I’ve interviewed McQuarrie a few times, and what I gather is part of this is Tom as a producer and a co-creator, making the space and time to have these steps. Yes, it’s scary at first, but when you start looking at it as a thousand steps of how to get there, it’s less so. And that’s a little bit unique, no?

Eastwood: Big time. There’s a lot of “yes” people in Hollywood, especially to a big actor and a powerful person. And I’m a “yes” person, but I’m not a yes person for the wrong reasons. You’ve got to be competent and be able to do it. And when I first met Tom, we were doing some driving stuff, and I was like, “Look, you don’t jump in a Formula One car and go set a lap record. You go to [first] jump in a Formula Three car, you have to build up to a Formula Two car. You’re doing it in stages, otherwise you’ll skip a very important stage and you won’t have those raw skills that you need when the job gets harder later. And he is of the same belief and he sticks to it. And as a result of that, it’s an easy process for me because I know I’ve got the best student during that process.

The thing that I have to imagine is hard is that you were talking about the training process, each one of these set pieces, is a different strength or skill that he needs. The strength you need to hold onto the plane is different than a running scene or scuba diving scene. It’s not just one training to get ready for “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” right?

Eastwood: Yeah. Tom designs his own training, not stunt training, but the physical training of the diet and so on. He knows what his body’s going to go through and endure and how he’s moving, and he then gets with his team and he designs that and he will work on things like when we do the speed fly sequence, he designed a system that he could get his core engaged, working with his arms up, so he’s not fatiguing or having injury, because if Tom has an injury then we have to stop shooting. So he’s 100-percent in control of that and he’s got a great team on the physical side, on the diet side. My job is to make sure that the stunt side, like learning the fights, choreography, the movement for the fights, I’ll get with his physio and his trainer, and say, “These are the sorts of movements Tom will be doing.” And then they know which muscle groups to work on to make sure that we prevent injury.

In terms of that prep, training, R&D process, can you take a minute to walk us through how that applied to the big biplane sequence in “The Final Reckoning,” which I gather you worked on for four-and-half months after they did all the Pre-Viz?

Eastwood: Yeah, so it started very early on. We climbed around on a plane on the ground and at an airport in England and started shooting ideas around — Tom, McQ, and myself. And then we strapped it down to the ground and put on some big wind machines and moved around the wing together. And Tom had ideas in his head, but he wanted to feel what the blast was like.

Then we need to know the limitations of that aircraft, because when there’s a body on the wing of the plane, as it moves across the wing, the plane wants to turn in that direction. And you have to have enough control and the stick to be able to keep it level for flight. Otherwise, you’re always in a dive, or a turn, or you spin or stall. So after we’d played around on the wing with the fans — he really felt the blast and he could work out his physical training with his team — then I started with a dummy on the side of the plane with wires. We would fly and I would move the dummy out in increments, and the pilot made sure we could always be in control.

Then we would upgrade the engines to have more power. We’d make sure they were tuned like an F1 car.

Because they’re 100-year old planes, right?

Eastwood: Yeah, but the aircraft restoration team were incredible. It really was like an F1 air plane. Because you’re flying 10-feet over these rivers in South Africa, and if you have an engine failure, you’re not landing, you’re crashing. So that’s out of my control. So the only control we had is to make sure that every time those planes land, they are checked to the T, and we’d switch planes to the other one if we needed to. Whatever needs to happen but that the plane has to be perfect.

So we would test the stunt with the dummy moving further and further out. Once the pilot had full control of that, I would then turn the dummy to the wind, so we have maximum drag, which makes a plane want to yaw, and possibly go into a dive or a spin. And once we worked that out with the plane and the pilot could withstand that, then we started with Tom. And there I had to come up with a rigging system that would allow Tom to start in the ****pit for takeoff and landing, to step out onto the wing to spin and rotate his body with all the cables and everything to get the shot and then get back in the ****pit for landing. So it was a complicated system, so we had to have a slack management system built into the wire that was hands free.

And that was shot near where you are from?

Eastwood: Yeah, it was amazing for me, as a South African originally, to go home. I took Tom to Namibia on another project before and I was desperate to show him South Africa. When the plane sequence came up, I was like, we have to shoot in these locations. They’re just incredible.

