might be a hint of that ‘cause we’re putting together a deleted shots montage - which we often do - where it’s just all the great shots from the deleted scenes rather than whole scenes.

We shot this in the Arctic and there was a whole montage of Grace and Tapeesa traveling across the ice - a 90-second montage of them with the sled dogs.

There was a moment where Grace falls off the sled and she has to run after it because if she doesn’t catch the sled, she’ll get left behind, but the notes we kept getting were, “There’s too much of Grace and Tapeesa on the ice.” We loved the shots.

There are stunning shots filmed in the Arctic.

During Ethan’s descent to the submarine we used to cut to Grace waking up on the sled and seeing that Tapeeza had vanished, so she’d clearly fallen off in the night.

So Grace stops the sled and looks around and calls, and you just see this massive expanse of ice - frozen Bering Sea in front of her - and you think, “What’s she gonna do?”

Because if he doesn’t go to Ethan, he’s gonna drown. He’s gonna be stuck under the ice forever. Is she gonna go back and get Tapeesa? You see her make this decision.

She turns the sled round and goes back to get Tapeesa, tthen we cut back to Ethan landing on the submarine. So you would know, “Oh shit, they’re not coming to get him ‘cause she’s turned around.”

But the audience was slightly confused because he’s only on the submarine for 17 minutes. So did Grace really go to get Tapeesa then turn around and come back? People started to ask questions.

So it was slightly more confusing than it was suspenseful. It was another 50 seconds that we could cut out of the movie. Ultimately, we just decided to stay with Ethan as he’s descending to the submarine then just see Grace revive him.

Eddie Hamilton on location in Svalbard - March 2023

In some of our previous interviews, you’ve sent me some great photographs of yourself editing on location. Beautiful! In the Alps. Talk to me about editing on location. What’s the value of that? Does it help you to be on set? Does it help McQ?

That is a great question for this particular movie. I had some pretty crazy experiences on set. Three of which stand out in my mind specifically. In chronological order it would be going to South Africa for five months for filming the biplane sequence, which is 15 minutes of screen time.

You gave me the footage count for the previous movie’s helicopter scene, which was like 40 hours.

This was 425 hours of footage for the biplane. Let me explain why. There were a lot of camera tests in England: testing the planes - which was never gonna be in the movie.

Probably a quarter of that was camera tests done in the UK where Tom is wearing a crash helmet and lots of pads to test his agility on the wing of the plane.

Every time they send a camera rig up, they have to turn the cameras on and fly the plane with just a pilot to test that the cameras won’t fall off and can withstand the air pressure and the G-Force that are being put on them.

Then when we got to South Africa, the total number of biplane flights we did in the red and the yellow plane was around 4,000 flights. I’d say probably a couple of thousand of those was Tom either flying the plane when he’s being chased or on the wing of the plane or transferring from one plane to the other.

It was astonishingly dangerous and very time consuming because of the level of safety that had to be maximized each day to make sure that nothing went wrong. The best pilots in the world. These stunning locations.

You are talking about unicorn weather conditions to make these things happen. So there would be days where the weather wouldn’t be right. We would prep on the ground.

We wouldn’t even film because the wind was wrong or it was raining, or the sun wasn’t right, or the clouds weren’t right.

If you film a plane with a blue sky, it looks like it’s not moving. It looks like it’s stationary regardless of how fast it’s going. So you need clouds to give you that sense of ground rush in the sky. We were quite often waiting for the right sets of clouds.

There’s a scene where Gabriel chases Ethan into the clouds and they’re flying along the ground and they just fly into the clouds.

To get clouds that low requires an astonishing stars aligning amount of different weather patterns to all coincide at the same time, so you can fly from the ground into the clouds and we would be monitoring the weather every day for the five months and there were maybe two days out of that time where clouds were at ground level and we could fly into the clouds.

We managed to get that shot on our second attempt, so we didn’t need to do it again.

Let me talk to you a little bit about being on set. I was there every day. I was living with Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise in a rented house in South Africa.

We filmed in the northeast of South Africa, then we filmed in Ensberg, which is south east of South Africa.

I would have breakfast with Tom and McQ every morning, and they would talk about what we would be doing that day. Then we would travel to set together - again, discussing what we would do that day.

