📰. ” ‘He is taking it to the next level’: the expert verdict on Tom Cruise’s epic ‘Mission: Impossible’ stunts.” Pub. Friday Evening, 07/14/23

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/14/expert-verdict-tom-cruise-mission-impossible-stunts-amy-johnston

Excerpts:

“Tom Cruise’s new film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is stuffed with spectacular stunts, but one in particular has grabbed the world’s attention: riding a motorbike off the top of a 1,240 metre-high crag, plummeting down its vertical, semi-cylindrical face, and opening his parachute, base-jump style, just before he hits the ground.

Cruise says its ‘far and away the most dangerous thing [he’d] ever attempted’, and in a video released by the film-makers, revealed he had trained for the stunt by making more than 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps over an 80ft mound, as well as training for a year in base jumping (a specialist skill involving parachuting from fixed objects including radio masts and skyscrapers). A practice ramp was constructed in a quarry in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, stuffed with fall-breaking plastic bags, before taking on the actual leap off the Helsetkopen in Norway. Cruise performed the stunt six times for the cameras.

Amy Johnston, a stunt performer on films such as Suicide Squad, Deadpool and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as well as the TV series Westworld, said: ‘In the movie theatre where I watched the film, as soon as he dropped, the audience was just dead silent. Everybody was trying to hold their breath, kind of they all felt like they were just having a heart attack.’

‘What he is able to do is create spectacle, and he knows how to entertain people. He did some of his biggest stunts to date in this film, and I was absolutely very impressed’… “