While we are on the subject of Ms. Ferguson, the shot you see above was the final one taken during first unit principal photography. The sets for the opera house scene, from which the still was taken, had already been built and dismantled since the sequence was otherwise complete. However, McQuarrie insisted on keeping the tower so they could get this shot of Ferguson, and subsequently the crew had to drag the tower from location to location until the very last day of principal photography.
Funny enough, however, Ferguson almost wasn’t even cast in Rogue Nation. Her audition tape had been lost in the shuffle, and it wasn’t until McQuarrie absolutely needed to cast someone in the role — in order for the stunt coordinator “to have time to train her before you throw her off the roof of the opera house on her first night” — that he and Cruise watched Ferguson’s audition. Shane Black (Iron Man 3) had a chance to watch an early cut of the movie and apparently he gave the Mission: Impossible crew the affirmation they were looking for, calling Ferguson “a revelation”, and McQuarrie heaped praise upon his female star as well, adding:
As wonderful as she is in the movie, such a marvelous presence, she’s a great human being, she’s a really lovely person. Which is always a thrill, when you find somebody who’s immensely talented and kind of undiscovered and then find out they are a really good person to boot.
While Ferguson almost wasn’t cast in the film, another actor central to the story wasn’t so sure he wanted to be in it at all. “He really didn’t want to be in a franchise movie,” McQuarrie tells of Sean Harris, who plays the film’s villain, Solomon Lane. “His thing was, ‘Look I just need time to prepare for the role.’ I said, ‘You’ll have time, you’ll have time!’ And we never had time.” Still, McQuarrie was quick to praise Harris for what he did with Lane.
[He] was constantly in this very vulnerable place of showing up and having new work thrown at him and it was kind of the antithesis of everything that is his craft and everything we talked about him needing as an actor, and in a lot of instances it was stuff that was totally against his instincts, and he would just do it. And he would do it beautifully.
McQuarrie spent a lot of time convincing Harris he was right for the role — the director first noticed Harris alongside Michael Caine in 2010’s Harry Brown — while Cruise assured his female co-star of the same. Ferguson had never handled weapons or trained to fight prior to working on Rogue Nation, and in fact she is terrified of heights, which she hadn’t told anyone before production began, substantially increasing the difficulty of her escape from the opera house roof in the film’s first act (see the clip below).
Based on an earlier draft of that scene, though, I’m guessing Ferguson would have had a little easier time with it. As McQuarrie tells it, “I had this sequence all kind of worked out where, at the end of this whole thing [Ethan and Ilsa] bust out the back door, run and get in the car and they drive away.” But that didn’t cut it for Cruise.
Tom goes, “This is Mission: Impossible, I’m not going out the back door. We’re going off the roof! How high is that building?” and I said, “It’s like 100 feet.” He’s like, “We’re definitely going off the roof!”
That change in exit strategy meant tweaking the shooting schedule, as McQuarrie and his crew were given only five days to shoot in the opera house with a live opera performing on the stage beneath them. “So what we did is we went into the opera and shot everything from the outside looking in. … We went back to London and built the entire backstage of the opera, the stage and the two boxes, and then a giant green screen the size of the Vienna opera, onto which we had all the [CG] plates.” For my money the opera house scene is the film’s best set piece, and you can listen to McQuarrie narrate that scene here.
However, while the opera house scene is my favorite set piece, it certainly isn’t the film’s only one. Perhaps the most notable stunt sequence is the film’s opening scene, which features Cruise hanging off the side of a massive Airbus A400 aircraft. The A400 sequence was actually supposed to be the final scene in the movie, according to an early draft of the script, while the opera house scene at one time was set to open the movie. And yet another sequence could have opened the film, too, going all the way back to the very first idea McQuarrie had for the movie.
“What’s funny is [the original idea for the film] is all in there,” McQuarrie tells Goldsmith. “What you’re seeing with the two of them sitting down at the table, when [Ethan] is sitting down across from Benji at the table at the tower of London, was the ghost of the very first opening scene we ever discussed, but [we] didn’t know where it was going so we threw it out.” That happened over and over and over again, according to McQuarrie.
The movie is comprised almost entirely of things we chucked out of other movies that we thought Mission: Impossible was supposed to be. All of the ideas came back in some weird, inside-out [way]. … We’d write a scene and go, “Wait, didn’t we talk about this a year ago?” We had this idea and thought it was terrible and now all of a sudden it kind of works.
The biggest struggle, though, was writing an opening sequence to kick off this fifth Mission: Impossible adventure. During development of the movie — while Cruise was shooting Edge of Tomorrow and McQuarrie was trying to figure out the script for Rogue Nation — the two would talk each Saturday, bat around ideas and then flesh an idea out over the week. Then they would come back together the following Saturday, tear the idea apart, scrap it and start all over again. The opera house scene was the first opening sequence they felt good about, but it ultimately got pushed further into the first act in favor of the standalone A400 stunt that opens the movie.
The logistics of strapping someone to the side of the plane obviously aren’t the easiest to figure out, but Cruise insisted on doing it practically, in-camera, without green screen. The crew developed specially-designed contacts to keep dust and debris out of Cruise’s eyes during takeoff, but there was another concern the crew couldn’t really prepare for. “What was going through my mind,” McQuarrie explained, “was, a bird is gonna hit him and take his head off. … He could have been torn off that plane if the pilot went too fast, but if a bird hit him, he was a goner.”
