On Wednesday’s CBS special, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One “Creating the Impossible,” star Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie broke down the latest M:I film’s most death-defying stunt.
Dead Reckoning Part One marks the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible film series, which has become known for its dangerous and elaborate stunts almost always performed by Cruise himself. And this latest mission is no exception, with stunts like speed flying — a more dangerous form of skydiving — and car chases through the cobblestone streets of Italy on the docket, along with the biggest one that includes a motorcycle jump off a cliff into a base jump.
More specifically, the stunt begins with Cruise driving a motorcycle down a giant ramp and right off the edge over a cliff, where he lets go of the bike as it falls to a crash and he eventually opens a parachute.
“I’ve wanted to do it since I was a little kid,” Cruise said of the jump. “It all comes down to one thing: the audience.”
The stunt was filmed in Norway where a group of engineers and technicians constructed a ramp on the top of a mountain that took “a number of months” to build, according to McQuarrie, with all of the supplies being brought in by helicopter. The director pointed out that if Cruise was to be blown off course while trying to drive down the ramp it would result in a terrible accident. Once he’s off the bike and doing the base jump, Cruise is surrounded by what’s described as a “rock bowl” where he has to deploy his parachute and try to move himself away from the mountain.
“We’ve been working on this for years,” Cruise said. “You train and drill over and over and over and over again. With a jump like this, the challenge is finding the cameras, it’s the amount of preparation, and then it’s the weather.”
Luckily the weather definitely cooperated on shoot day. After parachuting out of a helicopter near the end of the ramp to get his body warmed up and to gauge the elements, Cruise went on to perform the actual stunt six straight times in one day, with each attempt just as breathtaking as the one before it.
All of the previous six films in the franchise have a signature stunt or two that helps set them apart from the others. And for Dead Reckoning Part One, the hope is this is that stunt. That is, until they start filming Dead Reckoning Part Two.
“This is far and away the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted,” McQuarrie said. “The only thing that scares me more is what we have planned for Mission 8.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One “Creating the Impossible” aired Wednesday on CBS.