Then I would be in every briefing on the ground as the pilots were talking about where they were gonna be going, what stunts they were gonna be doing.

Then I’d listen to the briefing by the plane, as Tom would talk through with the crew and the stunt team about how his safety cable would be fastened.

Then they would go up and fly. I would look at the previous day’s dailies as they were in the air and start to break those down. Then they would land and they would talk about what they got, then they would go up again maybe and try to get something else.

Eddie Hamilton editing on location in Drakensberg South Africa

They also built these forward operating bases where they could refuel the planes so they didn’t have to come back to the main base, if you can imagine that.

So quite often they would be away for a longer stretch of time, and I’d just be looking at dailies from the day before.

At the end of the day McQ and Tom and I would travel back to the house and they would talk all the way about what they had done that day, then we would have dinner. Tom would almost always go to the gym every day.

He would be in the gym, then he would come for dinner, then they would talk about what we’d done. The great thing about that was I would get their immediate feedback where they felt the day went, and I would be able to incorporate that knowledge into my select pulls for the following day when I got the dailies and I was able to put my two green markers on the bits where they had talked about something happening that was really cool and this should be in the movie. It did take me about four months to build the first assembly of the aerial sequence out of all those hundreds of hours of footage.

As usual, I’m very thorough. The whole thing about sharpening the ax - which we always talk about - spending two thirds of the time breaking down the material into very specific tiny little selects so that I could always go back and say, “What are the other options I have for this 10 seconds of story?”

I’d have it broken down into ten second chunks, which is very similar to what I did on Top Gun Maverick. Then I would use Subcaps (Avid’s subtitle tool).

I’d put a Subcap on a top video layer explaining what that part of the story was, so when I came back to look at the selects roll two years later when I was refining the scene, I could find stuff super quickly.

When I built my first assembly of the scene - I would say. quite unusually – that it was about 90% accurate to what McQ wanted to see because I listened to everything.

The cut was very long. It’s twice as long as what’s there now, but all the best pieces were there for the most part. There was some feedback and notes and “this doesn’t work quite as well as I wanted, let’s see the other options” and all that stuff. That was the benefit of me being on set for that.

Sometimes I’d be in the helicopter with McQ and Mary Boulding, the first assistant director. Especially if McQ said to me, “You’ve built a version of this scene. We’re going to go and pick up this specific piece of action.

Can you make sure that what we film will cut into the edit?” All the low angle shots where we’re looking up at the pilots - the camera’s kind of between their legs and we’re looking up at them - that was all shot two years later in Oxfordshire in England, north of London.

So I already had an assembly of the scene and I knew we needed all these low angles so that we had more options for cutaways.

We tried doing them with the plane on a gimbal and they didn’t look good because you can’t get the sun to move quickly on a gimbal.

We thought we could just blow Ritter fans at the actors but we couldn’t get the interactive light. If you look at all the low angles, they feel real because they completely are real. Those shots took us  three weeks of filming where we were getting little extra pieces of action.

There’s pieces where Ethan was punching Gabriel or whatever, which we didn’t quite get right in South Africa and low angles, looking up through their legs.

Shots of Ethan thinking and listening to Gabriel and Gabriel chasing Ethan and seeing the close-ups of the poison pill around his neck.

All that stuff was filmed back in the UK much later, and I was in the helicopter for all of those, watching the live feed from the plane. We had a list of all the pieces of story that we need to make the sequence work.

McQ would look at the plane and communicate with the actor. And I would be religiously looking at the monitor to see if we got what we needed to cut in.

There were some days where McQ was not able to go up and he would delegate that to me. There were a couple of times where I did get quite airsick.

I was talking to Tom on the radio, ‘cause I was asking him to do specific maneuvers in the air where he was moving the stick to the left and right and pulling the stick back.

We would always make sure the sun was between the 10 o’clock and the two o’clock position behind them.

And there was one time where Tom finished a maneuver and he was asking me, “Eddie, did we get it? Did we get it?” And I was literally vomiting into a bag. Then eventually I said, “Yeah Tom, we got it. We got it. It’s great. Can you move on to number six on the list?”

The two other things that happened to me - which was nuts, Steve - was going to the USS George HW Bush, which was an active-duty aircraft carrier in the Adriatic Sea monitoring all the Russian activity in the Mediterranean and all the stuff that was going on in Syria and Ukraine. It was literally the eye of the storm.

