Christopher McQuarrie is out here setting Mission: Impossible records left and right.

Not only is he the first director to helm more than one entry in the long-running espionage-action franchise, but he’s also the first M:I filmmaker to play an instrument for one of its soundtracks.

Chatting with me over Zoom, composer Lorne Balfe reveals that McQuarrie — who officially boarded the series with 2015’s Rogue Nation — played the bongos for the opening title track of Dead Reckoning Part One (now in theaters).

“The bongos are always going to come back, unfortunately, for my sins,” Balfe jokes. “[There’s] just more of them this time.” Their use, of course, goes back to the original TV show, specifically its iconic theme song by Lalo Schifrin.

“Lalo created this vocabulary and the composers continue those themes and continue that emotion and push it to deeper motifs and different storylines,” Balfe explains.

But no matter how much new territory you blaze, however, the Mission: Impossible brand will always bring you back to that unmistakable (and paradoxically contemporary) ‘60s sound. “The TV show was very percussive and it was very punctuated. It was a very avant garde, modern score at the time, which we now associate as retro. But it wasn’t. It was modern.”

Balfe is currently raffling off a set of autographed bongos (signed by himself, McQuarrie, and numerous others) used for the score’s recording sessions. All proceeds will benefit Highland Hospice. The contest closes Aug. 18.

The hotly-anticipated followup to 2018’s Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Dead Reckoning Part One finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the rest of our favorite IMF agents (namely Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell, Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn, and Rebecca Ferguson’s honorary operative Isle Faust) battling their most dangerous adversary yet: an ever-mutating artificial intelligence known as “The Entity.”

This malevolent, technological being can literally reshape the truth to its every whim, making it a valuable weapon for intelligence leaders around the world, including Ethan’s old boss: Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny reprising his role from the 1996 original). And so, the race is on to obtain a cruciform key that can either destroy or control the powerful A.I. depending on who gets their mitts on the MacGuffin first.

Balfe and McQuarrie began to discuss the music for the two-part Dead Reckoning about three years ago, with the latter citing Romantic Period composers Jean Sibelius and Sergei Rachmaninoff as inspiration. “He had a tone in mind, because it was a far more emotional journey than Fallout,” Balfe says.

The subsequent scoring process required “a lot of trial and error,” yielding approximately 14 hours of music — not all of which made it into the final cut.

“None of it's wasted,” insists the composer. “It may not be used, but it lets you go down an alleyway, and there's two doors there. That musical idea might not be right for the left one, so you try the right and it opens up and has its own life. I think that seems to be the world of Mission — it really has its own life.”

While nearly 12 hours of music ended up on the cutting room floor, Balfe doesn’t think any of it will be repurposed for Part Two (slated for release next June). “It's difficult to tell, because ... so many new discoveries happened near the end,” he notes. “The film changed and the tone changed, so the music just kept evolving. I think it's dangerous holding on to something. I think you've just got to let it go.”

He continues: “Lalo’s got two themes from the TV show — the main theme and the plot theme. Those two singular themes have given a lot of mileage to all these great films. So I think everything will have a new challenge and a whole new approach to it. Because every time you think you can't do anything else with it, you discover that you can.”

When it came time to define The Entity from a musical standpoint, Balfe looked to “old school Hollywood” composers Bernard Hermann and Jerry Goldsmith.

“That very cinematic, atonal world, which you don't really hear much of [anymore],” he notes. “I think that was something [Chris] really wanted to delve deeper into, that very old school nostalgic tone, which gets removed these days. And it's the same as the film, the concept of great storytelling gets removed quite regularly. So it's hand-in-hand about embracing the past.”

A rather ironic sentiment, given how the plot revolves around a dangerous new technology mirroring up-to-the-minute developments concerning the rise of ChatGPT and an ongoing plight of writers and actors striking to curb studio flirtation with artificial intelligence.

Hoping to reflect the global nature of the film — which spans Abu Dhabi, Rome, Venice, and even the legendary locomotive known as the Orient Express — Balfe decided to do something highly unusual for an undertaking of this size by seeking out and recording musicians from all over the world. “We ended up with 555 musicians featured on the score,” he says. “We just wanted to kind of feel what we were seeing.”

Clocking in at just shy of 3 hours, Dead Reckoning Part One is the longest chapter in the IMF saga so far, introducing several new characters to the Mission canon such as Grace (Hayley Atwell), a hapless pickpocket swept up into the race for the key, and Gabriel (Esai Morales), a mysterious individual from Ethan’s past working on behalf of The Entity.

Despite the addition of so many new faces, Balfe didn’t feel the need to whip up a slew of fresh themes, but rather unite them all under the umbrella of Mr. Hunt.

“I think it's also just delving into Ethan's journey,” he explains. “I think when you start doing Peter and the Wolf, where every single character’s getting their own individual theme, it can become muddled and confusing. It’s more about, ‘What is their purpose? What is their mission?’ And that really unites them all.”

With a near-perfect score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes (just one point below Fallout), Dead Reckoning Part One continues to serve as proof that the Mission: Impossible franchise is that rare Hollywood IP that only gets better as it goes along.

Balfe credits this successful upping of the ante to Cruise, whose insistence on pulling off practical, death-defying stunts for our amusement has become both an indelible staple of the brand, as well as a steadfast commitment to a form of old school, boundary-pushing cinema quickly becoming lost in an industry over-reliant on CGI.

“I think every department and every person on it is pushing themselves because he’s pushing himself,” the composer says. “The stunts are getting more unbelievable and I think that when you have that going on, you are internally pushing yourself to try to make sure that you are writing better. You're trying to tell a better story. It’s an amazing collective, the whole the whole team.”

Once he’s completed the music for Part Two, Balfe will officially hold the record as the first composer to score more than two Mission: Impossible films (he currently shares the mantle with Michael Giacchino).

“It's always very intimidating [when] it's now your chance and you can't mess it up,” he concludes. “You've just got to constantly remind yourself of the audience. I am the audience. When I go to see a film and it’s franchise and there is a theme, when I hear it, it automatically connects me. So I think you're always feeling slightly intimidated by it. And the day you’re not, you gotta move on.”

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is now playing in theaters everywhere. Part Two is currently scheduled to hit the big screen next June, though it’s possible the film will be delayed as a result of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.