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‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ Composers On How They Got Tom Cruise Dancing In His Seat: ‘I Remember High-Fiving Each Other In That Moment’

By Josh Weiss, Contributor.

May 30, 2025, 01:38pm EDT

It’s not easy to please one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, but Alfie Godfrey and Max Aruj accomplished just that with their score for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (now playing in theaters everywhere; click here for tickets).

The composing duo knew they’d succeeded when Tom Cruise himself became visibly hyped during an early screening of the film for friends and family of the production. “He started dancing away in his seat straight away,” Godfrey recalls over Zoom. “I remember Max and I high-fiving each other in that moment, because we thought, ‘Yes, this is definitely working!’”

Cruise was responding to the very first cue on the soundtrack — “We Live and Die in the Shadows" — which plays over the Paramount and Skydance logos, perfectly setting up the movie’s pulse-pounding action with some East African Burundian drumming (rather than the customary bongos) and the opening bars of Lalo Schifrin’s iconic Mission: Impossible theme from the original TV show. “It gives you permission as an audience member to go, ‘Okay, this film’s gonna be a wild ride, let’s enjoy it,’” Godfrey explains.

Aruj echoes that sentiment: “Tom was always like, ‘I want the audience to come out and go into the summer wanting an adventure.’"

What’s more: the utilization of Schifrin’s enduring 1960s composition is not only a hallowed tradition at this point, but it immediately reminds the audience that what they’re about to watch isn’t some generic spy adventure. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just write my own piece of music.’ But at the end of the day, you do have to ground the score of this franchise in those themes, so that the audience feels carried along and never forgets what kind of story they’re in and what they’re watching,” emphasizes score producer and supervising music editor Cecile Tournesac (a veteran of Fallout, Dead Reckoning, and Top Gun: Maverick). “That was also one of the discussions that we went through … making [sure] the audience [was] always carried through a Mission movie, specifically a Mission movie, and not any kind of other movie.”

A direct continuation of Dead Reckoning, the eighth Mission: Impossible chapter finds Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and the rest of his IMF team on their biggest mission yet as they work tirelessly to stop the rogue artificial intelligence known as the “Entity” before it can take over the world’s supply of nuclear missiles and destroy human civilization.

Godfrey and Aruj had their work cut out for them after being recommended to Cruise and director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie by their former boss, Lorne Balfe, who composed the last two Mission: Impossible installments (Fallout and Dead Reckoning). Over a dinner in London with Aruj, Godfrey, and Tournesac, Cruise and McQuarrie (or “McQ” for short) laid out their mandate for the music — none of which would be temped during the edit.

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“They said, ‘We want to hear music as much and as soon as possible,’” Aruj remembers. “We're sitting at dinner and thinking, ‘Okay, so now that we're here, we gotta deliver.’ They made us feel comfortable and got us interested in diving right in.”

“McQ is very fluid in how he works; he just wants to experiment as much as possible,” adds Tournesac. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach where it’s like, ‘Well, it’s an action scene, so we have to do this type of music.’ It’s all up for grabs. There’s a lot of research and demand for a lot of material. Both Max and Alfie had to push quite hard and dig deep in terms of how far they could search musically.”

Having worked with Cruise and McQuarrie on a regular basis since Fallout, Tournesac knows exactly what the duo want out of a score. “It’s all a question of translating [their] words into notes,” she continues. “My main role, especially at the beginning, is to try and guide what I think they mean and what they’re looking for and expecting. McQ is very attuned to what music does in a film, how it shifts according to a scene. So it’s just a question of being very thorough and following the story and emotion at all times. He’s not looking to just score what’s happening onscreen, he’s really trying to make the audience feel what is being said and what Ethan is feeling in a particular scene.”

“The thing McQ often says is, ‘This music tells me I have no confidence in my movie,’ meaning, ‘Don’t just tell me what it is, make me feel what it is,’” echoes Godfrey. “That was one of the big reoccurring notes.”

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the scene where Ethan is forced to say goodbye to his old friend and dependable computer whiz, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only other actor to appear in all eight movies), before Luther is killed in an explosion planned by secondary antagonist, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

The resultant cue — “This is Where I Leave You” — directly calls back “Ethan’s emotional theme [“Another Sunrise”] from the start of the film," Aruj says.

