Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey on matching Tom Cruise’s plane stunt for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Tom Cruise clinging to the wing of an in-flight biplane with no CGI, and a gut-wrenching sunken submarine sequence in the depths of the Bering Sea – these are just two of the music-scoring tasks Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey were confronted with for what may be the final Mission: Impossible film. Having worked together as assistants to film composer veteran Lorne Balfe for several years, Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey had their biggest career breakthrough yet on The Final Reckoning. They speak to Headliner about the huge undertaking of scoring the film, creating the music for its two jaw-dropping set pieces, and how Cubase proved vital to it all.

Los Angeles-based Aruj secured his career in film scoring via the tried and true method of initially assisting established composers, starting out at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Studios. Starting out making coffee, he was eventually paired up with one of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers, Lorne Balfe, who worked on the previous two Mission: Impossible films and recommended Aruj and Godfrey for this instalment.

Aruj would assist on films and television, including Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Black Widow, and The Crown, before going solo and working on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Wrath of the Druids, Crawl, Lansky, and The Ice Road.

Growing up in West London, Godfrey makes up the British half of this pair of composers. As it’s his first interview with Headliner, the crucial first question is how he got into music and film scoring.

“I didn't really know where to put my energy as a musician until I went on a school trip one day and met Harry Gregson-Williams,” he recalls. “He showed me around his studio and the project files for Shrek and Team America, and all these amazing films that I loved at that time. I did a course at UCLA in film scoring. I heard about this five-week internship at Remote Control Productions, and later on, I met Lorne Balfe, who is our mentor.”

You can’t get a better example of the chameleon life of a film composer than Godfrey going from working on the Brit flick Marching Powder starring Danny Dyer, to the latest episode in the Mission: Impossible franchise. “It's a completely different film in every way if you're comparing it to Mission: Impossible,” Godfrey says. “It's a one-hour, 25-minute film, and the music was to enhance the comedy.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that being asked to write the music for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for both these composers, and one that will almost certainly elevate each of their careers to the next level. Touted as Tom Cruise’s final outing as the rogue agent Ethan Hunt, he and the IMF (Impossible Missions Force) must race around the globe to prevent the Entity, a malevolent artificial intelligence, from wreaking catastrophe on humanity.

It brings back the ensemble cast of Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, and Angela Bassett, and is one of the most expensive films ever made, being somewhere in the region of $400 million. Add to the mix the fact that director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise planned two of the most daring set pieces ever put to screen, with the actor risking life and limb once again, you can imagine the nerves Aruj and Godfrey were feeling when taking this project on.

“I had heard that from the head of music at Paramount that Christopher McQuarrie wanted to meet,” says Aruj. “After a series of chats and interviews and writing a pitch, I found out that Alfie and I would be scoring. It was so exciting and also scary. Lorne, our former boss, had recommended us both. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel that level of nervousness and excitement again, because now, having done the movie after the fact, I know that it is possible for me to do.”

Besides the weight coming from the Mission: Impossible name itself, and knowing how beloved this franchise is, there’s also knowing you’re following on from the long list of composers to score these films. Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard, Michael Giacchino, and more. “When your to-do list starts to pile up you don't need to be thinking about who came before you, because that'll just make you more stressed,” Aruj says. Even before Covid, many composers would work remotely, but Aruj was relocated to London for 12 months to work in the same room as Godfrey, and in the same office building as McQuarrie and the post-production army, making the magic happen.

And they have managed, despite the bewildering workload (the soundtrack album is over two hours long), to put a brilliant and individual stamp on this franchise. As Cruise listens to the trademark, ‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it’ order, Aruj and Godfrey provide this moment with some gorgeously ambient cinematic music (heard in Another Sunrise and This Is Where You Leave Me on the album), setting the tone with the kind of goosebumps only unforgettable sound in film can create.

A very different musical task they faced involves a giant Russian submarine. In one of the two, ‘Why on Earth did he want to put himself through that?’ setpieces of the film, Cruise has to retrieve something from a sunken submarine, and it was down to Aruj and Godfrey to conjure up the necessary levels of claustrophobia and dread.

“I think it was very clear to McQ (McQuarrie), this would not be violins and trumpets,” Godfrey says. “He showed us the space bass, which is this instrument that looks like a giant marimba made in a scrap yard. You bow it and strike it, and it has this deep resonance. That was going to be the world for this part of the score; is it sound, or is it music? It’s a testament to the ambition of McQ and Tom, because those sets and the risks that Tom took to shoot the film are crazy.”

As if Cruise putting himself in a submarine filled with freezing cold water of his own free will isn’t mad enough, The Final Reckoning’s other set piece sees him clinging on to an in-flight biplane. Knowing that next to no CGI was used in either set piece, it’s truly breathtaking stuff that can only be fully appreciated on the biggest cinema screen possible. McQuarrie and Cruise’s dedication to honouring the cinema experience is deeply admirable, to say the least.

“The plane scene was by far the most challenging bit of the score, and also the part I'm most proud of,” says Aruj. “When we first watched the four-hour cut with no music, we thought, ‘What could I possibly write that would match this?’ For about six months, we did not have a lot of music land in that scene. The instinct is to write really fast music with lots of percussion and lots of fast notes. But it didn't work, because when you're in the sky and trying to hear lots of fast notes, it oddly makes the planes feel slow. When we see Tom Cruise running on land, having fast notes worked very well, with this kind of kinetic energy. We needed melodies and chords that supported the deep drama and danger of it all, and a lot of the time, that was having trumpets up higher and having a dissonance between the bass note and the top line. That took months.”

With the two composers together in a room the entire time they worked on the film, it was vital that they were using the same DAW to make the process as streamlined and painless as possible. Thankfully, they are both long-term users of Steinberg’s Cubase for their scoring work, taking the lead from former mentor, Balfe.

“In this score and a lot of symphonic scores, MIDI editing and writing orchestral music is paramount,” Aruj says. “When we get to the period of orchestration and recording the music, it's already neatly done on Cubase. Of course, there are a few errors here and there, but in general, there should be very few questions when the conductor is on the stand and we're in the booth. There needs to be no debate; every minute counts. I’ve been using Cubase for 15 years now. I was using Logic before, but once I got the job with Lorne, I had to switch on day one. Once you start learning it, it's pretty easy to use. It's pretty impressive how quickly you can get into the flow of things, and we're expected to write fully orchestrated and programmed pieces within a day. Our skills need to be at that level and at that speed, to be able to give the director a symphonic piece within a few hours.”

“We both started on Cubase with Lorne,” confirms Godfrey. “It enables us to work as fast as we can think. There's no barrier, nothing is stopping us. It's our muscle memory, and we can control it at our will to a very deep extent. I don't indulge in the age-old conversation of what's better: Logic or Cubase, or this and that. The answer is always that the best DAW is the one you use and are best at using. That said, Cubase is very good at MIDI editing in complex ways, done with simple commands. It's very good for huge templates that we really rely on. It’s the modern way of making these films. You have to lean on the programming a lot to have a very clear intention of what you’re trying to do. And as Max said, there's no doubt of a dynamic. There's no doubt of a timbre. When we get to the recording, it's very clear. We spend a lot of time in Cubase making sure it's very, very clear.”

If you’ve not seen The Final Reckoning yet, hopefully the preceding paragraphs have done enough to convince you that this is not a film to watch at home, but on the biggest cinema screen you can find, with the highest spec speakers booming out Godfrey and Aruj’s brilliant score for this Ethan Hunt outing. The original score album is out now; stick it on and you can almost imagine doing a trapeze act on an aeroplane yourself.

Film stills credit: © 2025 Paramount Pictures