With the countdown underway to the July 12 release of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Paramount on Wednesday released the latest behind-the-scenes look at how Tom Cruise and team pulled off one of the pic’s mega-stunts.
This one involves a showdown on a fast-moving train that includes Cruise’s Ethan Hunt fighting Esai Morales’ Gabriel on the roof of an actual train car as it hurls down the tracks at 60 mph. Eventually it plunges off a blown-up bridge as Ethan and Hayley Atwell’s Grace cling for dear life.
Previously, BTS videos of M:I – Dead Reckoning Part One showed off Cruise’s wild motorcycle stunt in which he jumps with the bike off the edge of a massive mountain cliff, deploying his parachute mid-fall. Cruise called that stunt, which he and his team had been working on for years, the “biggest in cinema history.”
As per usual with M:I, the stunts are practical rather than VFX-heavy, and they feature the same stuntman: Cruise.
For the train sequence, an actual train had to be built so the team could destroy it in the plunge; the shoot was done at a rock quarry in the UK and “involved multiple factors of difficulty,” McQuarrie says in the video, which shows the many cameras and angles used for the one-chance-only shot.
Check out the featurette above.
