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How They Pulled Off That Wild ‘Mission: Impossible’ Plane Stunt

May 31, 2025
in News
How They Pulled Off That Wild ‘Mission: Impossible’ Plane Stunt
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Of the many storied stunts that Tom Cruise has performed over eight “Mission Impossible” movies — scaling the world’s tallest building in Dubai, riding a motorcycle off a Norwegian cliff, retrieving a stolen ledger from an underwater centrifuge — it seems unlikely that one of the most shock-and-awe set pieces in the series’ nearly 30-year history would involve two old-timey biplanes that look like they should have Snoopy at the controls.

And yet many viewers have emerged from the newest installment of the franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” astonished by that scene: a 12-and-a-half-minute sequence in which Cruise’s seemingly indefatigable special agent, Ethan Hunt, hitches a ride on the undercarriage of a small brightly colored aircraft, overtakes the pilot, then leaps onto another plane midair to fistfight the film’s grinning villain (Esai Morales) — all while being bashed and batted by the elements like a human windsock.

If it looks as if Cruise is genuinely getting blown sideways in the sky, it’s because he was. The actor’s well-known penchant for performing his own stunts meant that the scene was shot largely as it appears onscreen, minus the digital removal in postproduction of certain elements like safety harnesses and a secondary pilot.

Most “Mission” stunts, said Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed the last four films in the series, begin with either finding or building the right vehicle for the job. In this case it was a Boeing Stearman, primarily used to train fighter pilots during World War II. Eventually, the production bought multiples: two red, two yellow — “because if you have just one plane and that plane breaks,” he explained, “the whole movie shuts down.”

According to the stunt coordinator and second unit director, Wade Eastwood, Cruise, 62, trained for months on the ground before the full concept took flight. “Tom’s already a very established and very proficient pilot,” Eastwood said, “but being on the wing of a plane is not something that people do. So we tied it down and put out big fans and wind machines, and we had the prop running just to see what the effects would be on the body, and it was absolutely exhausting. I mean, you’re fighting the biggest resistance band you’ve ever fought in your life.”

Locations — several remote spots across South Africa — also had to be minutely calculated for both workable conditions and safety. “If the sky was too clear, you couldn’t do aerobatics,” McQuarrie said. “Because without clouds, the plane doesn’t look like it’s moving in three-dimensional space. You needed the temperature to be within a few degrees so that you got the lift that you needed. The hotter it gets, the thinner the air gets, so the plane loses its maneuverability. The colder it gets, the faster Tom gets hypothermia on the wing.”

To capture every angle required more than 60 camera positions, and the planes were flown on a minimum amount of fuel so they would be more maneuverable. Other logistics compounded the risks: The odds of Cruise falling off were “remote in the extreme,” McQuarrie said. “The more realistic danger was debris from the airfield hitting him on takeoff. If a rock got picked up, it would hit Tom like a bullet. And in the air, at that speed, a bird strike would be fatal. So we were worried constantly about birds or pieces of the plane, camera rigs, bolts, anything like that.”

Additionally, said Eastwood, the G-force “alternately drains the blood in your body and makes you much heavier than you are. So when you see Tom get slammed to the wing, that’s the G-force pulling him in. And then he goes zero gravity up at the top, that’s when he’s floating. It looks like he’s acting, because he is to a degree, but he’s also fighting the wind and fighting to stay on that wing.”

How exactly did Cruise breathe without an oxygen mask while clinging to the exterior of an aircraft going 170 miles per hour, approximately 10,000 feet above sea level? “The answer is he’s not,” McQuarrie said. “The molecules are so dispersed at that point. I’ve been on the wing of the plane and experienced it firsthand — you’re breathing, but your body is not. You’re getting maybe a tenth of the oxygen you would normally, and you’re being pummeled.”

Wind and engine noise were a complicating factor as well. “We kind of developed our own sign language,” McQuarrie said. “You just want to keep communicating so that Tom can conserve his energy.” A head pat meant that Cruise was only resting (and not, in fact, unconscious); another gesture signified trouble. “Basically, if you had to talk about something more than once, you developed a hand signal for it.”

The accumulated knowledge of working on the series for more than decade, McQuarrie said, has also bred its own kind of filmmaking shorthand. “We could probably do it now in a third of the time. But who would be crazy enough to shoot another sequence like that again?”

The post How They Pulled Off That Wild ‘Mission: Impossible’ Plane Stunt appeared first on New York Times.

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