Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One star Tom Cruise reveals that his showstopping motorcycle cliff jump stunt very nearly ended in disaster. The seventh film in the long-running Mission: Impossible franchise sees director Christopher McQuarrie once again at the helm with Cruise returning as superspy Ethan Hunt to face off against a new enemy. The movie continues Cruise’s penchant for dangerous stunts, with one standout sequence involving the star driving a motorcycle off a cliff before then deploying a parachute and gliding to safety.
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Ahead of the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One release date next month, Cruise tells ET Canada at the film’s Rome premiere that prepping for his motorcycle stunt almost went very wrong. During an initial parachute jump in the location to get a feel for the wind, the star describes how a miscalculation almost resulted in parachuting into the cliff face. Check out Cruise’s recollection of the stunt below:

“It’s funny that you mentioned engineering, because there’s as you know, there’s a lot of engineering in there to figure out that ramp, where the bowl is, the speed, you know, we’re testing wind conditions early on, I set all that up. That’s how I approach these things.
“You know, I’m thinking, first of all, Mc Q [director Christopher McQuarrie] and I, we come up with something and then go, ‘how do we do it?’ and we break it down. And luckily, like I’ve been skydiving for years and [riding] motorcycles and [doing] jumps, but you’ve got to hone it and make it perfect. I’m thinking about performance, I’m thinking about where’s that helicopter going across the stuff to make sure I don’t get blown off of the ramp.
“I don’t want to get blown off that ramp. And once I hit it, I don’t want that drone to hit me, you know? And then when my chute opens and you can see it in EPK when I’m in the bowl and I was testing the wind in that bowl and I jumped out of the helicopter… you can see when I opened it, I was in the wrong position and I opened the parachute, and the parachute turned into the side of the mountain.
“I could just at the last second, I was very close. My chute was pretty close to the side of the mountain. So you really have to watch every aspect of that to make sure that [nothing goes wrong]. You know, I’ve got a few things on my mind when I’m doing that. Plus I’m producing the movie. And it was day one. So I’m thinking, ‘Let’s get through this, let’s get this done.’”

Tom Cruise’s Approach To Mission: Impossible Stunts Explained

Over the course of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise has undertaken a number of jaw-dropping stunts, including scaling the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, doing a protracted breath-hold for an underwater sequence in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and doing a HALO jump for Mission: Impossible – Fallout. While many of these stunts are indeed dangerous, it’s important to note that Cruise also takes safety very seriously.

As his franchise costars will attest, the big stunts that end up on screen are the result of often months of planning, training, and rehearsing. Cruise’s HALO jump in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, for example, required the creation of a new type of skydiving helmet and the actor is said to have done over 100 skydives as part of the planning phase alone. There is certainly danger involved in these stunts, then, but they are meticulously crafted to be as safe as they can possibly be.

Cruise’s motorcycle jump in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, as shown in the video above, involved a similar approach. The actor is said to have trained for about a year in base-jumping, advanced skydiving, and motocross before undertaking the feat. Another way that the production made the stunt safer and more predictable was to have the actor jumping off of a long, man-made ramp instead of off a cliff edge, with the ramp then being erased using CGI. As Cruise’s latest story reveals, however, there is always still the possibility for calamity despite the extensive preparation work.

Source: ET Canada

Key Release Dates Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two