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Eddie Hamilton makes film editing sound easy. The trick is, as he explains it, “to tell the greatest amount of story in the shortest screen time.”
Fresh off an Oscar nomination for Top Gun: Maverick, and busy prepping Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two as the first installment hits theaters, Hamilton has earned the right to sound confident. Also the editor for 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout and 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Hamilton has worked closely with star Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie to guide the Mission: Impossible franchise into its current thrilling form. It’s a franchise built on challenges—impossible missions, you might say—but getting Dead Reckoning to the screen required more than anyone could have imagined.
Filmed entirely during the pandemic over the course of one year and a half, Dead Reckoning showcases the same intricate action and far-flung locales as the other films in the series, this time finding Cruise’s Ethan Hunt on a mission to stop an all-powerful AI known as The Entity. “If you look at Part One, there isn’t really a single straightforward sequence, apart from maybe Ethan receiving the mission at the beginning,” Hamilton says. “But everything else is incredibly detailed and dense. And there’s a lot of parallel storytelling going on too.”
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Hamilton was on set throughout the production of Top Gun: Maverick, but COVID limited his ability to visit the Dead Reckoning set. “When they went to Rome and Venice, I was working with my team on lockdown at Leavesden Studios in London,” Hamilton says. “When they came back, I would occasionally go on set in a mask if they had a question or if I wanted to ask McQ something.”
Part of Mission’s signature brand is capturing practical action in-camera, which amps up the visceral thrills and dangers onscreen. Take the sequence in which Ethan and mischievous thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) hurtle through the cobblestone streets of Rome in the tiniest yellow Fiat 500 (which was tweaked to run faster on a Tesla engine), with both actors handcuffed to each other. The chase works because we really see Ethan straining to steer the lightweight car in the middle of traffic with just one hand. “Tom is really one of the best stunt drivers in the world,” Hamilton says. “They filmed a lot and some fun pieces were cut. It’s really from listening to the audience and compressing as much as possible—putting in 8 frames here and 16 frames there, so that it has a great flow and pace but is still emotional and not confusing.”
The film moves to Venice for a dramatic set piece—a midnight gala at the Palazzo Ducale, where Ethan and ex-MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) face off with all the major players trying to get their hands on the coveted key that could defeat The Entity. Amidst the multilayered confrontation, Grace swipes the key more than once, keeping Ethan constantly guessing as to where her loyalties lie. “That was a very challenging scene,” Hamilton says. “Chris covers a lot of common geography, so you can see where each character is in relation to the others.” But the wide shots that would allow the audience to see all of the characters in the same frame aren’t dynamic enough for sequences like this, Hamilton says. “You feel slightly safe in a wide shot because you’re outside of the emotional pressure that the characters are experiencing. To get inside the characters, we focused on the medium shots and close-ups. There’s so much going on, we need the right balance of reactions to keep all the characters alive.”
As the film builds to its climax, Ethan has to “catch” the Orient Express train tearing through the Austrian Alps by jumping off a vertical cliff on his motorbike. To prepare for the stunt, Cruise’s training included 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps. In the gasp-inducing sequence, he jumped off Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain—3,900 feet above sea level—on a Honda CRF 250 motorbike, plunging 4,000 feet before opening his parachute. Cheating death once would be enough for most people, but not for the consummate perfectionist, who performed it seven more times to ensure the footage was perfect.
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