Tom Cruise trained for 3 years for the speed skydiving scene. He underwent training in several countries, learning different terrains, learning techniques, learning how to measure wind and how it interacts with the ground.
Tom Cruise always impresses the world when performing his own risky action scenes, especially with the Mission: Impossible series. Achieving epic and breathtaking footage requires hard work, sacrifice, and talent from the 61-year-old actor.
Tom Cruise always impresses the world when performing his own risky action scenes, especially with the Mission: Impossible series. Achieving epic and breathtaking footage requires hard work, sacrifice, and talent from the 61-year-old actor.
Base Jumping players will jump from these fixed locations with a parachute and a special suit with wings called a “Wingsuit”. This sport brings extreme thrills to players but is also very dangerous and can lead to fatal accidents without technique and experience.
The scene where Ethan Hunt rides a motorbike and jumps off a cliff took a total of 15 months to prepare, along with 536 practice jumps. In addition, the actor also had to undergo a series of training courses in skydiving, parachute control, and exiting the plane at dangerous angles to learn how to adjust his position in the air.
According to Allan Hewitt – the film project’s skydiving and safety coordinator – Tom Cruise has made “more skydives than most athletes training for the World Championships”. For months, Tom Cruise would practice skydiving in the morning and practice motorcycling on ramps in the afternoon.
After calculating the indicators, the motorbike road was built to be 135m long, 10.8m high but alarmingly, it is only 3m wide. Tom Cruise shared: “I need to practice well so I don’t make any mistakes. We check everything. I don’t leave any room for mistakes to happen. Anytime we let things get out of control, mistakes arise. Therefore, we are very detail-oriented in terms of training and testing.”
The actor has refined his Honda motorcycle into a world-class 300cc machine. The road was so dangerous that he couldn’t install a speedometer because looking at the speedometer meant not being able to see the road in front of him, the star could get off the track and lose his life: “I had to trained myself to the point where I understood the speed of movement through the sound of the motorbike and the feeling of the molecules moving on my body,” the actor said.
When Tom Cruise rode his motorbike down a cliff, he only had about 6 seconds to deploy his parachute. Allan Hewitt said: “If he hadn’t opened his parachute in time, he would have hit his face on the cliff in just about 2 seconds. Things are dangerous like that.”
After his epic motorcycle jump, Cruise raised the bar with another incredible jump: speedflying. It is an extreme sport, combining skydiving and skiing. Speedflyers will use a small parachute to glide over the mountainside. Speedflying is different from skydiving in that the player is not jumping from a plane or a fixed object, so there are countless variables. Also because of the danger and high technical requirements, this sport has very few players in the world.
“Speed skydiving is one of the most dangerous sports in the world and it’s something we’ve been looking at for a long time,” director Christopher McQuarrie shared. “One of the things that is particularly dangerous is that you fly too close to the ground and too fast. Other risks are related to the parachute, it may not work as expected. Everything is very unpredictable.”
Tom Cruise trained for 3 years for the speed skydiving scene. The actor said: “I want to give the audience the feeling of flying.” He underwent training in several countries for 3 years, learning different terrains, learning techniques, learning how to measure wind and how it interacts with the ground. The actor landed at a speed of 80km/h during filming in Lake Valley, England.
If in other action film projects, the crew has to try to hide the stuntmen performing the scenes, the problem with Mission Impossible 7 is the opposite. Tom Cruise is the one who performs the stunts himself, and the crew’s task is to fully depict the actor’s spectacularity. Director Christopher McQuarrie added: “Combined with the high-speed parachute scene, this was an extremely difficult challenge.”
