Tom Cruise has performed some extraordinary stunts in the Mission Impossible franchise as covered in previous ‘story behind the shot’ features but the bi-plane sequence in Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning is stomach churningly breath taking especially if watched on an IMAX screen. But it’s a stint that was years in the making
When Tom Cruise was just a kid, two things happened that would forever change the trajectory of his life. Aged around three years old – “maybe three and a half,” Cruise says – he was already fascinated with being high up in the sky. Even if, back then, the highest he could get was the top of the local trees. “It all started when I used to lay on the ground, looking up at the birds,” he says. “Then I’d climb the trees, because I liked the feeling of the wind and the feeling of the tree going back and forth in it. As a child, I used to climb out of the window and onto the gutters, to look at the stars. I was always doing stuff like that. I wanted to go to space and travel the world.” The first of the two things that would jolt these childhood daydreams into an obsession that has lasted his whole lifetime since was when, one Saturday morning when he’d woken up earlier than everyone else in the house, he switched on the black and white television in the family lounge.
“On the TV was this program about old aviation, and it was showing wing walking,” Cruise says. “I remember looking at this wing walking and thinking how exciting it looked, to be the pilot flying the plane and to be the guy on the wing.” Cruise pauses, his adult mind set kicking back into gear. “Now I look at things like, ‘How can I tell which story? How do I get a camera in there?’ Because doing it and not being able to tell the story about it, well, that’s not worth it.” This is how it has long been for the boy who would grow up to become Ethan Hunt, and the man who would produce the most audacious, thrilling and endlessly inventive action series of all time.
The basis of the story in the aerial sequence in The Final Reckoning finds Esai Morales’ Gabriel has just flown off in a classic Stearman biplane, forcing Ethan to give chase in a second one, transfer to its undercarriage and climb onto the wing of Gabriel’s plane, to fight him. In the real world, this staggering sequence was filmed at 10,000 feet above sea level, with Cruise battling hurricane-force winds, and a pilot trying his very best to throw him off. And that’s not to mention the local vulture population, or the fact that when the plane flew into the clouds with Cruise on the wing, he was entirely blind to anything around him. “I’ve done many aerial sequences over the years, but this is a classic sequence, pushing it all to the next level,” Cruise says. “I had to build a step-by-step plan on how to test it. How to test the aircraft, the engine, the weight, the trust. The only way you can do this is by building a program that you move step by step through to build a level of skill and competency, without stepping over any boundaries that you cannot recover from.” …..“It’s a little bit dangerous, a heck of a lot of fun, and beautiful and exhilarating to look at. Something audiences have genuinely never seen before.”
The sequence is the fourth aerial extravaganza that Cruise and Mc Quarrie have conjured up together, after the already envelope-pushing sky-high adrenaline rides of American Made, Fallout and, of course, Top Gun: Maverick. “But this has been by far the most dangerous,” says Wade Eastwood, The Final Reckoning’s stunt coordinator and second unit director. It all took place in Eastwood’s native South Africa, Specifically, it was filmed over three locations: the Blyde River Canyon, a 26km-long, lush green chasm running through Mpumalanga, that formed the backdrop for the start of the chase; the Drakensberg mountains, in KwaZulu-Natal Province, for the plane-to-plane transfer and the wing walking; and The Wild Coast, on the Eastern Cape south of Durban, for Ethan’s climactic fight with Gabriel in the cockpit.
“I’ve got to admit, I was nervous,” says Morales of the early parts of the chase, one which Cruise had his fellow actor trained in flying and skydiving for, just in case anything went wrong, and they had to eject. “I was worried about Tom hitting the water. His wheels were just above it, and if those wheels catch, and that plane pitches down, it could be disastrous. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to see him die.’ It was that real.”
