Ok, I don’t think theres any more Ghost Protocol stuff I can get on here today after this. Theres a fantastic article in the LA Times today with a huge breakdown of the Burj Khalifa scene in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It primarily includes some script excerpts from Ghost Protocol writers Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec. The full article is well worth a read, and really highlights the fact that Cruise and crew risked life and limb to make this movie.
EXT. BURJ KHALIFA — DAY
Brandt cranes his head skyward, looking at the behemoth building he’s under. It seems to go up forever.
Stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz: We were in meetings, and they said, “Tom’s not going to climb that building. The studio will never allow that.” I said, “Tom’s going to climb the building, I guarantee it.” When you’re on top and you look out, people are going to think it’s CG [computer-generated], and it’s not. You have to see it to believe it.
EXT. BURJ KHALIFA — 119TH FLOOR — DAY
A window panel is removed and pulled inside the room by Brandt and Benji. Ethan picks up the gloves.
Co-producer, visual effects producer Tom Peitzman: Special mounts had to be made for the 65-millimeter Imax cameras, special safety had to be put in place, because in a building that’s 800 meters tall [it’s 2,723 feet], you couldn’t run the risk of anything falling. Even all of us who are working inside the building, we all had to harness ourselves because the window was open. Being in a building that high, it almost gave you the sense you were in an airplane, watching Tom Cruise outside, actually doing it.
Smrz: We spent hundreds of hours trying to figure out, how are we going to climb this glass and make it look real. In Prague, we had a [replica] section of the building brought over from Dubai and built it on stage. We knew the temperature of the glass and where the sun was going to be on the day of our filming, and we put 50-foot-tall lights on a rheostat so we could adjust them so it was like the sun.
Actor, producer Tom Cruise: We were dealing with a lot of issues — not only the height issue but also the temperature issues and the winds. It can get so hot up there that it could burn me, so we had to really play with different kinds of rubber, different kinds of materials with the wardrobe. A sequence like this, with the amount of manpower and craftsmanship it takes — and also, athletically, what it takes — even for training as we’re trying to figure how we’re going to do it, it’s pretty intense. And then the aesthetics, how it’s going to look.
BRANDT
Twenty-seven minutes ’til door knock …
Ethan slips out the window.
Smrz: We rehearsed in Prague and never rehearsed in Dubai. We flew into Dubai and climbed the building. Kind of like a military operation, where they’re gonna go in and rescue the hostages; they’ve never been there, they rehearse on a set, then they go in there. The only difference was, don’t look down.
EXT. BURJ KHALIFA — 119TH FLOOR— DAY
Ethan steadies himself on the glass, and gets his first real feel for the gloves — the only things keeping him from a two thousand foot plummet.
Sound designer, sound re-recording mixer Gary Rydstrom: The sound of that scene hinges on the gloves Ethan’s wearing. You have to believe they’re really going to hold him up on the outside of the building. The key we found that made it natural and believable was these thumps from an MRI machine. They make these magnetic thumps, which gave it an electronic sound, a sense of power.
Peitzman: The majority of the [visual effects] work we had to do was painting out rigging because Tom was really climbing the building. But there were so many very large cables on Tom, we would actually be replacing the building pieces individually — instead of just painting out the cables. But with a mirrored-surface building, it created a reflections nightmare. We had helicopters in our shots, we had crew in our shots, we had all kinds of rigging. There were many times where we would see six reflections of Tom. So if he has four cables on him, we have 24 cables we have to remove.
For the rest of the article pop on over to the good folks at Hero Complex at The L.A. Times
