Mission: Impossible - Fallout

The shooting script ran to thirty three pages. Christopher McQuarrie, the first filmmaker to direct two entries in this series, worked from an outline rather than from written scenes, and the consequence is visible. Set pieces were designed first and the plot poured in around them, which is why characters keep restating who wants what between sequences, and why the middle stretch of masks and mistaken identity asks for patience rather than attention. The last half hour pays that back with almost no dialogue. Seventy hours of helicopter footage were cut to seven and a half minutes, and Tom Cruise took a pilot licence in twelve days and trained roughly eighteen months to fly it himself. The high altitude jump was shot in the United Arab Emirates close to sunset, leaving only a few minutes of usable light per day, and one hundred and six jumps produced three usable takes. The rooftop leap in which Cruise broke his right ankle is the take that made the final cut, so the stumble is genuine; production then stopped for seven or eight weeks. Henry Cavill’s moustache is its own saga: the studio refused to let him shave, three million dollars was discussed to restore the facial hair digitally, and permission never came. This became the highest earning instalment of the series.