“The Rehearsal” has maybe never been truer to its name than in its Season 2 finale, “My Controls,” which not only wraps up creator Nathan Fielder’s impassioned thesis on the need for better communication in airplane cockpits, but casually charts his (intentional or not) two-year rehearsal process to fly a real passenger jet full of real people, where the stakes of airplane safety are real, too.
Fielder tends to prefer not to discuss the process behind his projects outside of what he and his team choose to include as part of “The Rehearsal” itself. HBO respects that wish and also keeps fairly mum about how “The Rehearsal” was made. But the flight that Fielder captained from San Bernardino and back again got the IndieWire team thinking about how aerial sequences in film and television get approved at all. Did Fielder need to lock the network lawyers assigned to Season 2 inside of Nate’s Lizard Lounge for the duration of the two-hour and 10-minute flight? How was “The Rehearsal” cleared for takeoff?
The name of the game for any kind of stunt is risk management, something that becomes infinitely more complex the more specialized the action is. Few would know that better than Wade Eastwood, the stunt coordinator for the last four “Mission: Impossible” films — including the recently released “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” which, among other things, features Tom Cruise flying and fighting on top of a vintage biplane. IndieWire reached out to Eastwood to ask about how a film team goes about preparing to actually shoot a sequence in the sky.
“There is no form for how you put someone on the wing where they can move around freely and do the crazy stunts that Tom’s going to do,” Eastwood told IndieWire. “If you get into a forklift truck and you’re going to drive it [on camera], then you have to have this certification and you wear steel-toed shoes and all that. That’s normal. But this, people don’t do.”
The first step in proving you can do something people don’t normally do would, actually, fit into an episode of “The Rehearsal.” Once an aerial stunt’s been conceived of, in addition to planning how to execute it successfully, the team also needs to generate a worst-case scenario outcome. One of the concerns is one that Episode 3, “Pilot’s Code,” deals with directly: bird strikes. “ There’s obviously always an element of danger. Something could happen. An engine could fail. A bird strike. You know, there’s all sorts of things that we try and eliminate as much as possible,” Eastwood said.
If you’re Tom Cruise and you’re strapped into the wing of a biplane just enough that you can still be scrambling around the fuselage, then air particles and prop blasts are a concern, too. But even with Fielder safely inside the cockpit of a 737, partnered with a co-pilot with over 5,000 flight hours, the goal is the same: “ We do as much as we can to make the red box turn green, if you like, on the safety,” Eastwood said.
It is a back and forth between the safety team doing that risk assessment and the decision makers who insure the production and its assets, including talent, that determines the color of the proverbial box.
For the “M:I” films, this involves a fair amount of testing and both video and written documentation to prove a stunt is doable to the satisfaction of the production team before Cruise even starts rehearsing it on the ground. But even “The Rehearsal,” which aspired to run a commercial airline flight under as ordinary and unremarkable a set of conditions as possible, has to answer a similar set of questions: Do they have the right equipment, and are there enough redundancies and trained personnel to narrow the risk down to an acceptable, insurable level?
For “The Rehearsal,” we see some of that prep work in the show’s most stunning flashback to date — the two years that Fielder spent training to become a licensed commercial pilot type-rated to fly a 737, and the show’s search for a rentable 737 safe enough to fly. Fielder was still probably well short of the flight hours needed to achieve his airline transport pilot’s license at the time of shooting “The Rehearsal” finale, which is the certification that the vast majority of pilots flying passenger planes have.
But even so, Fielder dedicated himself to learning enough material to fill a college degree in a condensed amount of time, in addition to his work as a comedian. Although it comes out a little bit heartbreaking as the final voiceover of the series, from an insurance perspective if Fielder’s allowed to be in the cockpit, then he must be fine.
The main answer, therefore, in how “The Rehearsal” got away with packing a real airplane full of real people (even if they are actors) and flying it in the actual sky is that Fielder did the work to be qualified to fly it, that the production found a plane airworthy enough (thankfully, without bird nests), and that the team around Fielder, from his co-pilot to the show’s aviation consultants (two are credited in the episode, Steve Giordano and Robert Allen) to the crew in the chase plane, were experienced enough for HBO’s army of lawyers to agree they had indeed mitigated as much risk as possible.
“ I just have to make sure that the team around [Cruise] is as strong and as safe and as together as possible so that he can create and do what he wants to do,” Eastwood said. Only time and a potential Season 3 of “The Rehearsal” will tell what other stunts, aerial or otherwise, Fielder will create next.
“The Rehearsal” is streaming on HBO Max.
