Tom Cruise is famous and tenacious about performing his own stunts.
In Mission: Impossible – Fallout, also known as MI6, Tom Cruise spent about one year preparing for a stunt in an aerial chase where he needs to fly like a professional pilot without any assistance in the helicopter.
Paramount Pictures recently released the featurette for the public to know more about how challenging it is. “None of this has ever been attempted before,” director McQuarrie said of Cruise’s death-defying stunt.
Flying a helicopter takes a lot of skill, and it is almost impossible to have an internationally well-known celebrity risk his life and put in so much effort to perform such task in real life. Cruise needed to accrue 2,000 in-flight hours in a very short time. It is said that there are very few students with such dedication and focus that they can achieve the goal so quickly.
Producer Jack Myers added, “It takes someone like three months of eight-hour days just to become a novice helicopter pilot. Cruise needs to work ’round the clock to reach the level of skill the sequence needs.”
In addition, Cruise doesn’t just fly the helicopter and act in it, he needed to do a 360-degree downward spiral over a waterfall that many pilots wouldn’t dare to attempt, flies closely to cliffs and around the gorge, and controls the mounted cameras pinpointing at him while two helicopters are chasing after and even firing bullets at him in the film. Staff member comments that each spiral looks like Cruise is going to crash.
In fact, the most dangerous part is: crew members had a total of 13 helicopters, flying just a few feet from each other because they needed to remain visible to accomplish the required shoots. However, there is a professional team that Cruise trusts and they work closely with him.
Cruise didn’t want to use the green screen. “The audience can tell when something’s been cheated,” said stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood.
Cruise has starred in the five movies of the “Mission: Impossible” series over the last 22 years. He did an incredible number of insane stunts himself and worked with his team to come up with new moves in each new film to surprise his audience.
“Mission: Impossible – Fallout” will be in the theaters on July 27.