The Ukraine war going on. There were - I kid you not – F-18s taking off and landing 24 hours a day on that aircraft carrier every few minutes. It was extraordinary to be there and to be part of that.

The captain said, “Hey Eddie, would you like to set up your Avid laptop in my cabin and plug in to the big TVs - which are normally showing CCTV footage from the deck of the planes taking off and landing so the captain can see what’s going on.

He said, “Just plug in and use my cabin.” So for the four days that I was there, I was literally editing in the captain’s cabin, and Chris and Tom would come down and they would look at stuff and we would eat in the Captain’s cabin.

He was so generous and they were so welcoming, obviously because Maverick is on the aircraft carrier with us. It was like The Beatles, the most famous naval aviator on the planet comes to visit an active duty aircraft carrier - playing Ethan Hunt, but still he is Maverick.

For a Brit, that was an unbelievable experience to be able to be welcomed onto a US aircraft carrier. That was astonishing. And it was a whole naval strike group. It’s not just the carrier. There’s other destroyers flanking it.

Eddie editing in the Captain’s quarters of the USS George HW Bush aircraft carrier

The other thing that I got to do was go to the Arctic with my 160 terabyte hard drive in minus 30 degree temperatures and work in this little cabin that we had on an island at the northern most tip of Norway.

It’s like an independent nation, but it’s part of Norway. You can’t go any further north on Google Maps. North of there is the North Pole.

That was about two or three months before Dead Reckoning came out, so we were still editing that. I remember sitting there in minus 30 degree temperatures. I had my laptop and my hard drive and I set up and I was working.

The only time we stopped was for the strikes, which was in the autumn of 2023. For those four or five months where nothing was happening it was a very welcome break for me. I kept working on as much as I could.

We worked for about a month, fine-cutting everything that we had shot. We’d done as much as we could basically. Eventually we did stop.

There was a point at which we said, “We’re not really gonna make any more progress without filming.” We still had another year of filming to come. But I was ready for a break.

Eddie Hamilton outside cutting room building on location in Svalbard - March 2023

Then in 2024, I didn’t have any time off. We just went the whole way through 2024 every single day. I had some weekends off. I got two weeks off at Christmas and then in 2025 it was just nonstop. I was on the treadmill running every day with all the dailies coming in and trying to stay on top of it all.

High-five to all my team ‘cause they were all working flat out and they were all amazing. I had one assistant with me in South Africa, Chris Frith, who came out and did heroic work out there while the others were back in London and all the dailies were being uploaded to them.

We had a lab in South Africa that would process the footage locally, then we would get it put on a hard drive and I would copy the files from the little hard drive from the lab onto my gigantic 160 terabyte hard drive.

Every morning I would do that. You pinch yourself with some of the crazy stuff that goes on. The stuff that I saw was just insane.

Razer NAGA mouse

We talked a couple of interviews back about your use of a NAGA mouse. Are you still using that or have you changed that?

No. I am using it. There was a slight issue with the driver. NAGA stopped making a driver for the Mac, but there is this amazing piece of software called SteerMouse. It’s like a $15 one-off fee to buy, and it’s developed by - I think a Japanese guy who wrote it.

He has basically analyzed the signal of all these gaming mice - not just the Naga one, but lots of them - and he developed a much less resource-hungry plugin or this tiny piece of software - this app called SteerMouse which allows you to apply keystrokes and it’s a lot more versatile.

It works with all kinds of gaming mice. I just load my presets up. I find it incredibly helpful.

Eddie Hamilton’s Razer Naga Steermouse settings

Wheel click - double click

Wheel forward - H (timeline zoom in)

Wheel back - N (timeline zoom out)

Back shoulder button - 7  Match frame

Front shoulder button - o  Segment mode

1 - page up (toggle source/record)

2 - down arrow (next multigroup cam)

3 - CTRL-SHIFT F (full screen playback)

COMMAND 3 - ’ (quad split) 

4 - space bar (play)

5 - enter (enter)

COMMAND 5 - F5 (remove effect)

6 - ; (FX editor)

COMMAND 6 - F8 (render effect)

7 - F9 (find bin)

8 - F6 (add edit)

9 - 0 (editing layout)

10 - F10 timeline waveform off

11 - F11 timeline waveform on

12 - 9 (colour correction layout)

I like the new subframe keyframing in Avid. That was useful and the Pro Tools exports. Something that came into Media Composer maybe two years ago was Edit Group.

