Tom Cruise talks about the death-defying stunt in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
On September 6, 2020, the first day of principal photography
on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise drove a motorbike
off a mountain. Specifically, he drove a custom-made Honda CRF 250 off a
purpose-built ramp on the side of Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain, a vertiginous
rock face sat some 1,200 metres above sea level. Then he plunged 4,000 feet
into the ravine below before opening his parachute barely 500 feet from the
ground.
When he landed, director, Christopher McQuarrie, and the
small crew of his Mission co-stars who had assembled to watch the seminal cinematic
sequence from the safety of video village, breathed a collective sigh of
relief. Then Cruise picked himself up and did it all again another seven times,
just to make sure the footage was perfect.
Talking about the stunt, Tom Cruise says, “Every time I went
off the ramp, it was dangerous. It was risking my life. And we wanted to keep
that to a minimum. We have a saying on Mission: Impossible movies: ‘Don’t be
safe. Be competent". He says that of course knowing the extensive training
regimens and rigorous safety protocols that surround every element of the
production.
As is Cruise’s now standard practice, the motorbike jump –
in which Ethan Hunt zooms off the edge, ditches the bike and executes a
high-risk BASE jump in the six-second window he has before impact – had been
long in the planning. After rehearsing for a year in the UK during
pre-production, by the time the cameras rolled he’d completed over 500 skydives
and 13,000 motocross jumps in readiness to prepare for the most dangerous stunt
he has ever completed on screen.
The truth, though, is that the stunt had been in Cruise’s
head for considerably longer than that. He says, “When I was a little kid, I
used to make my own jumps, building ramps to jump my bicycle over garbage
cans.”
When Cruise was eight, – a child he now acknowledges “was
always looking for dangerous stuff to do” – he found some plywood in a local
construction site and assembled his biggest makeshift jump yet. “I started
down a hill on my bicycle, hit the ramp, split the wood in two and smashed into
some garbage cans. There was blood everywhere,” he laughs. “I’ve had a lot of
blood and broken bones and teeth from doing that over the years, but it’s
something I’ve always wanted to do.”
And, when it comes to the actual shoot, every sequence has
also been rehearsed to – literally – molecular detail. The perfect example of
Cruise’s constant quest for competency is his speedometer. Or, rather, his lack
of one. Hr says “I needed to be at a certain speed when I jumped off the ramp
[in the BASE jump stunt], but I couldn’t have a speedometer on the bike because
the ramp was so narrow that if I looked down, I could come off it. So, I had to
gauge the speed of the bike through the sound and vibration of the engine and
by feeling the molecules in the air over my body. That was the level of
competency that I had to get to,”
A Paramount Pictures and Skydance Presentation, A Tom Cruise
Production “MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE” is all set to
release pan India on July 12 in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
Official Synopsis:
In Mission: Impossible – Dead
Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their
most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that
threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of
the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan's
past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a
mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can
matter more than his mission – not even the lives of those he cares about most.
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