I loved the submarine sequence. I know that there’s been a lot of talk about how Tom was never really happy with his underwater scenes, and wanted another crack at it, but it’s such a unique and intentionally slower sequence, can you could talk about how that one evolved over time?

Eastwood: That was two huge, huge sets. We had a set that could rotate, that could sink it into the water, raise, it could pitch it, and we had real torpedoes, I mean not real in that they are going to blow up [laughs], I mean real scale and size torpedos. They were heavy, they weren’t light, because the light ones are rubbery, they bend, bounce.

Because onscreen you can tell if they don’t have the right weight?

Eastwood: Oh, big time. Also rubber that size is going to be almost as heavy anyway. If we made them super lightweight, when they react with the water they’re going to be different, you’re going to need cables to pull them down. So we went real, but that all had to be tested for weeks of making sure that there was nothing that could snag and then suddenly drop where it shouldn’t and go where it shouldn’t. Because Tom’s path — if he’s underwater and a torpedo hits the top and then sinks, once it’s weightless in the water, it’s fine, he can move it around, hit against it, but if he’s surfaced for some reason, or you’re caught up in the surface and that torpedo falls off the shelf, he’s got a full weight torpedo that’ll crush him. So just the torpedo room alone took a lot of rehearsing and a lot of working out with my team, special effects, and then getting Tom into it and having him working it out.

But when we’d first would go in and rotate the set slowly, and pitch it, and sink it, the bubbles and the current that was created by that set moving with all the water, you’re getting sucked towards the mechanics and the grinding gears and the chains, and then the bubbles distort your vision. You can’t see each other, so you don’t know if someone’s in trouble, you can’t give a signal. So, I had to work out all these things with my team that if they lost my visual, I had a light signal as a different visual signal, backups for backups. And if they lost visual with me completely, then the rig stopped.

So [Tom] was in the rig, and I was sort of half mid-station and just watching him. And at times, because he’s acting and we’re acting [a chaotic situation] where a torpedo will hit him and push him to the bottom and he’s going to get caught for three or four seconds, but now Tom’s down there for 10-12 seconds, and he’s still acting, and we’ve got signals if he’s in trouble, and it’s nervewracking. He’s ad-libbing, he’s going with it, he’s just making it up, but it looks like he’s drowning and he’s pinned for real and he’s in trouble, and it’s very hard for me not to go in. And at times I would go in, and then we’d surface, and he’d be like [impersonating a frustrated Cruise], “What are you doing?! I’m acting.” It was just too much sometimes.

“Back off Wade, I got it.”

Eastwood: No, he would, he’d be, “What are you doing?!” But also, Tom’s become a friend of mine over the years and if a friend’s in trouble, you want to jump in. It was very difficult.

One collaboration I’ve been fascinated by over the last few years is how editor Eddie Hamilton works into all this. Obviously, he’s a great editor, and we can talk about that, but there’s also a feedback loop that has to happen on set, right? Beyond Eddie’s talents as an editor, he has to help figure out what you have at this point, and I’m hoping you can talk about that a little bit.

Eastwood: Yeah, we’ve got so much footage and there’s so many different angles and ways that we can enter and exit the scene, and McQ’s got a bunch of ideas and he wants a bunch of options, and Tom’s got a bunch of ideas, and Eddie’s sort of putting it all together and saying, “Which direction are we going? Because if we go in that direction, we might need this. And if we go in that direction, we might need this. And alright, well then we should shoot this and this.” And it’s unplanned sometimes, and we have to create a new sequence and we have to shoot it.

But again, the joy with this, and the reason I love doing “Missions,” is if something like this comes up, “Alright guys, well I need this much time,” whether it’s with Tom or stunt people or whatever, “I need this much time, and this training.” They’re never like, “You haven’t got that, we’re shooting it tomorrow.” It’s like, “Okay bud, do the best you can.” And I’ll always do it as quick as I can, I’m very budget savvy, and conscious and aware of that, but it still needs time to do it properly, and they never compromise on time and they never compromise on performance, or action, which is the reason I love these films.

And there’s an ethos, “We’re doing it here, we’re not going to wait, we’ll do it now,” rather than figuring it out in post and reshoots, right?

Eastwood: Oh yeah, it’s on the fly. It’s all guns blazing, lots of ideas [Laughs], and lots of organic processes.