When you’ve made a group clip and you want to unpick it and edit it then lock it in again.

On the biplane sequence, it was so incredibly useful because we had so many cameras rolling on that. One of the things that Chris Frith did for me every day was make a sync map of the entire day’s photography.

So for the 12 hours that we would rolled cameras - we’d start at eight in the morning and finish quite late at night if the sun was still up - and there would often be up to four cameras running, Z cameras.

The little Z cameras are what we would use, rigged to the actual biplanes to get different angles. So there would be a helicopter with a rig on it that would be filming either with a Zoom lens or a wider lens.

Sometimes we would have Tom Cruise flying one plane with Esai Morales in another plane. They would both have four cameras on, so we would get eight. It would be a lot.

So we would make a sync map. We would tell Media Composer to plunk all the clips down on the timeline based on their source time code. And at a glance you could see, “A camera was running at all these times.

B camera was running here.” You could check the sync obviously to make sure they were in sync, then subsequence those and make the group from that.

But if you wanted to change it later - if you discovered that something you thought was in sync, actually was not in sync upon further inspection in the group - you could then edit the group.

That would’ve been, an almighty challenge if we didn’t have that. A lot of the new features that come on Media Composer don’t enhance my life as an editor, but they significantly enhance the assistant editor’s life, which is why I’m very keen to try and embrace all the latest features because it means that my team can work more efficiently, ultimately, and get stuff done quicker.

The transcription feature I think is pretty genius. It’s very helpful when you are under the gun and you need to find stuff quickly. We still do all the line strings and things like that, but it’s still quite useful to have as a kind of additional level of checking and finding stuff.

Eddie Hamilton editing in Italy hotel - March 2022

How would you use that? Looking for a phrase that you’re trying to find?

Yeah. Sometimes. You can use it for when the 1st AD calls action. You can go to the transcription and search, “Where does someone say ‘action’?” You can find it and just mark the in point. You can mark ‘action’ and ‘cut’ quite quickly.

So there’s things like that where you can fast-forward bits of the process ‘cause it transcribes the whole clip.

Or if you are trying to find resets - the director calls “back to one.” You can see those things in the transcription, which can help mark up the clip a bit quicker. It’s things like that. My team are obviously using them a little bit more than me.

I’m going to start a movie soon where it’s more documentary style. There’s gonna be quite a bit of ad-libbing.

No two takes will necessarily be the same, so I think the transcription tool will be very useful in those situations because you can make different characters different colors in the transcription and it can isolate different voices. It’s really clever, so I’m quite interested to see if that will allow us to work a little bit faster.

ProTools import and export was really useful because I don’t want baked-in automation from the music editor. I always wanted levels at zero, then I’ll do all the key frames.

But with the ProTools exports, she would be able to do a rough mix, then send me an export and I would get a track with automation in it, which would then translate perfectly on the Avid timeline.

That was incredibly useful ‘cause it saved me an extra level of remixing. She would mix it at her end then she would remove the automation to export it to me, then I would remix it.

When Cecile Tournesac, our music editor, would send music tracks, they would already have all the automation key frames - and they were subframe key frames as well - so they’d work perfectly.

Screenshot of Avid timeline from Reel 2 of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. From the first act.

You claimed that 80% of your time was spent working on the first act of the movie. What was the most challenging scene to edit? Was it the whole first act or was there a scene that was challenging?

Intercutting the third was quite a challenge because, how long can you be away from Ethan on the plane? How long can you cut away to the president? McQ’s quite clever because he builds in stuff for the team to do.

So while Ethan is flying the plane, meanwhile, you cut back to Grace and she’s assembling all the cables in the server box.

She’s gotta connect a whole bundle of these cables and Benji’s talking her through it, which all happens off screen, so you don’t feel like they’ve all just been doing nothing when you’re away from them.

The very first time we sat down to intercut this, the biplane was much, much longer. We wondered if we were ever gonna find a way that this is going to feel organic and smooth and you’re not just gonna be bumped off the ride every time we cut away?