In total, the sequence took a staggering four and a half months to shoot, after a lifetime spent in Cruise’s imagination and years of planning by the filmmakers, who formulated a program of months of rehearsals at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire in the UK, training, testing, evaluating and adapting the aerodynamics of the four 1940s Stearmans – two yellow, two red – that they would use. The Stearmans themselves had been selected by the filmmakers for their natural beauty and elegance and painted with their respective primary colours to contrast strikingly with that of the bright blue South African sky. Having developed bespoke camera rigs with specialist lenses to be positioned across the body of the planes, and with the aircrafts’ wings needing to be reinforced so that Cruise could clamber around on them, they required substantial modification and constant maintenance.
“These planes had to be sound – Formula One mechanically sound,” Eastwood says. “They were stripped, like a Formula One car is stripped before a race. The engine, the wing struts, spans, everything was checked daily, so that every day those planes fired up, flew perfectly and didn’t miss a beat.” Even so, cautions Cruise, who personally checked each aircraft every day, no matter how fine-tuned the four airplanes were, each of them required all the pilots – Cruise himself, as well as John Romain, Lee Proudfoot, Steven Jones and Jon Gowdy – to get used to their individual nuances.
“Each aircraft has its own personality, particularly old, classic planes,” Cruise explains. “Old doesn’t mean they’re unsafe, but each airplane has its own idiosyncrasies, so it takes time to try to understand each of them, because when you’re flying an airplane, you want to know those idiosyncrasies. So many people think, ‘Well, you just jump in the plane and the plane is the same.’ That is not true. You need to know those individual idiosyncrasies, so you’re feeling the plane, so you become one with it.” …….. “But the truth is, that’s what happens. And you need to find that feeling to be able to take them right to the edge.”
Right to the edge is precisely where The Final Reckoning team were prepared to push these aircraft to when they eventually got out to South Africa, for the final phase of testing, all the while developing a series of cameras that didn’t even exist before this movie happened. “Everything that went into shooting this was purpose-built from the ground up and was constantly reinvented. All this technology evolved from something that was, say, the size of a suitcase when we started to the size of a pack of cigarettes,” Mc Quarrie notes. “In Africa, we then had to get used to how these aircraft would operate in that climate,” Cruise says. “The kind of photography that we were doing had never been done. The cameras, the positions, how close we were going to be between air-to-air cameras, my interaction with the aircraft, you will not have seen any of this before. That’s what’s going to make it exciting.”
Famously, on the original Top Gun, Cruise only signed on when producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson acquiesced to his insistence that if he was going to do it, he would have to personally fly in the F-14. Three decades later, he learned how to fly a helicopter acrobatically just so he could do so in Fallout. “I just love aerial sequences,” he says. “But after each one I do, the question is, ‘Okay, what’s next?’”
With The Final Reckoning, though, there’s an argument that Cruise has pushed even his abilities to a point it’s impossible to exceed. He’d picked the Stearmans in part because of his memories of that old program on aviation, but also because he knows them so well, in particular how sturdy they are. But they do have their limitations. “I knew I could do loops and rolls and hammer heads in them. Now I wanted to make sure I could explore and go Zero G out on the wing and travel along their fuselage,” Cruise says. “And then there was the whole, ‘How long can I hang upside down on this airplane?’ We kept working our way up to the point where we were inverted in the air and the engine had stopped. Everyone was very nervous about that. But we did it. We went inverted, held it, held it and held it, then recovered. I would time it and go, ‘How many seconds?’ First it was two seconds, then it was three. It was always about, ‘How long can we get these shots?’ Because as much as I loved that old footage on the TV, those airplanes were very slow at the time, and they didn’t have to deal with the forces that we were going to have to deal with.”
Those forces were substantial. And that’s being conservative. High above the Drakensberg mountains, temperatures were freezing. As a general rule, Cruise says, “You’re going to drop three degrees Celsius per 1,000 feet. It was quite chilly, with all those molecules going across my body.” And that’s before factoring in the speed. “We’d be accelerating into 150-170 mph,” Cruise says. “The forces I was dealing with when I was hanging on the fuselage and trying to get my foot up on the wing was like doing the heaviest squat in your life. Up there, your body is getting pounded by the molecules coming off that propeller, which are traveling at the speed of sound at the tip.”
