Slow-burning, high stakes and undoubtedly guided by its score, Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning is an explosive addition to the beloved franchise led by Tom Cruise.
Taking over from the work of Lorne Balfe, Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey are the composers for the picture. The two have worked under the tutelage of Balfe, assisting him on projects like Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning and Black Widow. They have also collaborated with director Christopher McQuarrie, specifically in Top Gun: Maverick. Both hail from opposite sides of the world: Aruj a pianist from Los Angeles, and Godfrey born and raised in London before travelling to the US to pursue a career in the industry. Working in proximity with composers like Balfe and Hans Zimmer, the two have cultivated individual careers. Aruj has written for a number of shorts over the years while Godfrey most recently worked on the score for Marching Powder which stars Nick Love. Together, they are a force to be reckoned with.
Adventurous and reflective, Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning features city explosions, a cabin in the snow and underwater espionage, all of which are perfectly captured through Aruj and Godfrey’s music. Following the lead of McQuarrie’s vision for the franchise, the two pieced together the mishmash of scenes, stunts and character arcs, and provided a method to the madness. The Indiependent caught up with the composers to discuss their creative and collaborative process and the films that define the marriage of visuals and audio for them.
The Indiependent: When composing for a film, what is your process like? What helps to get your creative juices flowing; is it the script and the story, or the visuals and the actors? What inspires you?
Max Aruj: As a jazz pianist, improvisation is the most important way. It’s as simple as chords on the left hand and melody on the right hand. If you can write a piece that can sing just that, then you’re in good shape. In my opinion, if you can’t distil it down to a lead sheet—which, for non-jazz musicians, is the melody and the chords—then chances are, you’ll have a problem down the line.
Alfie Godfrey: I concur with Max. My amazing piano teacher would say, “Remember, you leave time for doodling.” ‘Doodling’ is her word for improvisation. It does come from play and once you figure it out, then all of the actual work begins. But you start with play. It’s hard to start when you get a huge film and there’s no one way in; there’s no one set formula. But that bit of play and that improvisation usually ends up unlocking the window into the kind of film it is and making things emotionally structured.
The team this time around is mostly similar to that of the previous Mission Impossible film, Dead Reckoning, with Christopher McQuarrie as the director and both of you also being involved in the former. Did you have an insight back then, working on Dead Reckoning, what this next one would be like and did that inform how you would tackle the score for The Final Reckoning?
AG: I didn’t work with Fallout, three Mission Impossibles ago, that Max did. But we were both in Top Gun and Dead Reckoning. We were privy to McQuarrie’s process. We knew the cut changes dramatically; we knew they experiment a lot and they shoot strands of story; we knew the cut, at times, is very long. McQuarrie’s a fan of classic themes. He has got this encyclopaedic knowledge of film. Every meeting you have with him, you have a list of at least five films you have to go and see. He was very good at schooling us and it really broadened my horizons working with him.
It’s a process that demands a lot of material; we were writing tons from day one. You try everything. The scene that you did is at the beginning, and then it’s at the end, and then it’s in a flashback. As for the music, you also try everything. He really does not like to leave any rock unturned because he has to know they tried everything. That’s very unique. The ruthlessness of that is something I admired.
MA: We did read the script. To be perfectly honest, when reading scripts and doing scores, it helps sometimes. But that’s not what unlocks my imagination. Not as much as watching a scene and muting the audio to get a chance to see the flow and the acting. That’s actually one thing I paid attention to more than ever in this film. It was the subtlety of the looks of the actors.
I was at brunch yesterday and I saw one of the actors walking. Holt McCallany was one of the military guys and I went up to him and said, “Hi.” He spoke with me for twenty minutes. I said I was in admiration of all the actors and these subtle things that they do that I never would’ve picked up on until McQuarrie pointed them out to us. What Holt said was, “Acting is 90% preparation and 10% inspiration.” In other words, all of these people who come onto the set, even though they received a script maybe even later in the process, they’ve put work into their characters and their delivery. They went to set for days and days and weeks. As the composers, we need to internalize that and react to everything that they’re doing.
I think the mistake a lot of composers make is that you come into a project and think, “I’m just going to write what I want to write. I’m going to give it to them and they’re going to like it. If they don’t like it, that’s their problem.” That is the amateur way to do a project. Everybody else is putting work into their craft so we need to react, pay attention and honour what they’re doing. That’s something that I learned on this project more than I ever had before.