“The goal is that it’s so subtle as it comes in, [that] you don’t realize it until you’re in it and thinking, ‘Oh no! I recognize this music and I know this emotion.’ Last time we heard it, it was bittersweet when we’re looking back at Ethan’s whole life. Then we’re hearing it again [when Luther] and Ethan are separated by a gate and we know that things aren’t looking good … It needed to have a sense of finality, not necessarily catharsis. That’s not it at all, but this kind of warm feeling that tells you this is such a special relationship and a friendship between these two.”

Clocking in at 2 hours and 49 minutes, The Final Reckoning is the longest entry in the nearly 30-year-old franchise. When Aruj and Godfrey became attached, however, the runtime “was even longer,” says the latter. “I think it was over four-and-a-half hours. So it was a vast film with no temp — a big, silent film. So if anything, the running time now feels like a relief compared to where it was.”

The sheer size and scope of the feature was ultimately reflected in the 13-month process it took to compose, record, edit, and mix the score, which included around 137 hours with a live orchestra. “[That’s] a uniquely high number,” notes Godfrey. "It was an incredibly long and labor-intensive recording process [but] the orchestra in London was just incredibly patient and helped us record every single element.”

“Every single piece has to be good. Therefore, you have to focus on one at a time," Aruj elaborates. "The production needs to be pristine, the ideas need to be good. Everything has to turn and shift at just the right moment. The big error is getting overwhelmed by the amount and not focusing on [it] bar by bar, or literally beat by beat.”

While every frame of The Final Reckoning required special care and attention, there were two stunt-related set pieces that needed to fire all on cylinders, both visually and sonically, in order to work properly: the Sevastopol sequence and the biplane fight between Ethan and Gabriel.

For the submarine segment, Aruj and Godfrey used the Space Bass, an eerie-sounding, one-of-a-kind instrument pioneered by the late Constance Demby. “It just had the qualities we needed to help personify the submarine; the sounds of bending metal and this kind of pulsing oddity that you’ve never really heard before," Aruj explains. “But you know you’re somewhere different. It helped us take the score to a very different place that you haven’t heard in Mission: Impossible before.”

The biplane sequence, on the other hand, takes up much of the third act, which the composers broke up into “a beginning, middle, and end," Aruj continues. “We had to find music that got us into that sequence, music that sustained us in that sequence, and then more music for a different chapter once the nature of the fight continues. Then it has to shift [again] when we get into yet another portion of their interaction. Writing music that personified the basic movements of the plane was difficult. If it didn’t start out right, if it wasn’t the right speed, if it wasn’t the right tone, if it wasn’t right melody, it was wrong from the start … Once it gets to the last third of the fight, finding music that worked was maybe one of the most difficult things I had ever encountered. And stylistically, I think it really takes you on quite a journey."

Despite the fact that it bears the word “Final” in its title, no one can say for certain that this is really the swan song for Ethan & co. Given the way in which the film regularly calls back to and celebrates previous entries, particularly the 1996 original, one could argue that the Mission: Impossible franchise — at least the version fronted by Cruise — is over. With that said, Aruj and Godfrey were never told that this would be the definitive ending to Ethan Hunt’s story.

“Nothing was ever sold to us. I just had to show up to work every day and do my job,” says Aruj. “There was no time, and for good reason, to overthink anything. We just had to be on board with the team, listen to people’s requests, and write the best music we could. Once you’re in it, all that matters is that you keep going. I didn’t like to ever bring myself out and say, ‘Oh well, this is the final one!’ [We never] had those kind of overarching thoughts. There's no reason to think like that in my opinion.”

“While we were never sold that this would be the final one, what McQ did communicate to us was the difficulty of concluding all these strands of story that have been going for the last couple of films since Fallout,” concludes Godfrey. “What Gabriel is up to, what the team is up to, who the team [members] are, Ethan’s past, and all these kind of themes. So there was an element of, ‘Okay, the music really needs to help me here because there are a lot of strands of story to put together.’”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshweiss/2025/05/30/mission-impossiblethe-final-reckoning-composers-on-how-they-got-tom-cruise-dancing-in-his-seat-i-remember-high-fiving-each-other-in-that-moment/