The individual scenes all worked.

I was very confident that the stuff with Benji and the tension pneumothorax was working really well. All the acting in there was great.

The stuff around the bomb where they’re trying to figure out if they can run to safety in 10 seconds - and because you’ve seen Luther die diffusing this bomb and there are five bombs of the same type - which most people probably won’t pick up on - but it’s the same bomb that Luther had, just five of them on their side - and they have to diffuse five of them, so you know that they’re not gonna make it.

It was quite nice in our test screenings when Donloe and Tapeesa turn up after the explosion, there was a round of applause in the audience. It was really very rewarding that they cared enough about those characters and were rooting for them to survive.

Screenshot of Avid timeline Reel 7 in the final act

The intercutting of the third act was very difficult. Originally, Grace and Dega did not talk to each other. The two stories were totally separate.

Then we discovered that we would need to do that Mission Impossible thing of characters talking to each other without us explaining how they can talk to each other, and you just buy it ‘cause you’ve seen them with earpieces and talking to each other elsewhere in the movie.

So you just assume that the team can talk to each other.

Some of that was pickups that we did later where Grace and Dega were talking and they were updating each other about what they were doing. That was a late edition.

Originally - here’s a real Easter egg - Donloe and Tapeesa were not supposed to be in the third act at all. They were supposed to just help in the Arctic. Tthen it would just be Ethan and the team.

There are shots in the trailer of Ethan and the team in South Africa without Donloe and Tapeesa there. You see the team driving up in their Land Rover, and we actually added Donloe and Tapeesa in a separate truck afterwards so that there’s a CG truck driving behind Ethan’s Land Rover with Donloe and Tapeesa in it.

They were never at the exterior South Africa location. We shot them back at Leavesden Studios and composited South Africa behind. Originally the team stopped outside the mine and all got out and then they walked in.

But when we added Don Lowe and Topez into the third act, we then. Had them drive into a sound stage together and we put South Africa outside and then all of them get out and we have another team shot where they all get ready and tool up, then they walk in.

That was a discovery that we made when we watched the assembly. We felt like we missed these characters and we want them to be there.

In the third act they feel an essential part of the team. If we’ve done our job correctly, you think that maybe they are sacrificing themselves for the greater good, and they may not survive, but then everyone makes it - even Benji.

When he turns up in Trafalgar Square, there was a massive round of applause in our test screenings because Benji had survived, which was exactly what McQ wanted everyone to feel. So that was nice and rewarding as well. That was probably the hardest thing in terms of an individual sequence.

Eddie at the Mission: Impossible premiere in London

All of the scenes are hard. The scene with Ethan when he’s in Mount Weather and he’s talking about what he wants to do with the key and that the entity’s going to take control of all the world’s nuclear weapons.

That whole scene with the president is cut a bit like an action sequence because there are all these different pieces of coverage. We’re bouncing around the room and seeing the reactions of all these people and choosing to cut on very specific words.

Those scenes are very difficult to build. You have to tap dance around everybody constantly and feel all the reactions to what Ethan is saying.

Are we on the president? Are we on Ethan? Are we on Kittridge or whoever we are on? That was very time consuming to get right.

Any of those scenes with lots of characters talking - you know what it’s like - it’s always a challenge to get the balance right every day. We were just chipping away at different parts of the movie, but certainly the lion’s share of our exhaustive restructuring and reworking came in the first act.

The movie worked really well from the moment Ethan landed on the aircraft carrier pretty much to the end. The structure was pretty locked down because it’s a very linear story at that point. You’re just on the journey.

There was a really fun deleted scene, actually on the submarine where you first met the Marine recon divers. Obviously you see them when Ethan first arrives on the submarine and he’s lying on the floor and the water’s draining out.

You see them all take their masks off and we set up the characters there, but there was another scene where we met them.

They X-rayed Ethan, and all these x-rays were up on a board. It’s all the injuries that Tom Cruise has actually sustained, making all these Mission Impossible movies.

So we had his real x-rays of all his broken bones and stuff, teeth and nose and head and broken ankle and all kinds of stuff.

The medic was talking through all the injuries that he could see and the Marine recon divers are listening and you can see their eyes widening and we would cut to Tom reacting and remembering back all these injuries and wincing slightly the memory of that.