Having worked with Lorne Balfe in other projects before, Mission Impossible or otherwise, did your experience with him help you tackle composing for this film together? Was there any struggle trying to break free from Balfe’s sound while maintaining the signature heart and flare of Mission Impossible as a whole?
AG: I’m a huge fan of Lorne’s work on Mission Impossible. Fallout, I remember, it blew my mind. It was just so fresh yet had so much to say. It was such a unique score and it’s daunting to try and carry on that standard of work. I have to give this one to McQuarrie because he had great ideas. The Burundi African drumming; the low voices; the space bass and the crazy unique instruments we use in the submarine. He really had a clear idea of how to make this unique. Obviously, we had to go away and execute. But his ideas were great, actually—he clearly had been thinking about it for years.
MA: In terms of breaking away from Lorne’s sound, what Lorne did is he established the high standard of the quality of the music that needed to be done. We did learn so much from him over the years. The great thing about film music is that it’s really an apprenticeship working for someone like him. It’s kind of a lineage that he teaches us how to do things. Step one: the music needs to be good. Step two: over time, we figure out how we find our sound and our voice. Alfie and I spent a year in the studio trying to do this. The most important thing is it’s up to the standard of Cecile Tournesac, our score producer, and the standard of McQuarrie. Then everything else will just come after.
AG: One of the big benefits with working with Lorne so much over the years was simply just sitting in meetings and watching him interact with directors. Maybe thousands of hours of meetings we would just play back scenes, the history of the scenes, and see when to stand the ground and when not to stand the ground. To see him present the idea of the music in the film; I’ve always really valued the lessons I’ve learned from him.
Working together, did you have any allocation on who would take the reigns in emotional sequences and who would be better at tackling the action? How does that collaboration work between the two of you and how do you allocate the roles that you both play in the creation of the score?
AG: Your question would have an easier answer if it was: we came up to the project at the end, the cart was locked, and everyone knew what the film would be. When we got there, it was this vast, over four-and-a-half-hour cut of the film with not a single bit of temp. We had these very broad, emotional briefs from McQuarrie. He thinks like a writer, in a way. We talk about things like Ethan’s challenges, and it’s really, deeply emotional. Each character has a proper emotional focus.
Max, I don’t know if you’ll agree—it was just an element of both of us throwing paint at the canvas and seeing what would stick. Because there was just so much to do! As I was saying, McQuarrie’s process gets so much material out of you, and you never know what would end up where. Having two brilliant music editors, you don’t know where you’re going to put stuff. The amount of times I would go, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have done that,” and somehow it works! McQuarrie’s very good at moving music around. If he finds something he likes in one spot, he’ll rewind an hour and put it there and see if it works. So, there was a slight lawlessness to it all, to be honest.
MA: I think someone like Lorne and a lot of the big dogs, they’re really Jacks of all Trades. Alfie and I are trained to write any sort of music any time, really. Whether it’s action music or emotional music. With these big movies, you need to be able to do it all. You can’t only write dramatic slow emotional music; you can’t only write big bombastic action music. You need to be able to do both and transition from one to the other seamlessly.
That, in itself, is hard. Because if you can’t find a way to link them, then it just sounds like a disjointed score. So much work goes into making the transitions perfect. If one thing was off, McQuarrie would just dismiss it, basically. It had to be super seamless—even with volumes in between tracks! Because if you have one track that’s really loud and all of a sudden there’s a really low track and they don’t link musically, it just sounds weird and he would not let it go. He wouldn’t.
But was there any space for you to be creative as well in the process?
AG: Of course. It’s a long film, the scenes are spectacular and the visuals are amazing. It can’t be generic, in a way. They’re very sensitive to that. Obviously, we are too. You have to dig deep and really think about what will work. Then, of course, it demands the highest creativity you’ve got. It took everything we had just to keep offering ideas and keep bringing things to the table. No matter how hard it got, it was like, “Look at Tom Cruise. Look at what he’s doing right now. I promise you, it’s not as hard as what he’s doing!” He set the standard of commitment.
You mentioned earlier about the submarine and the type of sounds McQuarrie really wanted to implement for that specific sequence. There are a lot of different locations throughout the film: the underwater, the snow, and the explosion in the city. Did either of you have any specific notes, tunes or instruments that you wanted to use as signals to these locations or characterised these locations for you in the composition of the score?
