Interview With Composers Max Aruj And Alfie Godfrey (Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning)

With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning now in cinemas and the culmination of nearly 30 years of the franchise, we sat down with composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey to discuss the series’ musical lineage, scoring huge action and some unexpected influences on the score.

How did you both get involved in this film?  You both worked on Dead Reckoning?

Max: So, Alfie and I both worked for Lorne for a number of years. I predated Alfie a bit, so I was involved in Fallout as well.  Then, Alfie and I both worked on Top Gun and Dead Reckoning. So that’s kind of part of how we were ushered into this and how we pitched for it, is that we were familiar with the workflow, and we’d be working with the brilliant Cecile who’s our team leader, because she had worked and had a leadership role on Fallout, Top Gun and Dead Reckoning.

Working in conjunction with her and Timmery and Sarah we made up the music team. For us to succeed on this, we had to work to their standard. On a technical level, everything we had to deliver had to be immaculate and be able to be edited. And if it didn’t work on this technical level, it wouldn’t work for McQ, because his demands are so great and so sophisticated in what is demanded of us as composers to make a three hour movie blend into a piece of music and a piece of art that is smooth and continuous is not easy. So that’s how we were part of how we booked the gig.

Alfie: Similar to this process we just did with Mission, working for Lorne at Remote Control you’re all under the same roof, and you’re shoulder to shoulder with the deadlines, you’re in the trenches together in a way, and you have to have a very you have to be very, very aligned technologically. So, it did feel like going back to that kind of environment again to deliver what is a very, very technically difficult process.

There have been some amazing composers who have worked on the previous seven films from Giacchino to Hans Zimmer, Lorne and Danny Elfman, did you feel nervous about following in their footsteps?

Alfie: At the beginning of the process, I made a very stupid mistake, and I would go home and look at that list of composers. There’s a Wikipedia page called the music of Mission Impossible, and it lists all these people. Oh, God, I never look at that. Yeah. What the hell am I doing here? So, to answer your question, I would ignore it in my most nervous moments, just so I am, you know, didn’t make me too nervous, but we were very lucky. At some point we had we asked Eddie and the Edit team to provide us, like the fight scenes throughout history, throughout the franchise’s history, and we would watch them all, and it’s so interesting how the score of each one appropriately represents what was going on in the era they were made. I think really was probably kind of leading the trend as well. So, you know, it’s a great look into kind of film music history, kind of modern film music history, and how scores were made throughout the 30 years of these films,

This is the longest film in the franchise with multiple references, how did you tackle some of those moments?

Max: It was a case-by-case basis. There was no set of rules. For example, one of the first scenes that got McQ excited was the scene, and I’m not giving anything away here, but the scene with Briggs on the plane, so you wouldn’t expect that, but I think that was the first time McQ got excited about music going on a scene, and in that scene, there are flashbacks, and we do not do a major shift in the music, as in Cut away to some other piece of music during that we but very subtly, the rhythm and the tempo of the music is surgically crafted around the dialogue and to just kiss the flashback, where maybe we’re changing chord there, but we’re not changing note on every single time you go to a flashback or leave a flashback, it’s all about flow and making it feel natural and seamless was so difficult. We did so many revisions of that scene to make sure the music is following this game of ping pong between the characters, where Briggs is provoking Ethan, and then Ethan’s trying to rally and say, no, come with me.  To make the music feel like it’s following the emotion of that conversation, while also not ignoring the flashbacks, maybe we’d have a little beautiful electric violin twinkle when we cut away back to Prague. So that is an example of how in that one, we were kind of playing it a little cool and stepped back. But in some of the other flashbacks, we have a lot more engaging shifts. So, it was different every single time.

We have some amazing action, but how did you manage to keep the momentum for dialogue-driven sequences?

