It took over 555 musicians with sessions around Europe — including in Rome, Vienna, Venice, Switzerland and London — to put together the score for “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” composer Lorne Balfe tells Variety.

The composer started writing the music almost three years ago, and “at last count, there was over 14 hours of music recorded,” Balfe says. However, only two-and-a-half hours or so made it into the final cut of the film.

The storyline sees Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt take on a new villain, The Entity, a sentient Artificial Intelligence. Ethan’s mission is to defeat The Entity with a metal key. And while the film features an array of mind-blowing stunts, including Ethan driving a motorcycle off a cliff or a climatic fight atop a moving steam engine train, there was also plenty of emotion for Balfe to root his score in.

“There were certain things on bridges and certain relationships that come to an end,” he says. “You see a totally different side to Ethan. You see someone who is protective and driven by different things, and that’s where that emotion came from.”

All the while, Balfe never strayed away from the franchise’s iconic theme laid out by Lalo Schifrin almost 60 years ago. “I embraced it,” Balfe says. “That DNA is well connected throughout the film. It’s connected to Ethan’s theme and the main opening titles.”

With Ethan’s theme, Balfe went into a darker space for the chord progressions. “I went back and looked at Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky and reinvented what was already there,” he says. “It’s what the audience relates to and their connection with it, but it’s twisted differently … It was about taking that and delving into the emotional and tragic vocabulary.”

It took a global village to put the score together. Balfe’s recording process followed where they were filming the movie. “I wanted to be pure and honest about what we were seeing and involve the local community,” he says. “So, when they were filming in Rome, we recorded there. And we went to Vienna and found local musicians there.” He adds, “There are times when it warrants a small ensemble, and there are times when it warrants a global franchise.”

That approach of enlisting local musicians helped him discover new talent. Director and writer Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise had seen the Switzerland-based Top Secret Drum Corps perform at the Queen’s Jubilee and mentioned it to Balfe. “They’re military drummers and it was as if I had found the missing piece of the score’s DNA,” Balfe says. “I started involving them in the score where it becomes rhythmical and percussive.” Balfe adds, “It doesn’t matter about the size of the orchestra, it’s about how you use it.” 

Balfe says there was a lot of experimentation with the score, so time was a luxury. In fact, he started working on the film and then went off to tinker on the “Top Gun: Maverick” score before coming back to it. But, Balfe also largely credits the film’s music editor Cécile Tournesac. “She was an integral part of the creative process. What I’d written for one scene, that scene could get removed and she would make that music cue work in a different scene by reducing elements of it,” he says. “There are many of us who made the soundtrack — the orchestrators and additional composers who helped get us to this line.”

Listen to the film’s new opening theme below.

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