How They Made the Awesome Flute Gun From 'Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation'

For a film filled with high-octane stunts and awesome advanced gadgets, it’s odd that one of the most eye-catching elements of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is a flute. A very, very dangerous flute.

Like any good spy flick, Rogue Nation is stocked with hidden weapons — including a flute-gun featured early in the film, when Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is working to prevent the assassination of the Austrian prime minister during a performance at the Vienna State Opera. One of the terrorists employed by the evil group The Syndicate pretends to be a member of the symphony accompanying the opera, carrying a very authentic-looking flute that doubles as a sniper rifle. Hunt, of course, does his best to stop the hit, leading to a literal high-wire fight over a musical instrument of death.

The gun was designed Simon Atherton, a leading film armorer who’s assembled weapons from some of your favorite action films over the last 30 years. His first film was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he’s since worked on classics such as Aliens, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, The Fifth Element, and Gladiator. Yahoo Movies spoke to Atherton about the process of putting together a flute-gun, as well as putting weapons in the hands of a generation of stars.

How did you go about inventing the flute-gun? Had you ever seen a weapon in an instrument?

I looked it up online, and somebody had made a kind of rifle with a flute on the front of it. That was like a bolt-action rifle, but that’s not what we required for the film. We needed something that was totally concealed within the flute. Another image came up of one flute-weapon — created by the Germans — that was in a museum, and looked similar.

This had to look like a flute up to the moment that it was converted into a weapon. The first thing we did was go and buy a flute, [so we got] a bass flute which cost about $1500. I based the on a walking-stick gun. You can get a chain that fits into a walking stick-gun. So we took that principle and designed the flute around it.

How the different parts work?
We tried to use everything that was in the flute box: A cleaning rod turned into the stock, and the little box that contained spare parts of the flute became the shoulder piece. The sight we had to play around with a little bit. And then trying to hide the ammunition within the flute — we had to make a little holder than contained five rounds of ammunition.

I think the hardest thing was actually stripping the flute down before we could work on them, because each one contained about 40 different little springs that were hand-made for each valve. So we had to strip them all completely down, take it apart, and then cutting it in half was scary moment because you’ve got a $1500 flute not really 1000 pounds, right? we should just say “heavy” in brackets and we had to cut it in half to get the mechanism inside there.

Could the flute-guns you created work in real life?
Oh, yeah. They’re real. [In England], as soon as you make a weapon that is concealed within something else, it becomes a Section 5 weapon, which are prohibited. 

Watch the flute scene below:

You’ve worked on a lot of Tom Cruise movies, including Edge of Tomorrow and Valkyrie. Does he prefer any type of gun in particular?
He likes to know about the weapon that he’s going to use. He got really into the bits and pieces we were making. He’s very gun-friendly. Once you show him one, he gets the hang of it completely.

Are there certain styles he prefers?
He likes the pistols that he uses to be nice and compact. And he likes them to be ambidextrous as well. He likes to be able to fire in his left hand or right hand, and each film you never know if he’s going to be righty or lefty. He can do it either way.

Are most weapons in movies real?
Yes. I think people don’t realize that it’s easier to convert a real weapon to fire blanks than to build a blank-firing gun. So I would say 90 percent of the weapons that you see in films are real weapons.

How much training do most actors have to do with guns?
With someone like Rebecca Ferguson, who hadn’t really used a firearm before, I started off by just going to meet them and showing them a weapon and familiarizing them with it. And then we move at the pace that they feel comfortable with. Start to build them up, get them comfortable around holding the weapon, and start to make them aware of the safety of the weapon first. So some actors you can do it in a couple of days, [and] some people take a week. But it’s [all about] making them look proficient, so when you see them on the screen, they don’t look like they just picked the weapon for the first time.

What are the most weapons you’ve ever made for a movie?
Troy. One day, we’d just wrapped, and I was walking back up to the tent, and there was the biggest queue of people waiting to hand their weapons back. It was up in the 900 people to 1,000, all waiting to return their shields and spears and stuff. So that was quite daunting.

How many did you make for that film?
I think we made in excess of 3,500 different weapons. Even though you have a crowd of 800, you can swap them out for different looks. I’m actually in the film – I ended up being the lead archer in the film. It’s quite common. I’ve done a few films now. I worked on Raiders of The Last Ark, and I ended up in that one.

What are the most common mistakes that actors make with guns?
Pointing the weapon at people. It’s a safety thing. It’s awareness, really. You only point the weapon at what you want to shoot – not wave it around. Also, recoil. Trying to teach actors how to recoil. Especially when you’re firing a weapon, when you’re firing a blank round you don’t get the kickback, so it’s getting the actor to relax when they wouldn’t normally relax so that the weapon does look like it’s recoiling. There are different techniques and ways to do it.

I need to ask about the the pulse gun and flamethrower combo in Aliens: Was that a real flame-thrower?
Yeah, the flamethrower was real. At the end of the film it had to be cut up because we couldn’t allow it to outside. There was about three of four different weapons. We did a film called Fifth Element where Gary Oldman has the red F1, and that was made of ten different guns. They disappeared at the end of the film. The weapons went to France. I’ve only ever seen one of them since. They went back with the film company. We’ve still got the original patent, that we molded the weapon from. That’s all that remains.

Sigourney Weaver was pretty awesome with a gun in Aliens.
Yeah she was very good. Most women on films are very good. They listen to you. They don’t have anything to prove.

Does that mean men are stubborn?
Oh, yeah. Sometimes you’ll get people who say “I know everything about it”, and then you hand them the weapon, and then they pull the slide back and then they don’t know how to release it. It’s just better if they listened even if they do know. I always say to people, “You probably know everything about this weapon, but I’m going to take you through it as if you don’t.” Hopefully people just shut up and listen to you.