60-year-old action movie star, Tom Cruise is making the biggest stunt jump in cinematic history in his next installment of the Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning One, and he is showing his audience how he does it.
The nine minutes twenty-two seconds video posted by the Jerry Maguire star in his twitter page, starts off with an aerial view of the cliff and the deep, dangerous base in Norway, Cruise will ascend off and down into on a motorbike in a scene of the movie.
It is by far and away one of the most dangerous things attempted by the stunt men, but apparently one that Cruise had dreamed of doing since childhood.
That’s because for him, it is not about being afraid or careful. “Don’t be careful, be competent,” said Cruise.
“There is a lot going into this stunt. Tom put together this masterplan to coordinate all of these experts and each of the particular disciplines involved to make this happen,” said writer and director of Dead Reckoning One, Christopher McQuarries.
Preparation for the stunt includes a year of base training, advanced guided training, and a lot of tracking. He had had to learn how to track while in the air, doing lots of different positioning while on air, with a two-man team. While in the air, they are coming on top of each other, below each other, back tracking, front tracking. They ran the drill again and again and again.
“Tom is an amazing individual. You tell him something and he locks it in. he has a sense of spatial awareness. He is the most aware person I have ever met,” said Base Jumping Coach, Miles Daisher, while Cruise is seen landing smoothly down to earth via a parachute with an excited “great day, men.”
Next, on the round of preparation for the base dive, is the motorcross training. Cruise boards a motorbike and takes off on the constructed ramp for a practice run. He is then seen constantly jumping over seventy to eighty feet table tops (sand land) on a bike. His positioning on the bike and landing are so good – cruise himself says – “there is no way I’d miss my mark.
Then, there is the preparation for the shooting the entire stunt – which is quite a bit technically difficult, as the cameras required to capture such shots were not yet innovated as of two years ago. “Because If we do it all and we don’t capture it, what’s the point?” said Cruise. To him its his own way of involving his audience. “I want to give them that thrill.”
To capture every aspect of this deadly but historic stunt, Eastwood and his team built a ramp modelled after a quarry in England, filled the cardboard boxes, to catch the motorcycle (Cruise will jump off) so Cruise can simulate the jump.
“We built models of different ramps at different angles to calculate what Tom’s trajectory will be. We have to be able to predict where Tom is going to be in three-dimensional space, (Tom will have a GPS chip on him) and then record every single one of Tom’s jumps, along with his ground speed; whether there is a head wind, whether there is a cross wind. And by doing this multiple times, we will get a consistent set of data so that at each take, they can see where he is and set drones and cameras in places where he can go right into close-up shots,” demonstrated Eastwood, and further visualized by video shots.
These trainings all lead up to his flying off the cliff and landing at the base of that mistily dangerous, Norwegian valley.
Finally, post a year of trainings comprising 500 skydives, with an achievement of 30 skydiving jumps per day, and 13,000 motorcross jump, all is set, and Cruise is about to make the jump.
It is the day one of principal photography day in Norway, and Cruise starts off with a practice skydive from a helicopter in a parachute to warm up his body.
“If something is done for the first time, you can’t help but worry about how it’s going to turn out,” said Base Jumping Coach, John Devore.
“The only things you have to avoid while doing stunts like this are serious injuries and death,” said Daisher. And a mishap could happen at any point. It could be his legs getting entangled in the bike and he couldn’t lift off and away from it during the jump, or his parachute failing to open, or not open right, or perhaps miscalculation on the weather both in the valley and on ground.
“The key is me hitting certain speeds and being consistent with that because there is no speedometer, so I do it by the sound and feel of the bike. Then, as I depart the bike, I produce the wind that is hitting me here (he demonstrates to indicate full frontal) and I am raising my chest, that would give me a lift,” said Cruise.
Tom is seen via cameras driving up the ramp that stretches to the edge of the cliff, as the worried stunt and film crew looks on. He braces up in the bike, lifts up and off the cliff, jumping off the bike a few seconds later, and falls feet first, down, down, to the base, then releases his parachute to continue onto a safe landing to the base.
The anxious film crew releases loud sighs of relief and ‘woo hoos” in their filming tent, as Tom says “thank you guys. Thanks to you guys. I think I can hold onto the bike a little longer,” via a radio phone.
“It is about the biggest stunt in cinema history. Tom Cruise just rode a motorcycle off a cliff, six times today,” trilled Devore.
Camera rolls again to show the jump, from the point of Cruise falling off the cliff, opening his parachute till he lands at the base, then back to him trailing off the ramp and over the cliff, in tune with the signature Mission Impossible theme music.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning 1 is set to premiere in July 2023.