Tom Cruise is returning to play Ethan Hunt in the new Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part One movie. In an interview with ComicBook.com, director Christopher McQuarrie discusses the film’s more death-defying stunts and explains how they plan them.
Both McQuarrie and Cruise plan stunts together, with the latter doing most of his stunts while the former helps find ways to carry them out. One of the biggest stunts of the film and Cruise’s career is the motorcycle stunt on the first day of production, which soon required weeks of setup and training. Meanwhile, McQuarrie was determined to get the train sequence stunts right.
In an interview with ComicBook.com, McQuarrie said there is not necessarily a step-by-step process to planning stunts. “Sometimes,” he explains, “we start with…like, Fallout started with the emotional story of Ethan and Julia, and the stunts were kind of put around in the periphery.” McQuarrie asked Cruise, “‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to ride a motorcycle off a cliff. What do you want to do? And I said, ‘I want to wreck a train. Let’s just wreck a train.’ Of course, both of us at one point or another, would remind the other, ‘You know, this was your idea. You wanted to do this.’ Tom was very fortunate in one respect because he got his stunt out of the way day one. I’m still shooting that train. That just took forever, and it was very, very challenging.”
McQuarrie admits that some stunts are not worth risking one of Hollywood’s biggest actors. The audience cannot tell that Cruise is doing the stunt in some scenes, so it would not be worth the headache. It may be necessary for the plot but not for Cruise to do the stunt.
McQuarrie states, “Normally your job is to hide the fact that it’s a stuntman. I have the opposite problem; I gotta show that it’s Tom. That means for every one of these stunts, we have to invent camera equipment, we have to invent ways to show these sequences, and it’s a testament to the crew.”
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