Mission: Impossible 7 used a jet engine as a secret weapon for its sandstorm shootout
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has just hit digital, with a 4K Blu-ray release planned for later in October. The home video push comes with various behind-the-scenes how-did-they-pull-that-off features — always a must for a movie with this many huge action sequences and complicated stunts.
A pair of short excerpts premiering exclusively on Polygon breaks down some of the details of a particularly intense fight sequence early in the film, where perpetually on-the-run rogue agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) shoots his way through a disintegrating desert town during a blinding sandstorm, en route to meet fellow rogue agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).
The clips show how the film’s desert town was built — like so many blockbuster-movie sets that need to support an entire complex run-and-gun fight from a variety of angles, it really is an actual small town, built from scratch in the desert. As production designer Gary Freeman explains, he and his crew built the set over the course of five weeks, but then the COVID-19 quarantine shut down production for months before shooting could start.
“In a way, it did me a favor, with the winds blowing all the sand in and aging the buildings beautifully in the sun,” Freeman says in the clip. “Over months, it only made the set look better.” That isn’t time most productions could afford, at least apart from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series, which built the Hobbiton set nine months before shooting in order to let the surrounding gardens and greenery grow in naturally, making the place look just as warm, homey, and lived-in as the Dead Reckoning Part One desert set looked abandoned and weather-worn.
In a second clip, SFX supervisor Neil Corbould reveals the secret to
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