‘Every time he’s doing stunts, you’re designing the camera moves so you can show that it isn’t a stunt man’
To provide screen thrills, Tom Cruise puts his life on the line for the Mission: Impossible films, director Christopher Mcquarrie tells Ben Kenigsberg
The older Tom Cruise gets, the more fun it is to watch him risk death in elaborate age – and gravitydefying ways.
One person who has seen him face danger up close is Christopher Mcquarrie, who directed the now-56-year-old actor in the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies: Fallout, currently in cinemas, and Rogue Nation from 2015. I asked him to rank the most difficult stunts he and his star, who is known to dislike stunt doubles, have executed.
Mcquarrie ranked them in order of what he called “inherent danger,” basically risk multiplied by the amount of time Cruise was exposed to that risk. But you could rank these sequences “five different ways in terms of their technical difficulty, their strain on the body, the real-time danger and difficulty,” he adds. “If you arranged them alphabetically, they would be correct.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
5) Underwater sequence, Rogue Nation
Without the benefit of oxygen, Cruise swaps a file in an underwater security system.
Given just 10 days to shoot this sequence, Mcquarrie figured that his best use of the time would be to film it in a series of continuous takes. “It put a huge burden on Tom because Tom had to hold his breath longer,” the director says. “You and I can hold our breath for a minute, maybe two minutes. As soon as you start exerting yourself, you consume oxygen at a much higher rate. Which meant that for Tom to be able to hold his breath for anywhere from a minute to two and a half minutes that each take required, he had to learn how to hold his breath for longer,” because he would be swimming.
Cruise and his co-star Rebecca Ferguson “trained with an extreme diver,” Mcquarrie says. “He learned how to hold his breath for six and a half minutes. By the time that sequence was over, Tom was so physically and mentally exhausted, he had nitrogen in his blood, he was achy all over, it was hard for him to focus and remember lines. He was exhausted all the time. It took a really severe physical toll on him.”
4) Paris motorcycle chase, Fallout
Having been separated from his co-star Henry Cavill, Cruise evades capture on two wheels.
“The initial idea was he would do a portion of the sequence free riding and the rest of it on these safety rigs, and when the rigs didn’t work, we just went for it. Everything that you’re seeing Tom doing, he’s doing free riding on cold cobblestones. Sometimes there was rain; sometimes there was morning dew. There was always a danger of skidding and wiping out.
“Sometimes he’s going in excess of 100 miles an hour with cars chasing him and coming at him. They were all stunt drivers, but some of them were local, so there was a language barrier. A couple of times there were miscommunications and drivers were not where they were supposed to be, which was always scary. Tom had to be hypervigilant.
“And of course, every time he’s doing stunts like this, he’s got to act. You’re designing the camera moves so you can show that it isn’t a stunt man. One of the dangers becomes the camera itself. Tom is driving into close-up in certain shots. He’s inches away from the camera. If the camera vehicle stops short, Tom is going right into the camera headfirst.”
3) Sky-diving, Fallout
Cruise, Cavill’s stunt double and a sky-diving videographer jump out a plane over the United Arab Emirates, standing in for Paris. The sequence stitched together three shots, combining jumps from 18,000 to 25,000 feet, for the appearance of a continuous take.
“Probably the most technically difficult one we’ve ever done. The costume that he’s wearing – all of that stuff is designed so that you can see that Tom is doing all of the stunt work. That helmet didn’t exist, the air tanks didn’t exist. It all has to be certified as a lifesaving device. It’s not just a prop. And we needed to find a country that would let us do it. Then of course, Tom has to get certified to be able to jump at that altitude.
“The jump is divided into three pieces. The first piece is when he jumps out of the plane and goes past the camera. The second piece is when he’s looking for Henry” – actually his stunt double – “in the air and grabs onto him. And the third piece is as he’s falling with Henry where he disconnects his oxygen bottle and connects it to Henry. And that’s the most
“Everything that you’re seeing Tom doing, he’s doing free riding on cold cobblestones. Sometimes there was rain; sometimes there was morning dew. There was always a danger of skidding and wiping out”
time-consuming piece, which of course means that he’s got to be able to complete all of that action before he reaches his minimum safe altitude by which he has to deploy his chute.
“Because the sequence is at dusk, we have three minutes of available light every day to shoot. They would just rehearse until the light was right, and they’d go up and they’d get one take every day, to get one of these three pieces. It took several tries to get the first piece, several tries to get the second piece, several tries to get the third piece. And so that took 106 jumps of us rehearsing and shooting to get that two-and-a-half, threeminute sequence.”
Why couldn’t they just land and take a cab?
“Landing on the Grand Palais looks a lot more spectacular than landing in a parking lot on the outskirts of Paris,” Mcquarrie says.
2) Hanging off a plane, Rogue Nation
Cruise dangles from an Airbus
A400M as it takes off.
“When we proposed it to Airbus, they said it was impossible. And our approach was to say, well, if we were going to do it, how would it be done? And once people start to consider the possibilities, it’s a slippery slope to the place where they find themselves doing what they deemed impossible.
“Tom’s wearing a harness under the suit. But of course the harness doesn’t protect him from the real dangers of the sequence. One, if the pilot overaccelerates the plane, there’s no harness in the world that’s going to keep Tom on the plane. The other danger is any debris on the runway. Tom was struck by a pebble. He said it was like being shot. And the real danger is bird strikes. If a bird flew past and struck Tom, it would be like a cannonball. The exhaust from the engines is extremely punishing and very toxic.
“And finally, Tom is wearing earplugs and contact lenses. They cover half of his eye — they’re not like the little lenses that just cover your iris. So he couldn’t really see. He couldn’t really hear. I would have to direct him with very large gestures and communicate in the simplest possible way. And Tom said to me, ‘If I look like I’m panicking, I’m acting. Don’t cut. Only if I tap my head’ – he put his palm on top of his head – ‘it means something’s wrong.’ There was one point at which Tom brushed his hair out of his face, and we were wondering, is he just fixing his hair, or is something wrong?”
1) Helicopter chase, Fallout
Cruise pilots a chopper through mountainous terrain to retrieve and disable the remote detonator of two nuclear bombs.
“The hairiest one I can think of is the helicopter chase in the third act of Fallout. Tom qualified” –for pilot certification – “on this helicopter in six weeks. Normally it takes three months; he trained with two crews working 16 hours a day so he could cut his training time in half. And we’re in New Zealand in low winter light, which means visibility is always a little tricky. You have two helicopters. The way you measure distance in a helicopter is a rotor width. And Tom was at times inside one rotor width from the other helicopter. He was less than a rotor width away. In some parts of the sequence, Tom’s doing the chasing, and in other parts he’s being chased – and we were always pushing for proximity, because that of course sold more danger. Tom is weaving in and out of canyons and gullies. There was one where his rotor blades were just a few feet away from the rock walls on either side. It was like flying through a broom cupboard.”
The director recalls that he and a producer “said while we were making it, if we knew what it took to shoot this sequence, we never would have started. Tom was having the time of his life.”
© NYT 2018
● Mission Impossible: Fallout is out now.