‘Mission: Impossible’ Editor Eddie Hamilton On Cutting ‘Dead Reckoning’ Into Pure Cinematic Adrenaline

Christopher McQuarrie continued his celebrated shepherding of the Tom Cruise-starring Mission: Impossible film series with this summer’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Second for second, the film delivered more emotional beats and genuine, heart-stopping thrills than any other film within the hugely successful series. Thanks to Cruise’s legendary dedication, McQuarrie’s intelligent and focused direction, and a world-class team of artisans, Dead Reckoning became the kind of action film beloved by cineasts and adrenaline junkies alike.

Helping seamlessly blend the many ingredients required for this adrenaline soup is Academy Award-nominated editor Eddie Hamilton (Top Gun: Maverick) who has partnered with McQuarrie on each Mission: Impossible entry since Rouge Nation. Given the progression of the series, each film ups the ante in terms of complexity and pure thrills, and the editing rhythms for each film, according to Hamilton, emerge from the footage McQuarrie and team assemble.

But edits are hardly random. Every beat within the film is hyper-analyzed, deeply scrutinized, and carefully assembled to produce the best product possible.

“We choose every edit very precisely. We’re very rarely forced to cut unless we want to, and so every single edit is precise and designed to trigger an emotional impulse in the audience. Chris is very conscious of that. He’s very conscious of taking the audience’s hand. From the very first beat of the logos and the theme music, that’s happening all the way through to the end,” Hamilton revealed of his collaborative process with McQuarrie. “He’s taking you on this kind of intense journey using all the filmmakers tools starting with lens, light, location, emotion, cast, music, sound design and editing to give you an immersive emotional experience. So, the editing language is very much dictated by the fact that we have great footage.”

The original cut of Dead Reckoning clocked in at over four hours. Hamilton’s job, partnering with McQuarrie, became a process of whittling the film down to a few key directives. However daunting, it wasn’t an impossible mission, and one Hamilton gladly accepted. After all, editors are “time lords.”

Cutting down a massive four-hour version of this story meant that Hamilton and McQuarrie reviewed each sequence within the film and literally trimmed seconds here, seconds there, to shape the scene into the leanest possible version of itself. Then, once they realize a version of the scene that contains the most essential visual and narrative information possible, they go back and add what they refer to as “air,” or moments of slower pacing, to enhance emotional beats or to allow the audience to catch their breath. It’s one of an editor’s key jobs: modulating the timing of a scene to take the audience on an emotional journey while balancing the level of information they are presented with in any given scene.

For example, following the climactic train crash sequence, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt questions the gravely injured Paris (Pom Klementieff) and learns key information that will carry the story into the upcoming sequel. An early version of that sequence emerged about 30 seconds shorter, but McQuarrie and Hamilton found that the quicker path through the material didn’t provide the same impact they needed for the film to excel.

“We look at every single line in every dialogue scene and every emotional beat, and we try taking things out and putting things in, compressing it and expanding it. We’re making sure that every single line in the movie earns its place because we know it’s long. For this emotional scene with Paris at the end, I did a much tighter edit that was about 30 seconds shorter,” Hamilton revealed. “That was an exercise, what Chris [McQuarrie] called a ‘just try version,’ which is just the absolute bare minimum of stuff that we need. You just didn’t feel anything when watching it. It was just pure information, and so we actually went back to something that was much closer to my original edit where the acting was so good. We ended up putting putting air back into to give it dramatic weight. And the same with Lisa’s [Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson] death. I loved that character. I’ve worked on every Ilsa scene on these three movies. So, I’m very attached to her and to Rebecca Ferguson, who is just a wonderful human being. Even though it’s a long movie, you still need to give a moment for the audience to grieve and for Ethan to grieve.”

Aside from balancing emotion and information within a scene, Hamilton’s editing prowess also needed to assemble complex sequences filmed in a variety of locations. McQuarrie shot the early airport chase sequence partly in Abu Dhabi, partly in Birmingham Train Station in England, and partly on a studio sound stage over the course of a year and a half. Obviously, Hamilton needed to blend all of those disparate pieces together to seamlessly create what emerged as a brilliantly thrilling, multifaceted action sequence.

Cutting the scene together took several weeks of dedicated work. Not only are there multiple perspectives at play, he also needed to incorporate onscreen graphics representing the advanced technology Hunt and team leverage.

Another audience-favorite scene provided a whole new set of editing challenges. Hunt and Grace (Hayley Atwell) escape capture through an elaborate series of car chase sequences. While nothing new (particularly in the Mission: Impossible universe), Hamilton cut this sequence to elicit a new response from the audience: humor.

“We weren’t really sure if it was going to work because I remember when the Fiat is rolling down, and Grace and Ethan land at the bottom of the stairs and they’ve swapped sides. That whole sequence of the Fiat rolling was just to get them to swap sides and get that gag to land for the audience,” Hamilton recalled. “We didn’t know if it was working, and then at the very first friends and family screening we did everyone was laughing, and everyone totally got it. So it was a huge relief. The difference really is just to allow the chemistry of each shot to play out and not be interrupted editorially.”

When it came to the most talked-about moment of the film — the climactic train sequence — Hamilton faced yet another editorial challenge: shifting perspective away from Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to that of Atwell’s Grace. He needed to balance Grace’s journey on the train while impersonating Vanessa Kirby’s Alanna with Cruise’s infamous motorcycle jump sequence. The rhythms of the dialogue sequences on the train obviously take longer than those of Cruise riding a motorcycle up the mountain, and Hamilton and McQuarrie were intimately aware of the differences and balanced them accordingly.

As the train drives over the exploded bridge into the gorge below car by car, Hamilton again assembled the sequence beat by beat, cutting away any unnecessary or extraneous moments to create as clean and pristine a sequence as possible. Hamilton and McQuarrie again sat together and built the scene beat by beat and compressed the scene as tightly as possible. At one point, test audience reactions indicated the sequence felt too long, perhaps bordering on viewer exhaustion.

But the finished project excels as-is because of the tight collaboration between the two artists.

“I’ll sketch out the scenes, and I’ll build assemblies. When we actually get down to it, [McQuarrie] sits with me, and we go through it over and over and over again together,” Hamilton shared. “It’s his brilliant storytelling brain which guides the movie into kind of a safe port. I couldn’t do it on my own. I really couldn’t.”