What is a Mission: Impossible movie without multiple awe-inspiring practical stunts?
Another Mission: Impossible movie means another summer of Tom Cruise doing unbelievably dangerous practical stunts. Cruise, who has gained a reputation for doing practical stunts himself, returns at Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
We have already watched one of his death-defying motorcycle stunts earlier this year, which writer-director Christopher McQuarrie called “the most dangerous stunt in the world,” but Cruise and the Dead Reckoning team released a featurette showcasing another intense stunt. Cruise and his co-star Esai Morales, who plays a powerful rival to Ethan Hunt named Gabriel, are seen in the featurette fighting on the roof of a train moving at 60 miles per hour.
Check out the featurette below, then let’s break down how the Dead Reckoning team pulled off this stunt.
Cruise and Morales shot the fight scene practically, which means that the actors were strapped to the top of the train as it sped through a Norwegian valley. While this seems pretty crazy to film, we have to remind ourselves of the amazing plane stunt Cruise performed in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.
“When we started talking about this movie in the terms of a sense of adventure, an action sequence on a train is something we always wanted to do,” McQuarrie said. “We wanted to build upon the previous films and apply that knowledge to something practical and real and bring this train sequence to another level.”
“I’ve done fight scenes, but to do them on a moving train is trial by fire,” Morales said. “But that’s how Tom like to do things.”
“There was not a surplus of trains available to be wrecked,” he added. “We had to build the train if we wanted to destroy it. To shoot it practically was extremely challenging. Not just to execute it, but to design all of the different train carts that could function on a real train track.”
Most of the intense stunts are filmed early in production, allowing Cruise and his co-stars the chance to train their bodies and minds in preparation. This is done just in case a stunt doesn’t work out for whatever reasons and the writers can do major rewrites to accommodate for the safety of the cast.
“I was training and I was ready,” Cruise tells Entertainment Tonight. “You have to be razor sharp when you’re doing something like that. It was very important as we were prepping the film that it was actually the first thing. I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things and have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped. Let’s just get it done.”
Despite the mixed feelings many people have about Cruise, he is one of the smartest actors in the game and understands how to get people in those empty theater seats. We’ve seen two of the many practical stunts performed by the cast, but what other sweet (and somewhat insane) stunts they are keeping from us?
Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One will only screen on IMAX screens for a week before Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer explodes onto screens on July 21st. If you want to see these death-defying stunts on the biggest screen possible, then I highly recommend getting tickets for the opening week.
