Tom Cruise's Most Dangerous Waterfalls in "Mission: Impossible & # 39;

The more Tom Cruise ages, the more fun it is to see it risk death in a sophisticated and defying manner.

Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the present 56-year-old Actor in the last two films "Mission: Impossible": "Fallout", currently in theaters, and "Rogue Nation" of 2015. I asked him to rank the Most difficult stunts him and his star, who is known for not liking doubles, have performed.

McQuarrie classified them in the order of what he called "inherent danger," essentially the risk multiplied by the time that Mr. Cruise was exposed to this risk. But you can classify these sequences "in five different ways in terms of technical difficulty, pressure on the body, real-time danger and difficulty," he added. "If you arranged them in alphabetical order, they would be correct."

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

5. Underwater Sequence, "Rogue Nation"

Without the benefit of oxygen, Mr. Cruise exchanges a file in an underwater security system.

Giving only 10 days to shoot this sequence, Mr. McQuarrie's use of time would be to film him in a series of continuous shots. "It put a huge burden on Tom because Tom had to hold his breath longer," said the director. "You and I can hold our breath for a minute, maybe two minutes." The minute you start exercising, you consume oxygen at a much higher rate, which meant that for Tom to hold his breath for a minute to two and a half minutes that each take required, he had to learn how to hold his breath longer, "because he would be swimming."

Mr. Cruise and his co-star Rebecca Ferguson " "He's trained with an extreme diver," said McQuarrie. "He learned to hold his breath for six and a half minutes. By the time this sequence was over, Tom was so exhausted physically and mentally, he had nitrogen in his blood, he was sore everywhere, he was very nervous, he had trouble concentrating and remembering. lines. He was exhausted all the time. It cost him dearly. "

4. Paris Motorcycle Chase," Fallout "

After being separated from his co-starring Henry Cavill, Mr. Cruise avoids capture on two wheels.

" The initial idea was that it would make some of the footage for free and the rest on those security platforms, and when the platforms did not work, we just went for that . All you see Tom do is free ride on cold pavement. Sometimes there was rain; there was sometimes morning dew. There was always a danger of skidding and erasure.

"Sometimes it's over 100 miles to the hour with cars chasing him and coming to see him. They were all stuntmen, but some of them were local, so there was a language barrier. Some times there were communication problems and the drivers were not where they were supposed to be, which was always scary. Tom had to be hypervigilant. "

" And of course, whenever he does stunts like that, he has to act. You design the camera movements to show that it's not a stuntman. One of the dangers becomes the camera itself. Tom leads in close-up in some shots. It is a few inches from the camera. If the camera vehicle stops, Tom goes straight into the camera. "

3. Sky-Diving," Fallout "

Mr. Cruise, Mr. Cavill's stuntman and a diving videographer jump from a plane over the United Arab Emirates to The sequence assembled three shots, combining leaps from 18,000 to 25,000 feet, to give the impression of a continuous take

"Probably the most technically challenging we have never done. The costume that he wears – all this is designed so that you can see that Tom is doing all the waterfall work. This helmet did not exist, the air tanks did not exist. Everything must be certified as a rescue device. This is not just an accessory. Layer 2, we have to find a country that would allow us to do it. And then of course, Tom must be certified to be able to jump to that altitude.

"The jump is divided into three parts.The first piece is when it jumps out of the plane and passes in front of the camera.The second piece is when he looks for Henry" – in fact his double stuntman – "in the air and the catch.And the third piece is as it falls with Henry where he disconnects his oxygen bottle and connects him to Henry.And it is the piece that takes the most of time, which of course means that he must be able to carry out all this action before reaching the minimum safety altitude by which he must deploy his parachute

At dusk, we have three minutes of light available each day to shoot.They just repeated until the light was good, and they went up and they took a catch every day, to get one of these three pieces It took several tries to get the first piece, several tries to get the second chop, several tries to get the third piece. And so it took us 106 repetition and shooting jumps to get that two and a half minutes, three minutes sequence. "

(Why could not they land and take a taxi?" Landing on the Grand Palace seems much more spectacular than landing in a parking lot on the outskirts of Paris, »said Mr. McQuarrie. 19659005] 2. Suspended from an airplane, "Rogue Nation"

Mr. Cruise sways on an A400M Airbus taking off

"When we proposed it to Airbus They said that it was impossible, and our approach was to say, well, if we were going to do it, how would that be done? And once people start to look at the possibilities, that's right. is a slippery slope to where they find themselves doing what they deem impossible

"Tom is wearing a harness under the suit, but of course the harness does not protect him from the dangers In the first place, if the pilot accelerates the plane, there is no harness in the world that can keep Tom in the plane.Other danger is any debris on the runway. Tom was hit by a pebble. He said it was like shooting at him. And the real danger is the impact of birds. If a bird passed by and hit Tom, it would be like a cannonball. The engine exhaust is extremely punitive and very toxic.

"Finally, Tom wears ear plugs and contact lenses. They cover half of his eye – they are not like little lenses that just cover your iris. So he could not really see. He could not really hear. I should lead it with very large gestures and communicate in the simplest possible way. And Tom said to me: "If I seem to panic, I play." Do not cut. Only if I hit my head – he put his palm on his head – it means that something is wrong. There was a point where Tom was brushing his hair, and we wondered if he was repairing hair, or something is wrong? "

1. Helicopter Chase," Fallout "

Mr. Cruise Pilot A helicopter through a mountainous terrain to recover and disable the detonator at a distance from two nuclear bombs [19659004] "The furry thing I can think of is the helicopter pursuit in the third act of 'Fallout'. Tom qualified "- for pilot certification -" on this helicopter in six weeks. Normally, it takes three months. He trained with two teams working 16 hours a day, which allowed him to reduce his training time by half. And we are in New Zealand in low winter light, which means visibility is always a little tricky. You have two helicopters. The way you measure the distance in a helicopter is a rotor width. And Tom was sometimes inside a rotor width of the other helicopter. It was less than a rotor width. In some parts of the sequence, Tom is hunting, and in others he is being chased – and we always insisted on the closeness, because, of course, there was more danger. Tom sneaks into canyons and ravines. There was one where his rotor blades were just a few meters from the rock faces on either side. It was like flying through a broom closet. "

The director remembers that he and a producer" said while we were doing it, if we knew what it took to shoot this footage, we would never have started. Tom had the time of his life. "