Tom Cruise made history with his latest death-defying stunt!
In a new behind-the-scenes look at the making of Mission: Impossible — Fallout, fans get to learn a little bit about all the work that went into one of the film’s biggest stunts — a HALO jump.
In order to properly complete the HALO jump (which stands for “high altitude low open”), Cruise jumped out of a plane while it was 25,000 feet in the air and plummeted towards the ground at 200 miles per hour, waiting to deploy his parachute until he was just 2,000 feet away from crashing into the ground.
“Tom will be the first actor to do a HALO jump on camera,” remarked Wade Eastwood, a stunt coordinator for the film.
“A HALO jump is a sequence Tom and I have been talking about for a number of years,” commented the film’s writer and director Christopher McQuarrie.
But even after building one of the largest wind machines — so that Cruise could rehearse the stunt safely — getting the perfect shot was far from simple.
In order to get the lighting just right, the scene had to be shot as close to sunset as possible, which meant the production crew only had about three minutes a day to get it right. And before anybody could even get in the plane, they needed to spent 20 minutes breathing in pure oxygen on the ground, in order to prevent them from getting decompression sickness while in the air.
“I can’t wait for an audience to see this” Cruise remarked.
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McQuarrie and Cruise previously shared photos from the stunt on social media.
In one photo, the 55-year-old actor stands at the edge of an open plane door just before jumping out. In the photo’s caption, the director stressed just how difficult this particular stunt can be.
“Just one shot. At 25,000 feet. At 200 mph. At dusk,” wrote McQuarrie of the scene. “Three minutes of available light. Two minutes of action. Once chance per day. Just one. Just one shot left.”
But it seems not all of the actor’s stunts go off without a hitch. While filming a stunt for the upcoming film that required him to jump from one building to another and hit the side before climbing up, he accidentally crashed into the wall and broke his ankle.
The actor went on to explain that following the injury he “went right into rehab,” spending 10-12 hours a day working on getting himself back in shape.
“Six weeks later I had to be on set and twelve weeks later I had to be sprinting again,” Cruise said in April during Cinemacon. “Doctors said they weren’t sure whether I’d be sprinting in nine months, let alone that time. I was like, ‘Okay, I gotta figure this out and I gotta figure it out fast.’ ”
Mission: Impossible – Fallout will be released on July 27, 2018, and will be the first film in the franchise to be released in Real D 3D. The summer blockbuster will also be released in IMAX 3D.