It was a fun scene that McQ and Tom had talked about: to have this scene where one way of introducing Ethan as a character is to see all the injuries that he sustained over the years. But again, the movie’s too long and something had to go.

It was one of the first scenes to go, actually. I said, “The sequence will work fine without this. We should probably cut this.”

It’s interesting that a movie that’s developed and written with so much care and talent and time devoted has all these scenes that get cut out. That happens with nearly all movies. Why do you think that is?

The script is evolving through production constantly. They’re trying to make each scene inherently emotional. Information is the death of emotion, and whenever there are “vegetables” they’re trying to make sure that there’s a side of sweet emotional treats to go along with it. It’s all stuff that feels essential on the day when they’re filming it.

Every day I’m sitting in the cutting room thinking of the audience. I’m thinking of them and how they’re going to react to what they’re seeing - individually, scene by scene, but also in the movie as a whole - and the context of everything that they’re seeing.

The fact that this is the culmination of all these movies means that there’s a lot of stuff going on that we have to try and fit in.

With Cruise doing so much of his own stunt work, do you favor - or lean into - the moments when you can tell it’s Tom that’s actually in peril, doing the stunt?

Always! Hopefully you can always tell it’s Tom. Every camera angle is specifically designed - very carefully - to show that Tom Cruise is doing these stunts. Generally speaking, we’re always designing every camera move to show that it’s him.

That scene where he’s in the flooded torpedo room and he’s trying to swim back across it? That was unbelievably dangerous and so time consuming! I’d be getting only two setups a day! Rehearse for three hours, film for an hour.

Have lunch. Rehearse for three hours, film for an hour, call it a day. So you wouldn’t get a lot of footage, but there was amazing stuff in there.

Just the safety protocols and the amount of testing they would do to make sure that something wouldn’t directly fall on Tom’s back and put him in danger. It was terrifying the time it took to do that.

Everyone seems to love that submarine sequence, and it’s a little piece of cinema history for people who want a very different kind of suspense sequence.

It’s a revolving set that we’ve seen in a few other movies, but taken to a kind of absurdly advanced level, where it just escalates and escalates over a sustained period of time.

That was fun, but again, quite hard to get down to the correct length. A lot had to go.

In the opening section with the flashback movie clips from the other MI movies, did you just use clips from that were actually in the finished movie, or did you find that it was valuable - and you had access to the other takes and other angles - or was everything from the released film?

Good question Steve. No, it was just shots from the finished movie. We had the scanned film from all the other movies and we were able to put those straight into our DI and use them and recolor them for the purposes of this film, but we did not have access to dailies to be able to reinvent anything.

I think it’s quite nice to see images from the other movies because you are very familiar with them.

People who’ve seen them remember those shots. We had tiny nods to Mission 2 of Ethan Wright pulling the mask off, or Ethan riding the bike out of the flames.

Those are iconic images from Mission Two with tiny flashes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sean Harris from Rogue Nation and Fallout.

Actually, I think we only ended up using images from Fallout in there, but the shots were just from the other movies which obviously I’ve seen so many times and I know them all so well, so it was fairly quick.

It was still enormously time consuming and I had already done quite a lot of homework ‘cause I had a feeling something like this might come up.

So I had gone through and pulled out all the greatest hits of the other movies and had them on a selects roll.

When I wasn’t overwhelmed with dailies I sat and did that and got my editorial team to have a crack at building selects rolls of Luther and Benji and Julia and all those great characters. I got lots of sets of eyes on it, so we were able to find all these iconic little moments.

Eddie’s map of the previous Mission: Impossible storybeats

I remember when we last talked about one of these Mission films you had mapped out all of the peaks and valleys of all the mission films in a graph.

That’s true. I probably should do that just to complete the set, but we did not have time. We were all working so hard.

But maybe I will. Maybe at some point I’ll finish that. It was more of a kind of educational device to teach us how these movies feel as you watch them. I think in a way we evolved past needing that because we’ve done so many of them.

Eddie, I’ve taken up far too much of your time. We really appreciate your generosity in sharing all of your wisdom with the editing community.

Thank you, Steve. It’s always such a pleasure to talk to you. It’s great to talk to you and inspire the young editors who are coming up who love listening to your show. Onwards to the next one. Thank you all for reading this.