MA: One thing that made doing the score actually easier is that, with each location, we had a drawer of sounds that we were able to use. The explosion in the city, I imagine you’re referring to when the Entity is talking to Ethan. It’s safe to say that the choir there was the leading voice—no pun intended—and instrument.
Then when we got to the underwater, the space bass was the core. But after we had space bass, we had so much work to do to continue developing sounds and motifs to carry the scene for twenty minutes. The space bass was the foundation. But we had to build a variety of sounds. We’re thankful to Louis Perez—a musician who helped us develop these unusual, low-groaning tones that were actually used for the sound effects of the submarine as well.
Then moving on to South Africa, as Alfie mentioned, the Burundi drumming was a great way for us to set the tone and create this unusual and exciting bed on which we had to put our orchestral themes. Once we knew what the language was, it helped us write the score.
AG: You’ve got to see the film to really understand the scope. It goes everywhere! We had Balalaika, which is kind of like a Russian guitar; we had low voices, some of which were proper octavos. That’s like the deepest a man can sing. It has a lot of bells and whistles that you would never think to put in an action film. Because Mission Impossible isn’t just ‘an action film’. It’s so much more than that; it’s a very wide palette. But it does connect, and I think that’s because of the themes. It brings it all together.
I like your point about everything connecting and all the different bells and whistles of the film. Because one of the things I really enjoyed about it was the several back and forths between different scenes, characters and locations. The way the score seamlessly transitions from one to another, it almost acts like a guide for the audience. Was it hard trying to balance all of that?
MA: You’re absolutely right, and thank you for noticing that. When we reviewed music as a group, we would mute the dialogue and the sound effects. In other words, everything we did had to sound smooth or musical. Or else, it would get rejected. McQuarrie was cognisant of the fact that dialogue is a part of the movie. But really, a lot of the time, the audience is paying attention in and out. They might be watching the acting, they might be listening to the music or listening to the sound effects. The music needs to be able to tell the audience what’s going on in every scene without dialogue.
That’s something that will forever change the way I write music. Because it forces you to ask, “Is every single chord right; is every melodic note right; is every sound right?” That tells us that we need to tell stories with just music like a silent film, or like with a pianist in the theatre back all those decades ago. It was the best training.
AG: It was very exposing at times. McQuarrie’s a big fan of film music for music’s sake, not just film. He really knows his film composers. As Max said, these reviews, you had no sound to hide behind. There couldn’t be a bar of laziness: filler music or something that’s just treading waters. You can’t tread water! So, to answer your question, it’s incredibly hard.
Finally, composing music is a delicate art. Like you said, McQuarrie himself is a big fan of film music. What specific films would you say embody the marriage between cinema and score, the visuals and the sound? A film that highlights how it can be defined by the music that it has?
MA: You know what I’m thinking about today? Lord of the Rings. The more subtle parts when they’re talking about what they’re going to do, and they’re talking about these different characters, and the themes we’ve ended up so seamlessly. That’s what I was thinking about. Because yesterday, I saw the film again with my friends and family at the Chinese Theatre. I was just reminded of these subtle cues that are so important. But the average audience member won’t notice them. I’m thinking, “Wow, we worked so hard on those for the music to transition it at just the right moment of the conversation, and how many months we spent doing that stuff.” I think Lord of the Rings is just such a good score in so many ways.
AG: For such a big film with so many themes—and everyone knows those themes still. They hear a theme and they know what part of the film it’s from. It shows how successful it is as a thematic score.
I remember watching Gladiator a million times growing up, and there was one very minor moment of Russell Crowe where he’s simply just walking down a hallway. It’s a very under-dramatic moment and the theme was just soaring below it. It literally worked so well with the film; it’s tied to the emotion of the film and it can just be there, and it works. It doesn’t distract; it just enhances. Him walking down that hallway is now part of his character’s arc. It’s not just filler. It’s a good way of telling if a score is working in a film, if it can just sing.
Interview conducted by Mae Trumata
Support the Indiependent
We’re trying to raise £200 a month to help cover our operational costs. This includes our ‘Writer of the Month’ awards, where we recognise the amazing work produced by our contributor team. If you’ve enjoyed reading our site, we’d really appreciate it if you could donate to The Indiependent. Whether you can give £1 or £10, you’d be making a huge difference to our small team.