Tom Cruise reveals why he shot crazy ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ on first day of filming

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NEW YORK CITY — After Tom Cruise dangled off the Burj Khalifa, clung to the side of a plane and performed a dangerous HALO jump stunt — all as part of his ongoing Mission: Impossible series — the action star didn’t have to think long about what was going to come next.

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He wanted to try a motorcycle jump off the face of a cliff 1,200-feet above sea level before opening his parachute just 500-feet from the ground where he would then speed fly the rest of the way down.

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Cruise, 61, rehearsed for a year before performing the stunt off Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain on the first day of principle filming on Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which opens in theatres today.

On the day he shot the stunt, he had a lot on his mind. “I was thinking about opening my chute at the last possible moment. I was thinking about the cameras on the edge of the cliff. I’m hoping I’m not going to get blown off the ramp by the helicopter. I’m hoping I don’t tumble. There was a lot of things going on with the performance,” Cruise said breaking into a smile Monday night at the New York premiere of Dead Reckoning. “There was a lot going on that day.”

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The jaw-dropping manoeuvre was declared by Cruise’s Mission castmates on the winding red carpet as the series’ best.

It was a sequence he first started thinking about as a child, in love with the movies. So he wanted to get it out of the way when filming on the sequel started in September 2020.

“I trained very hard,” Cruise told Postmedia of taking on something so daunting on the first day of production. “I don’t want that hanging over my head. I trained, so let’s get it done … let’s get it over with.”

”Doing that on the first day was Tom’s idea,” writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, 54, told Postmedia. “That motorcycle jump — we spent months rehearsing it and when we got out there on the day, nothing we planned really applied and we had to start from scratch.”

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But it’s not just a death-defying motorcycle jump. Cruise races through the streets of Rome in a tiny Fiat (while handcuffed to co-star Hayley Atwell), fights atop a speeding train, and speed flies down a mountainside.

”They were all challenging in their own way,” McQuarrie says of Dead Reckoning’s edge-of-your-seat thrills. “The desert sequence was extremely difficult, creating that sandstorm. The airport scene had so many logistical challenges since we were at the height of the pandemic. Drifting in Rome on those cobblestone streets gave the car a mind of its own.”

McQuarrie and his production team also crash a full-size train in the film’s gasp-inducing finale.

”The train sequence was probably the most complicated one we’ve ever shot,” he said.

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Then there was the pandemic. Dead Reckoning was the first Hollywood blockbuster to go before cameras in the fall of 2020 as Cruise and his producing partners tried to restart the filmmaking industry.

“There was a tremendous amount of pressure and I kept saying, ‘This is going to work. We’re going to do this.’ You just have to take everything else out and just be present and be in the moment,” Cruise said.

Cruise’s return this week as Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt in Dead Reckoning finds him and his team of spies — which includes Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg — going after a world-ending artificial intelligence threat known as the Entity.

His pursuit brings him into conflict with old adversaries played by newcomer Esai Morales and franchise vets Henry Czerny and Vanessa Kirby. Along the way, Hunt finds himself allied with a fast-talking pickpocket (played by Atwell).

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McQuarrie, who has enjoyed a creative partnership with Cruise that dates back to 2008 when they worked on the Hitler assassination thriller Valkyrie together, said he knew right after the last Mission that his next story would need to be split into two.

”I knew from Fallout, which was nearly two-and-a-half hours, that we had a bigger movie this time. So I said, ‘Let’s give ourselves the space by making a two-part movie.’ The action was there, but I wanted to spend more time with the characters.”

The Mission: Impossible series is now entering its 27th year after the 1996 original, which was directed by Brian De Palma.

McQuarrie credit’s the franchise’s enduring popularity to Cruise’s commitment to finding new ways to thrill moviegoers.

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”That’s all down to Tom. He’s all about entertaining the audience. He’s all about big-screen emotional shared experience. We take things from all the movies we’ve previously done, whether it’s movies we’ve done together or separately, and we just put it into the next thing and we’re all in.”

Cruise said he hasn’t tired of the series because he and McQuarrie — who has been with the franchise since writing 2010’s Ghost Protocol — keep coming up with new ways to challenge his hero.

”There’s constant adventures that we can take this character on,” he said. “To be able to expand it with the cast that we have, McQ and I really wanted to blow this one out and make it a big, big epic adventure. And I get to travel the world. I always wanted to go make movies and travel the world. I wanted to be in other cultures and not just visit. You get to know people by working with them, and then to be able celebrate and show people things that we love in different countries and every time there’s always something new. To be able to have something that we can share and make for the big screen I think today it’s important to do that for audiences. That’s what I love doing.”

After Cruise screens each new Mission film, he famously turns to McQuarrie and says, “We can do better.”

But with Dead Reckoning Part Two already deep in production, McQuarrie stopped him before he could finish that sentence this time around.

”At the end of Part One, he turned to me and he was about to say it, and I said, ‘We already did.’ Wait until you see Part Two.”

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Twitter: @markhdaniell

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