Alfie: McQ’s spoken in other interviews he’s done. While there is it is a lot of dialogue-driven material, it’s also a lot of nonverbal dialogue. There are a lot of big characters in this film that don’t have many lines but still have a huge role in the film. So obviously there’s a lot of space for music there. I think once we do get to our action set pieces, they have to be fantastic. Obviously, this is some of the most ambitious action ever shot, so there’s no real issue there. Other than us having just to be at that standard too. There was a lot of talk about pace and energy and not being too low, not being too dreary. Where do we give the audience permission to have fun? Where do we give the audience permission for it to feel like an adventure movie?

There’s a lot of variety in the score. Each location has a different flavour, whether that’s Africa, whether it’s in, you know, the snowy deserts, whether it’s underwater or in the skies. Coincidentally, we work in reels, as you do in post-production, each reel kind of had its own flavour as well. So, I suppose to answer your question. It was a variety and just emotions for all the kinds of nonverbal communication of the characters,

You’ve alluded to the two major set pieces there; how long did you get to work on the submarine and biplane sequences?

Alfie: It was pretty long. The whole score took us about 13 months so we had, we could indulge in time and experimentation in general. Kind of homing in and finishing everything was obviously a big squeeze, as we think always are. But, yeah, I mean, you know, we worked very closely the music editors from the submarine. We had sounds from an instrument that McQ was very interesting, called the space, space, which is this kind of very unique metallic marimba, modern art looking thing, and you bow it and you strike it, and it has this incredibly deep sound and really unique sound. So, we had sounds of what we were working with, and, of course, our own melodies and score to bring in there.

Max: For the biplane that was the big musical and technical and orchestral challenge of the film in terms of making the sequence have a beginning, middle and an end, because really, we had to structure it in that there There’s multiple cutaways to and from the plane, and choosing and deciding what music went there took basically the whole project to figure out. We had no temp music, and I don’t know if we had mentioned that yet. So, imagine watching the biplane stuff with no music. And of course, imagine watching the whole film with no music, but writing music that matched the pace of the movements of the planes, that was a huge obstacle, even to start out with, because given the planes are up in the air, you don’t want to write music that sounds too fast, because it started to sound like the music was moving faster than the planes, and it sounded chasing. A lot of the time, percussion and fast strings weighed it down. So, although we did use some of that, it was all about choosing chords and melodies that reflected the peril Ethan was going through.

Max: It evolved as the scene went on, so making sure that if we were at level 11 or part of the plane, at one point we were talking, do we calm it down if it’s too intense? The answer was no; we simply need to have the music evolve and move to another section. Then guess what? We must move to another section as we start to end the playing fight bit. So, deciding when, how, and where to shift within that last third was the hardest part of the score by far, because it had to be very musical. It had to be orchestral, it had to be melodic, it had to do everything. Finding what that piece of music was very difficult, and some of that we didn’t even find out until the very end, but everyone was always very supportive, and was always, you know, cheering us on, even though we had very little time left and had to figure out the climax of the climax of the climax. We finally did it.

How did you find scoring the Entity and the sequences it appears?

Alfie: On the last film The Entity had this kind of signal, and it had a button almost where you had a Bernard Herrmann, little swell that kind of signifies here what the entity is. It also had an atmosphere. They did that a lot with sound effects on the last film and the presence of the entity. And a big kind of theme in this film is that we are now in The Entity’s reality. That’s the kind of recurring line of the film. So, we matured the entity a bit so that it’s kind of not just two or three chords now it’s kind of it becomes of a piece. There are moments where The Entity is not just an atmosphere, but actually present. We had to find a new way of, kind of, I suppose, a lazy way of saying, it was creeping the audience out. This is a malicious, all-powerful being. It’s like a god in a way.

So, we used voices and female voices in a cluster kind of way, you know, it’s quite strange and ambient. Then we also use a lot of orchestras. There’s a scene where Ethan, without getting too many spoilers, is approaching the place where The Entity lives, in a way. So, you know, we kind of explore the Entity theme of variation, manner. Yeah, all of the above. I mean, it’s such a big film, we have a lot of room for themal variation and to just indulge in all these places. It goes quite deep.

