Article content continued

In this one, the HALO jump was not something we set out to do. It came up because in the Grand Palais sequence we were trying to figure out how Tom was going to get in. One of the things about Mission is, you don’t go through the front door or out the back door — anyone can do that. You come up with ways to make those two things complicated. Our production designer showed us a picture of the Grand Palais from above and he just stuck a figure of Tom skydiving in from above … We never thought of this movie having multiple, big stunts until we were deep into making it.

Tom broke his ankle doing one of the stunts. Was there ever a point where you were worried that he might get seriously injured?

Without question, we worried about it all the time. When he broke his ankle it wasn’t even a big stunt. It was a transitional beat. It was the first day of shooting the foot chase. We had been through the helicopter chase, we still had the HALO jump and Pulpit Rock in front of us, and that was the only stunt of its kind in that foot chase sequence. Once we were over that hurdle, the rest of the foot chase was very straightforward. What should have been the simplest sequence in the movie was complicated exponentially by the fact that Tom broke his ankle. Virtually every scene you see him running in London, except for the one where he breaks his ankle, his ankle is broken.

You’ve directed some of the most memorable action scenes ever filmed. What are your favourites?

It’s funny. The ones that mean the most to me are the ones that don’t belong in a Mission: Impossible movie. There’s that attack on the police motorcade that’s done entirely without sound and only with music. There was a lot of apprehension on the studio’s part with that scene… to them it didn’t feel like Mission. But the one thing that we’re most proud of on Fallout is this is the biggest finale of a Mission movie by a long stretch.