Mission: Impossible - Fallout

Bongos.

You can't beat starting with bongos.

I'm Lorne Balfe. I'm the composer from Mission: Impossible - Fallout.

And I'm going to try to

give an insight into the whole process

of scoring this amazing film.

So, this whole introduction,

there is a lot of musical elements here.

So, the bongos was something,

I think I started recording maybe about six months

before the end of the movie.

And we had a lot of bongos.

I think we had 12 bongo players, which is

11 more than you normally do on a recording session.

And we recorded the bongos at AIR Studios in London

in a massive cathedral.

Just really fantastic.

And this piece here is called Loves Reduced.

And this string piece was

really the beginning of my relationship with Mission: Impossible.

And we'll start hearing it in quite a few places

and I'll explain to you how that started.

The idea came up during breakfast with Chris, weirdly enough.

Anyway, that will be discussed later.

This coming up was

possibly the hardest scene to write.

And I... Now after doing it quite a few times,

I now understand why.

So this is our first introduction to the famous Mission theme.

Very subtle.

Didn't wanna make it too obvious.

So, this scene was just

a very hard scene. I think we scored it three times.

That's not writing it. Writing it...

I lost count of how many times I wrote it.

But it's... The mission briefing scene is

probably one of the most important scenes in all of the movies.

And you're getting a lot of information.

And it really sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

So we tried several versions.

I wrote a version that was very atonal,

with no melody, no harmonic structure,

and no pulse.

And...

It's weird, you...

You have to watch...

You have to get through the whole movie to understand the movie.

So, every time you watched it, you go back to it again

and change the tone and it's just...

Yes, this is the beginning of your movie, so...

So, it was a very difficult one.

It's also, weirdly thinking about that beginning

over the title cards, that again had...

I wrote that a few times

and the version that we had until the last minute

was very atmospheric.

And weirdly, we kind of went back to the first-ever idea

we had a long, long, long time ago and again it's the bongos.

And I think that Mission, it's just...

It's got one of the most famous themes,

I think in culture. You've got...

You've obviously got themes, Star Wars themes.

The Mission: Impossible theme is part oi

worldwide dialogue.

It's in commercials.

People can make jokes about being against the clock

and as soon as you hear that famous piece of music,

you automatically know you're in Mission: Impossible.

And...

There we go again.

It's again that subtle hint of it,

and just changing

one note.

Now, this theme here.

So, again...

That is

the second phrase of the original Mission: Impossible theme.

And I think that...

I can freely talk here 'cause there's no music.

So, I will take over.

I think

this whole process started over breakfast.

I was very fortunate in getting a meeting with Chris.

And we talked over breakfast, quite a few breakfasts,

about the movie,

and the truth is I think I went and wrote my guts out.

I've always loved the franchise of Mission: Impossible.

I've always loved Chris's films.

And...

I... I think after the second meeting or the third meeting,

I locked myself away in the studio for two to three weeks, and I wrote.

And I just thought

there's a lot of mileage with this iconic theme

that's just never been touched on.

And...

Chris had talked a lot about wanting

a new approach to the music and not necessarily wanting it to feel

like the TV show.

This movie is far different than Rogue.

It's just a different tone.

It's different colors, it's shot differently.

Tom's character,

it's just far more...

I think you see a different side to him

than we did in the other movies.

And I think that musically, we had to delve into that,

and not necessarily by writing new themes.

I think everything thematically

we've done with this score is so connected to the original.

It may be presented in a more modern style,

but the DNA is all...

All from the original show.

So, yes, I wrote my guts out and

that first piece over the wedding scene,

Loves Reduced, that was something

that we'll feature in the forthcoming scenes.

And was something that Chris and Eddie

started working with and placing it in other scenes.

We're about to get into some bongo action very soon.

Again another very difficult scene to score.

You don't want music to take over.

There's a lot of information happening.

And probably wrote it again quite a few times.

So, that was our gang of 12 bongo players,

going for it.

They're about to feature again.

So we recorded...

They're playing it not as one normally would.

But we're using bamboo sticks.

So all of them are playing bamboo sticks.

And then in some of the other cues, they're playing with hands

or they're playing with drumsticks.

And it just

again has a slight '60s feel,

but there's something tribal and larger about it.

So that was a lot of fun.

And as a failed

percussionist drummer that I am,

anything to do with getting people banging drums I love.

So again back to one of our action motifs,

which is gonna be featured in the latter reels.

Now also throughout that scene we'd been having a little hint

of our soon-to-be baddie theme.

This...

And I believe you are about to hear it now.

There.

So this is not quite an octave jump,

but this bass motif "ba-boom" is our...

Which we came to call it our "ba-ddie" theme throughout the movie.

And it's actually part of the famous plotting theme from the TV show.

So, it's the same DNA.

Now back to this

piece of music, which

we all refer to it as the Loves Reduced theme,

mainly because the way I had written it was...

This piece of music was called Loves,

because the way

Chris talked about

Tom's character in this show during one of our breakfast meetings

was about the emotions

of this journey that he's about to go through.

So, I wrote this piece called Loves.

And then he felt it was a bit too big.

So I started removing piano from it.

I had some more melody in it.

And then because of that,

it was much simpler, so I just called it Reduced. So, it's Loves Reduced.

It's probably the backbone

to a lot of the film.

And, unfortunately, this is one of the rare scenes with no music,

which as a composer I like, which is probably odd, but...

Silence is golden.

It's weird sometimes when you're looking at a scene,

you always have to pinch yourself.

Because normally when writing, there's no music there.

One of the amazing things about this project

has been Chris does not use temp music.

Temp music is music from other films

or albums

that they put into the movie and edit with to create a tone.

And he never uses temp.

So, anytime I watch this movie,

there was absolutely nothing.

And I started writing suites.

Not to picture but with just conversations with Chris,

and Eddie and Chris were able to edit it,

put it in different scenes.

So we created our own temp.

But, yeah, what's always something you have to pinch yourself is

when you are watching a scene like this,

or you're thinking, "Okay, I've got to start writing,"

it is pretty amazing.

You have Tom Cruise on the screen and you're writing to it.

It's amazing.

And it's his... I think it's one of his best performances.

It's just... It's...

It's another level, this movie.

So here... This was something that...

Originally, it was not played this way.

I think the way I had written it originally was, it was a very