Tom Cruise gave fans a glimpse of how he and his team pulled off “the biggest stunt in cinema history” for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
On Wednesday, the 60-year-old actor shared a 9½-minute featurette from the upcoming movie, which details the creation of the stunt in which Cruise rides a motorcycle off a cliff and then jumps into a ravine.
“This is by far the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted,” Cruise said at the beginning of the clip.
Tom Cruise gave fans a glimpse of how he and his team pulled off “the biggest stunt in cinema history” for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. (James Devaney/Getty Images)
The Top Gun: Maverick star continued, “We’re going to shoot it in Norway and it’s going to be a motorcycle cliff jump into a base jump.”
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The camera panned down a massive ramp that ended at the edge of a giant cliff as Cruise said, “I’ve wanted to do it since I was a little kid.”
“And it all boils down to one thing — the audience.”
Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie explained that Cruise created a master plan and assembled a team of experts from all disciplines involved to pull off the feat.
Wade Eastwood, second unit leader and stunt coordinator, described the extensive preparation Cruise and the team undertook, including “a year of basic training, advanced skydiving training, lots of canopy skills, lots of tracking.”
Base jumping coach Miles Daisher marveled at Cruise, whom he described as an “amazing personality”.
“You tell him something, and he just includes it,” Daisher added. “His sense of spatial awareness, he’s the most conscious person I’ve ever met.”
“Tracking with [base jumping coach] John [DeVore] and Miles in the air,” Eastwood continued. “Doing many different positionings. As if they were a two-man team in the air. Coming on top of each other, underneath each other, backtracking, fronttracking. You know we drilled and drilled and drilled.”
In the clip, Cruise explained that the motocross is the next part of the practice.
Eastwood recalled how the team built a motocross track so the actor could “get comfortable jumping 70- to 80-foot tabletops.”
“I have to get so good at it that there’s no way I can fail my grades,” Cruise added.
Cruise went on to say that he trained and practiced, performing more than 30 jumps a day to perfect every aspect of the stunt. The video states that he performed over 13,000 jumps in total, with Eastwood noting that he performed over 500 skydives during his training.
McQuarrie explained that another challenge was positioning the cameras so that all of the stunts were captured on film.
“The idea for the stunt is just one of the technical challenges,” he explained. “The other one puts up a camera so you can see where Tom is doing it.”
He added: “Finding the right lens, the right platform, the right medium. Two years ago there were no cameras that would allow us to do what we are trying to do today.”
Cruise revealed that he trained and practiced, performing more than 30 jumps a day to perfect every aspect of the stunt. (Murray Close/Getty Images)
“How do we engage the audience?” Cruise asked. “I just want to give them that thrill.”
McQuarrie noted that the camera needs to be in front of the actor and as close to him as possible.
The production team built a ramp over a quarry in England to replicate the jump in Norway and filled the landing area with cardboard to catch the bike after Cruise jumped off.
“How fast should I start, which route should I drive?” said cruise.
To do the camera work, the team built models of various ramps at different angles to calculate Cruise’s trajectory.
The actor had a GPS attached to track his movements and he was surrounded by drone cameras to capture the close-up shots.
“Because if we do everything but we don’t get it, what’s the point?” cruise set.
“I always wear my earplugs so I don’t have to hear myself scream,” he said, smiling.
Cruise explained that the key is to hit certain speeds and stay consistent. The bike didn’t have a speedometer, so the actor said he knew when to jump by the “sound and feel of the bike.”
“We need to be able to consistently predict where Tom will be in three-dimensional space,” noted McQuarrie.
The clip was cut to Hellesylt, Norway on the day of shooting in 2020. McQuarrie said the Mission: Impossible crew always starts filming with the biggest stunt in the film.
Cruise performed the death-defying stunt six times. (Ken Ishii)
Along with the stunt work, the filmmaker noted that the weather also had to be perfect.
Cruise explained that he started warming up with base jumps to get a feel for the weather.
“Of course, when something’s first done, you can’t help but think about how it’s really going to turn out,” Daisher said. “The only things you really have to avoid doing a stunt like this is serious injury or death.”
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The tension built as Cruise made his first attempt at riding the bike off the ramp and jumping into the rock bowl. The team clapped and cheered as he pulled through successfully.
The video revealed that Cruise performed the stunt six times that day.
“This is by far the most dangerous stunt we’ve ever attempted,” said McQuarrie. “The only thing that scares me more is what we have planned for ‘Mission 8’.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is slated to hit theaters on July 13, 2023.
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Ashley Hume is an entertainment writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to [email protected] and on Twitter: @ashleyhume