One thing I worry that gets lost in discussing these movies is the collaboration with visual effects. I know there is an emphasis on practical, and this is Tom Cruise doing the stunts, and that’s what’s understandably put forward, but VFX are an important part of figuring this out too, right? That’s another voice in the room of how to do this stuff?

Eastwood: Yeah. I mean, when you interact with things, everything is practical on a “Mission.” Everything on the plane is practical. If there’s vision effects in that, it’s painting out a wire or enhancing a sky. There is no other visual effects in the plane sequence. It’s 100-percent real. It might be a little cleanup here, or there, or a little bit of damage on a plane here or there, but the planes are really flying and Tom is really on the wing. And when Tom’s flying, he’s really flying. There’s no trickery rigs, or stage rigs, it’s all in South Africa for real, which was amazing.

And so the visual effects side it’s not like if I went and did a Marvel movie, and I’m like, “We are creating a wall on the blue screen over there, and then he’s going fight this dragon, which is actually a stunt double in a blue suit with pads on, and he’s got to imagine it, visual effects telling the actor, “It’s six foot tall, and here’s the marker.” We don’t have to imagine a world because we shoot in the real world, and we use visual effects to enhance and to extend sets, and things like that.

I guess what you are saying what visual effects can eliminate, or what it can extend, is known, that’s somethingC

Eastwood: We know. Exactly. And they know.

I saw that you’re getting ready for your directorial debut, “Mister.” Obviously, with David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, and now Sam Hargrave too, stunt coordinator into director is becoming a more established career path. I’m curious, with stunt coordinators also often being second unit directors, has directing become a natural storytelling extension of the work you are already doing?

Eastwood: Yeah, it is. We are so involved early on, with the script development. And on a big action movie sometimes there’s no action written. The character is here and then the character’s there. “What about doing a car chase into that?” “That’s a great idea.” And then we write it and beat sheet it, and do all that. So, we’re very involved in the creative stage in an action movie, so it feels like the natural progression is to [direct].

And then when we get the actors in and they start training, I love bringing performance out. Teaching them to do fights, that’s fun in itself and it’s fun seeing them enjoy it, but then once they’ve got the choreography, putting the character in there and making them have fun with it and making them find it, and we do that in our workshops, where it’s a relaxed environment, and that’s normally where they find it. So, you are directing the whole time. And when I run a second unit, I have the main actors on my second unit when I’m doing the action, I don’t just use the stunt doubles. The same with David and Chad, good friends of mine, and have done really well. As a second unit director you’re in control of your action, and the emotion and drama, so it feels like the natural progression.

And “Mister” is definitely one of those. It ticks all the boxes of action, but also really, really good emotional storytelling.

With the stunt community now being part of an Academy branch and at the 2028 Oscars will have its own category, a part of that movement was the creation of the “Stunt Designer” title. Is that something that you’re hoping will take hold?

Eastwood: I haven’t really looked into. I’m not really a massive awards guy myself.

The idea would be in this new world for a “Mission: Impossible,” you would’ve gotten the title of stunt designer over stunt coordinator, or is that just semantics at this point?

Eastwood: It’s semantics. It’s just a title at the end of the day. I mean, at the end of the day, I’m the second unit director and stunt coordinator, I help design the action. What you see on screen is part of what I designed with Chris and Tom. You’re always designing, you’re creating, you’re writing, you’re doing it all, but under the guise of your box, and as a partner in a journey, so I don’t really care what the title is.

Fair enough.

Eastwood: When press comes out in a big movie like “Mission,” obviously there’s a brand and there’s publicity and no one really cares about Wade Eastwood or whoever it is behind the scenes: The crew, the special effects coordinator, the production design. The brand is Tom and McQ, and “Mission: Impossible,” so that’s where the marketing is. But it is nice, like Pom Klementieff that other day, mentioned, “Thanks to Wade and his stunt team.” Because you are very much behind the scenes. So not so much on the award side. It’s just nice to be acknowledged when you’ve been on a movie for six years and you’ve been away from your family a lot of that time, you’re working 12 hours and six, seven days a week, and you’ve poured all your blood and guts, and you’ve worked out the logistics of how to do it, and the training, and all that stuff, all that work and creativity, which you get paid for, that’s your job, but it’s nice just to get a little mention of like, “Oh, the guys did a great job.” And that’s good enough for me.

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