Visual effects supervisor Alex Wuttke has worked on several major blockbusters over the last 20 years – including the James Bond films “Quantum of Solace” and “Spectre,” as well as “Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom. But only “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” allowed Wuttke to work with star and producer Tom Cruise.
“That’s the fun aspect of these movies is that everyone involved – every department – 100 percent committed to furthering their craft and taking things to the next level all the time,” Wuttke tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “Tom was kind of leading the charge with that and he’s right at the head with [McQuarrie], just saying, ‘Okay, now we’ve got to up the game, and this is what we’re going to do, and how do we do it?’”
Trying to figure out how they did it is one of the great pleasures of “Dead Reckoning Part One,” the seventh installment in the blockbuster “Mission: Impossible” franchise and arguably the most elaborate yet in terms of its action sequences. The film – which focuses on a battle to stop an artificial intelligence program from running amok – includes an elaborate car chase through the streets of Rome, an awe-inspiring cliff jump that Cruise performed numerous times, and a brutal fistfight atop a runaway train. In keeping with the ethos of the franchise and its star, everything was done with verisimilitude in mind, something Wuttke says was “music to my ears” as the visual effects supervisor.
“It gives us such a great foundation to work from,” he explains. “It’s a really interesting process and it’s kind of unlike a lot of other pictures that you might work on in the sense that we always start from a place of ‘Tom is going to be doing this stuff, and he’s going to do it for real, let’s get into the logistics of how we can make this happen.”
“For us in visual effects, it’s fantastic because you’re watching a real performance,” Wuttke adds. “Tom is in these dangerous positions, and you see it in his performance. And for us, that kind of helps to sell the visuals. It’s like a sleight of hand, because it sells the shot for you, because you know everyone’s watching him do this thing and you know it’s for real.”
But even when things veered into the unreal, Wuttke says he and McQuarrie still prioritized some level of truth to the visual effects. Case in point, an opening prologue aboard a Russian nuclear submarine.
“As it turns out, you wouldn’t have any visibility whatsoever underwater – light would fall off within about 10 meters. So we knew that we were going to have to kind of push things a little bit,” Wuttke says. From there, the conversations turned to the audience’s understanding of submarines – much of which has been culled from earlier movies, like “The Hunt for Red October” or “Crimson Tide.”
“No one has seen a submarine underwater for real, it’s just not entirely possible,” he says. “So we wanted to sort of recreate [the feeling of ‘Crimson Tide’ or ‘The Hunt for Red October’]. So we started thinking about doing a really big model miniature like they would do it back in the day when they were shooting those movies. So that then becomes its own style of reality.”
Due to the sequence itself, however, a miniature wouldn’t necessarily work. So Wuttke worked backward from there to present the work digitally – in essence, building a large-model miniature via computer-generated effects. “That was pretty much the analog that we used for our digital work. So it ends up kind of harkening back to those classic movies that the audience recognizes and loves, but just doing it in a digital way,” he says.
Wuttke is already hard at work on the next “Mission: Impossible” film, due out in 2025. He says to expect the same level of commitment from everyone involved. “No one is going through the numbers with any of this,” he says. “Tom expects 110 percent commitment. The reason you’re on this franchise is because he’s decided that you’re someone who can contribute something. So you’ve got to bring your A-game.”
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