Tom Cruise Has Never Been Happy with His Breath-Defying Underwater Scenes, So ‘Final Reckoning’ Went Three Times Bigger

The airplane finale looks death-defying, but IndieWire dives deep into the scene that truly terrified Christopher McQuarrie and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood.

Tom Cruise did his first underwater scene for “Legend” (1985), followed by executing far more demanding scenes in “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014) and most famously “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” (2015), where he held his breath for six-and-a-half minutes. But when writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, who has made eleven films with Cruise, was on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he made clear the duo walked away from “Rogue Nation” deeply dissatisfied with the underwater set piece.

“Shooting in water is extremely challenging and very frustrating,” said McQuarrie, who at one point swore never to do another underwater scene.

According the McQuarrie, the biggest problem is how time-consuming these scenes can be to shoot, having been limited to only six setups a day working in the tank on “Rogue Nation.” He also said there were a number of mistakes made in how the underwater scenes had been designed for the 2015 “M:I” movie, including its over-reliance on visual effects.

Those were the mistakes he and Cruise were determined to learn from when they came up with “The Final Reckoning” storyline of Ethan (Cruise) needing to get to the top secret Russian submarine, The Sevastopol, buried deep under the ice caps of the Bering Sea, so he can retrieve the “Podkova” and stop the AI villain The Entity from destroying the world.

“We’re always wanting to take the lessons we had learned and do something that was more practical,” said McQuarrie. “Less virtual, rely less on CGI, less on green screen. All those things were very, very frustrating on ‘Rogue Nation.’ They were all dictated by the design of the set and the concept of the scene itself. So we applied the knowledge of ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ to ‘Rogue Nation,’ and then applied the knowledge of ‘Rogue Nation’ to [‘Final Reckoning’].”

Below, McQuarrie and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, who has worked closely with Cruise and the director since “Edge of Tomorrow,” break down how they designed and built from the ground up what is arguably their most difficult, dangerous, and impressive set piece yet.

Time Saver: McQuarrie Gets in the Water

“The big breakthrough on this movie was I got in the water,” said McQuarrie. “What happens normally when you’re directing an underwater sequence is you are above water, and you’re talking to an assistant director, who’s on a microphone, talking to everybody underwater, so you’re directing through mediaries.”

Not only did the “M:I” team increase the number of underwater shoot days from ten on “Rogue” to 22 on “Final Reckoning,” but McQuarrie’s learning to scuba-dive so he could direct underwater meant going from six to 22 setups a day.

“You have no spatial awareness of the set that’s underwater [when you are directing from above-water],” said McQuarrie, explaining the increased efficiency. “You’re only seeing what the camera sees. I described the process: It’s akin to trying to fix a pocket watch while you’re wearing boxing gloves.”

Two Years to Build the Set

Cruise has long been a Buster Keaton fan, and one of the key lessons of conceiving “The Final Reckoning” sub scene is how the actor’s interaction with the set, or the machine, creates the subsequent action and danger. As Cruise navigates his way to the sonar room to retrieve the “Podkova,” he faces the obstacle that some compartments have been sealed shut and left bone dry, while others are flooded.

This means that when Ethan opens the door to the non-flooded compartment, it creates a tremendous vacuum-like effect of water rushing through to fill the room. Compounding the problem, the sunken sub is near the edge of a sea floor cliff, and rolls under the shifting weight of the washing through its hull. Oh, yeah, and there are enormous torpedoes that Cruise must navigate as they are jostled with each sub rotation.

It was an action scene rooted in the geography and physics of the precariously flooded sub, and shooting it practically would require one of the biggest and complex film sets builds ever.

“There was no facility on earth that could accommodate the ambitions of this sequence. So everything had to be scratch-built,” said McQuarrie.

In addition to the two enormous submarine sets, there had never been a need to build a gimbal big and strong enough to support, rotate, and move a set of this size, nor a water tank large enough to house the gimbal and set. The final tank built for “The Final Reckoning” was so big it took 15 days to fill with water, and, along with the set and gimbal, would take over two years to construct.

“We built this giant, enormously complicated set,” said McQuarrie. “It was a 1,000-ton steel gimbal that could rotate 360 degrees, it could pitch 45 degrees in both directions, you could raise it and lower it so you could completely submerge it in an eight-and-a-half million liter tank.”

Real Danger

Compared to Cruise doing stunts on the wing of 140-mph of 100-year-old biplane, the relatively and intentionally slower submarine scene on the surface may seem less dangerous, but that wasn’t the case. While on the podcast, McQuarrie told IndieWire both “The Final Reckoning” submarine and plane set pieces represented the two biggest, most difficult and dangerous sequences in the “M:I” franchise history.

“The engineers told us how fast it could rotate, and their predictions were correct, but you really couldn’t anticipate what it was going to be like to shoot in there until you did it,” said McQuarrie of the rotating underwater set. “Nobody really anticipated the physics of that rig rotating, with all of the rip currents and the rain that was being generated. No one really anticipated any of that, and how could they?”

Stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood and his team spent a great deal of time before the shoot getting used to the underwater rig, and made sure there was ample rehearsal time.

“When we first would go in, we’d rotate the set slowly and pitch it and sink it, and the bubbles and the current that was created by that set moving with the tons of water — you’re getting sucked towards the mechanics and the grinding gears and the chains, and you’re getting pushed [by the current],” said Eastwood.

While the torpedoes were not real, the weight of the enormous prop weapons was kept realistic — to have made it lighter (and hence safer) would be noticeable to the audience based on how it moved through the water.

“What we did is 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 because of Tom’s path,” said Eastwood. “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, he can hit against it. But if he’s surfaced for some reason or he got caught up and that torpedo falls off the shelf, a full-weight torpedo will crush him.”

McQuarrie, Cruise, Eastwood, the underwater camera and stunt teams communicated through a series of hand signals, and if necessary, had a special underwater dry erase board for more complicated discussions. The problem is the moving set’s current created bubbles. McQuarrie said the problem that couldn’t always be pre-planned for was losing sight of Cruise, “ Getting inside that gimbal, while it was rotating, filled with water and debris, sometimes you would lose sight of Tom — that was extremely dangerous.”

Eastwood added that the problem was compounded by not being able to always decipher when the actor was under real distress versus what was performative distress for the camera. The stunt coordinator, who has been working hand-in-hand with Cruise and McQuarrie since “Edge of Tomorrow,” admitted he found himself in impossible situations when shooting the sub-scenes.

“Tom has become a friend of mine over the years and if a friend’s in trouble, you want to jump in. It was very difficult,” said Eastwood. “We’re acting chaos [in one scene] where a torpedo will hit him and push him to the bottom and he’s going to get caught. [The plan was] he was going to get caught for three or four seconds, but now Tom’s down there for ten, 12 seconds and he’s still acting. We’ve got signals if he’s in trouble and it’s nerve-wracking watching. He’s ad-libbing, he’s going with it, he’s just making it up, he’s acting it, but it looks like he’s drowning and he’s pinned for real and he’s in trouble. It’s very hard for me not to go in, and at times I would go in and then I’d surface, [Tom] would be like, ‘What are you doing? I’m acting.’ It was just too much sometimes.”

To hear Christopher McQuarrie’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.