Its 2018, and were just now catching on to the fact that every Mission: Impossible movie is really just a front for Tom Cruises globetrotting, increasingly insane stunt work. The man has singlehandedly turned the series into a death-defying Cirque du Soleil—if Cirque du Soleil were full of acrobats who are also spies. Mission: Impossible—Fallout already had to delay its release once because Cruise broke his foot doing one stunt; for another, he had to learn not only how to fly a helicopter, but also how to put the aircraft into a nosediving tailspin on purpose.
The movies latest behind-the-scenes stunt video further proves that Cruise will do anything for his art, and features a stunt that you may remember from the 2014 Godzilla movie: the HALO jump.
HALO, or “high altitude low open,” is originally a military maneuver in which soldiers dive from miles above the ground and free-fall for a prolonged period of time, before opening their parachutes at the last possible second once theyre below 2,000 feet. In the video, Cruise, director (and enabler) Christopher McQuarrie, and producer Jake Myers walk us through all the work the cast and crew had to do to prepare for the actors jump. They had to build a giant wind machine just to rehearse the stunt; they had to get flight permissions from the U.A.E.; everyone had to breathe pure oxygen for a few minutes before going up to combat altitude sickness; and, of course, the jump had to be performed during a certain window right after sunset that gave the team about three minutes to get it right.
The part thats on camera—the really, really important bit—lasts about five or six seconds. At 25,000 feet, Cruise jumps from the plane, preceded by a man with a camera attached to his head who films Cruise diving in midair. Meanwhile, Cruise has to maneuver himself three feet away from the cameraman. And everyone also has to survive the landing. “Theres always a ticking clock in a film or a movie,” Myers says in the video, “but its not usually the earth flying up towards you.”
This is far from the only movie in which Cruise has performed his own ridiculous stunts; many of the craziest ones in the Mission: Impossible series were done by Cruise himself. He really was free climbing on the side of a mountain in Mission: Impossible 2, he literally hung from the side of the Burj Khalifa for Ghost Protocol, and he attached himself to the door of a cargo plane for that incredible opening at the start of Rogue Nation, like a tree frog gripping the side of a car. What does he have up his sleeve for the next film? Literally flying up into space? Im sure Tom Cruise could get Elon Musk on the phone.
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