Tom Cruise’s new film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is stuffed with spectacular stunts, but one in particular has grabbed the world’s attention: riding a motorbike off the top of a 1,240 metre-high crag, plummeting down its vertical, semi-cylindrical face, and opening his parachute, base-jump style, just before he hits the ground.
Cruise says its “far and away the most dangerous thing [he’d] ever attempted”, and in a video released by the film-makers, revealed he had trained for the stunt by making more than 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps over an 80ft mound, as well as training for a year in base jumping (a specialist skill involving parachuting from fixed objects including radio masts and skyscrapers). A practice ramp was constructed in a quarry in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, stuffed with fall-breaking plastic bags, before taking on the actual leap off the Helsetkopen in Norway. Cruise performed the stunt six times for the cameras.
Amy Johnston, a stunt performer on films such as Suicide Squad, Deadpool and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as well as the TV series Westworld, said: “In the movie theatre where I watched the film, as soon as he dropped, the audience was just dead silent. Everybody was trying to hold their breath, kind of they all felt like they were just having a heart attack.
“What he is able to do is create spectacle, and he knows how to entertain people. He did some of his biggest stunts to date in this film, and I was absolutely very impressed.”
Cruise has been making Mission: Impossible films for nearly 30 years, and will be for another 20 if he has his way. Since the premiere of the first Mission: Impossible in 1996, the role has been particularly testing, with the series renowned for its elaborate and physically challenging stunts, for which Cruise, 61, prides himself on his personal involvement. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh entry in the series, carries on the tradition, with other set pieces including a somersaulting Fiat 500, and train carriages hanging over a steep drop.
Johnston points out that while Cruise will have stunt doubles to assist him, as well as elements of CGI to heighten impact, the fact that he gets involved so heavily himself has an influence on the way scenes are filmed and their impact. “He knows how to bring the realism – you can see that it’s happening to him in closeup, like the effect of freefall on his face – and then you can also keep the frame very wide and see the action play out. It adds to the experience, and audiences definitely feel that.”
For all that, Johnston says one of the hardest stunts in the film is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the very start, when Cruise’s character, hiding in the desert, has to mount a horse as it gets up from a prone position. “This is very specialty-trained movement; it really needs timing, and it’s dangerous as well, because the horse could lay down on his leg if the timing is off.
“That is what Cruise always brings to his films, the extra details, because he didn’t need to do that. But he wants to do those things, and it adds a lot.”
Johnston also talks admiringly of the car chase scene in which Cruise and Hayley Atwell are handcuffed together as they manoeuvre a Fiat 500 around the narrow streets of Rome. “It was really fun, and not just because of all the somersaults and car hits, but the fact they were connected by handcuffs was so creative. I would love to break it down frame by frame, but I think that Cruise was definitely driving one-handed while being handcuffed. That whole scene [was a] really great job by the stunt coordinators and the stunt performers.”
Johnston says that a scene in which Cruise fights a selection of bad guys on top of a speeding train employed a mix of stunt trickery and actual exposure to the conditions. She suggests that film-makers may have employed harnesses or wires attached to a crane, which are then erased in post-production, for wide shots, and that greenscreen backdrops, where the background is added digitally, were probably used for tighter shots. “But the part where he had to duck under a bridge is one of those things that you have to really work on and go over and over and over and really get the timing right. It’s very scary to do something like that.”
Johnston is also supportive of the stunt industry’s campaign to gain recognition for its work through inclusion in the Oscars, which is spearheaded by John Wick director Chad Stahelski. “It would make a lot of sense, especially with how hard the stunt teams work to make a great film. These fight scenes, and car scenes, are all designed by the stunt team, who also figure out the best way to film them. The stunt coordinator and the stunt crew are such a huge part of a film.”
Mission: Impossible’s main rival in the blockbuster stunt world remains the Bond franchise, which stages equally elaborate scenes for its star performer – until recently Daniel Craig. But for Johnston, Cruise remains the gold standard: “It’s how he shoots action, doing his own stuff, that adds to the experience. I know in the Bond films, the actors are definitely doing a lot of fight scenes and such, but Cruise is taking it to the next level. It’s not that the action is better, but Cruise’s process does make a difference.”