There is a Cold War and old school feel with the nuclear fallout elements of the plot and the submarine sequences. Did that feed into your preparation for the score?

Max: The answer is, McQ has an incredible knowledge of film, and he loves older films. So, the answer is yes. He would always reference older films because he liked and of course, I love classical music. The further you go back with film scores, the more and more related it is to Wagner and Tchaikovsky and all these geniuses. So yes, the score did start to go back in time a little bit in order to evoke that more old-school feeling. So, thank you for noticing that. We had tried some other stuff with The Entity, but it just didn’t quite work. So, we had to do something new and fresh that was a little bit related in terms of tone, but harmonically, we had to go further back to get that even grittier feeling and using muted brass. With the climax of the biplane, we were also thinking very old school as well with that brass. So, we found a lot of time that the further back we went, the more it worked, and McQ loved it, so we just embraced it.

Alfie: Each thing you come out with McQ, you have five films you need to see. It’s almost encyclopaedic Das Boot is a film that came out The Abyss is a film that came up a lot.

Personally, for me, there’s some great submarine films out there. You know The Poseidon Adventure, the original one.  I suppose that’s not really a submarine film, more of a capsized boat film. The Thin Red Line came up as well.

We made the mistake early on when talking about these films, we would then go write music in the style of those films. And we learned that that isn’t the right way to do it. He would say, I want you to write music that makes me feel like that, not that sounds like that. So, at every turn, you know, we still had to stay unique, modern, and fresh rather than referential. That was, you know, that’s a big challenge with working with McQ because he’s so encyclopaedic, but he’s also very forward-looking.

This is the second part of a sort of two-part story, have the continuation of Lorne’s work and then your own work. How did you find balancing the sound of Dead Reckoning with what is a very distinct score of its own?

Max: That was pretty easy, because McQ, having done this, having been his fourth mission and the fifth one he worked on, he knows how to shift and move, and whether, how referential we get, we’re using the entity quote. So that was clear. That was easy. But other than that, we would slowly gravitate away from some of the tropes that we were used to.  I remember at first, we thought, well, it’s part two, so shouldn’t it sound this and that? But the answer was no, it just needs to be good, and we need to use the Mission theme, and it has to be exciting and thrilling and emotional. Other than that, we just had to proceed, which was great. There weren’t rules like, oh well, in the last movie, this happened, so we need to kind of continue this theme or tone. That wasn’t it at all.

Alfie: Yeah, you know that throughout, don’t take these off rules. That was kind of one of the mantras of the process.

You’ve mentioned Chris McQuarrie’s involvement.  Did you talk to Tom Cruise at all?

Alfie: Oh, yeah, we’re close personal friends now. No, it was great, he was so encouraging and supportive. From day one, we had this, we had a dinner with him, and, you know, he just kind of turned around and said, I’m a huge fan of your work. I know you guys. I’m very excited for you. Let us know if you need anything. I think Tom and McQ they’ve done a lot of work with maybe less of the more obvious names or someone on their way up, and they are very embracing of that. We were beneficiaries of that. And then, you know, towards the end, we visited on set, and he was incredibly welcoming there. I mean, they are very welcoming on set. They had Paralympians and all the influencers visit. It’s a very family, inviting atmosphere there. It was lovely. Towards the end, when he was able to come to the mixes again, he was always incredibly encouraging. A lot of high-fives, and when things came together, it was exciting for all of us. You know,

Max: He could give a master class in how to treat people and how to inspire them, because for us to come in and meet him, I think we’re definitely a little nervous, for sure, but he just kind of made it feel like, listen, we’re going to work together. It’s going to be great. Of course, there were many challenges to come and many late nights, and he knows that, but the tone he said is that it’s all going to be good. Everyone’s going to be excited. I’m excited. It just puts you in this mood where it’s like, wow, I’m I’m thrilled to be here, and I want to kick some butt, and I want to write a great score.