Tom Cruise: It takes decades to prepare for Mission: Impossible stunts

By Lauren Del Fabbro, PA Entertainment Reporter

Film star Tom Cruise has said it takes “decades” to prepare for extreme Mission: Impossible stunts.

Speaking at the global premiere for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in London, the actor said he wants his stunts to engage his audiences emotionally, and does not want people to “just watch the movie”.

Cruise, who has become known for performing extreme stunts in the franchise, including scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper and riding a motorcycle off the edge of a cliff, returns for the eighth instalment as Ethan Hunt, a highly skilled agent who works for the Impossible Missions Force (IMF).

Speaking about how he prepares for his stunts, Cruise told the PA news agency: “I have to tell you, look, it takes years, decades to be able to prepare for something because I’ve been flying aeroplanes and studying aerial photography for decades.

“I learn when I’m shooting something. I learn a little bit and I keep trying to expand upon that knowledge.”

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the new film sees Cruise hanging off a plane, jumping off buildings and underwater in a submarine sequence.

He added: “So, aerial sequence all the way back to 40 years ago, and now I fly aerobatics. I fly aerobatic jets, helicopters. I fly everything.

“I’m learning these skills and then I’m applying it to cinema. So it’s also just understanding the aircraft, the camera, what kind of cameras can we have?

“How’s the aircraft going to behave with that camera? How am I going to create motion in space that will create an emotional reaction with the audience.

“I want that emotional engagement, I don’t want you just watch the movie. I want you to experience it. So that’s a lot of physical, mental, but a lot of other things, technical things, that go into developing something like this.

“There’s a lot of studying a lot of learning.

“I don’t ever coast through anything. I want the challenge and I see beauty and privilege in my art form that I get to do, like the underwater sequence, the amount of engineering that I have to study and learn, and many, many layers of skill involved.”

The new film sees Ethan and his IMF team take on the Entity, an advanced, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) first introduced in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I, which now plans to destroy the world by hacking into countries’ nuclear arsenals.

At the start of each film, Ethan is offered the choice to accept a new, high-risk mission, putting his life on the line to stop crime and hostile forces.

Speaking about the power of choice, Cruise added: “It is the heart of Mission (Impossible). Should you choose to accept the very first mission? It is a choice of that individual. So it is inherent.

“That’s one of the things that I loved about the Mission: Impossible franchise. They don’t just say, this is your mission and you have to do it. It’s like should you choose to accept? So there’s personal responsibility.

“All of us, whether we realise it or not, we’re making choices, even to not do something or not take responsibility for something.

“I think that adds a whole other emotional layer to the characters and each one as you’re going through it, and how we introduce these characters again, you’re seeing each of them making a choice.

“Those choices build society, build cultures. We all have that.”

Throughout the franchise Ethan is joined by expert hacker Luther Stickell, played by Ving Rhames, who is the only other character aside from Cruise, to appear in every Mission: Impossible film.

Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg also returns to play field agent Benji Dunn, alongside thief turned agent, Grace, played by Hayley Atwell.

Newcomers to the franchise include Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham, who plays Admiral Neely, and Severance star Tramell Tillman who plays submarine commander, Captain Bledsoe.

One of the scenes in the film sees Cruise attempt to move through a submarine that has crashed and begins to rotate underwater from the weight of the water that is being let in.

Speaking about the stunt, Director McQuarrie said: “It took two and a half years to build that set. It’s a 360 degree rotating, 1000 tonne, steel, submersible gimbal and an 8.5 million litre tank, all of which had to be built from scratch.

“It was all being built behind my trailer. So every day when I came to work, I was just watching it grow. And you can’t plan what you’re going to shoot in there, because we understand from having done so many of these sequences, the physics just hits you in the face, and whatever you thought you were going to do, that goes right out the window.

“So, we had a plan, and knew that plan wasn’t going to happen. And it wasn’t until we got in the tank that we knew what the sequence was going to be.”

Aside from all the action, the film is also about “our hope for humanity”  McQuarrie said.

He added: “The story was was just people connecting with other people and remaining connected and not losing their connection. And that that’s what you feel emotionally in the story.

“It’s less about me saying bad technology and more about wanting to remind people what life is really all about, and what really connects us is not technology, but emotions.

“It’s about our hope for humanity. It’s about hope for and our belief in the ultimate goodness.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will be in cinemas in the UK on May 21.