As much as they had tested the sequence with mannequins on the wing, until he was up there, on the outside of an actual airplane – “one which was basically riding right on the edge of being able to fly,” Cruise notes – there was simply no knowing with absolute accuracy what was going to be physically possible. “What I was creating has never been done in the way we were doing it. We knew that the force was going to be so great that if we made a mistake, I was going to get in trouble, so there were so many things to consider. I am very, very methodical about approaching these things. And, as a pilot, I know what is happening when I’m on that wing. But until we got up there, I couldn’t be sure what story we could tell,” Cruise says.
When he did, the experience exceeded even what he was expecting, pushing Cruise to his very limits. “When we were doing these loops, rolls and manoeuvres, I was slamming back and forth on the airplane,” he says. “I was worried about the fuselage. I was worried about me going through the wing, because it was fabric. Also, I had to protect myself, so I didn’t get knocked out, because I didn’t have a helmet on. Some of the impacts I was taking on the wing and some of the forces were so tremendous that at times I couldn’t move.”
Eastwood puts what Cruise went through into the kind of perspective us mere mortals can understand. “You know when you put your hand out of the car window, and you feel the forces on your hand? Now imagine putting your whole body out the window and pushing against hurricane force winds, because that’s what he was doing.” And remember this: all the while that Cruise was doing all that, he was also having to not only find his mark, so that his body would be in the perfect frame for the perfect shot composition, but so he could then deliver his dialogue, or engage in a mid-air fist fight.
“At times, when the airplane was rolling and we were Negative G, Tom was just in space, completely free in amongst the spans of the wing. And then, when the plane recovered, he would come slamming down onto the wing and lose all his air and be clinging on for his life, before continuing the action. There was a lot of method acting. When you watch it, know that he really is getting beaten up on that wing.”
If Tom Cruise is used to literally putting his life on the line in pursuit of the best possible experiences for audiences, one man who hadn’t been until The Final Reckoning was its director. But out in South Africa, on location for this first sequence, he was about to have a conversation with his star and producer that wasn’t just going to change his actual view but his entire worldview. “I had Mc Q go on the wing for a flight, just to feel what it was like,” Cruise reveals. “He’d been in the helicopter [flying alongside the Stearman, directing Cruise with the hand signals they would adapt even further to shoot the submarine sequence but we had to discover the progression of me going through and around the aircraft, to figure out what was possible. What could the aircraft handle? What could I handle? And only I knew what the forces were like, out there on that wing. So, there was a moment when I just said, ‘Listen, I don’t know how to explain this to you. You’ve got to get on the wing to really experience it, so you have a greater reality of what I’m doing.’”
Mc Quarrie laughs and said. “And as soon as I stepped out of the plane and onto the wing, I understood the sheer violence of being there. The forces of nature as you understand them do not apply.” Cruise coached his friend through the process, step by step. “I said, ‘Look, this is going to happen. Don’t worry about this step out here. It’s going to take your breath away. Don’t forget to breathe, because there’s so much force coming at you that your lungs can’t get the air.’ When he went up there and did it, I felt confident about it, but he is my friend so of course I was concerned,” he says. “But I made it as safe as possible – I didn’t put him out in Zero G on the wing, to sustain all the Gs that I was taking. I made it safe so he could just step out onto the wing, then get back in the cockpit. To feel for himself what that energy is like. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do what I did, but I felt very safe with him doing this. I would not put him in a position where I felt it was too dangerous. I just wouldn’t do that.”
Looking back on the day in question, Cruise remains seriously impressed by the fact that Mc Quarrie had the guts to do it. “When I suggested it, he just said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’” Although he’s still not necessarily surprised. “I’m constantly impressed by Mc Q, and I respected that he did it – and loved it,” Cruise says. “. On Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise reveals, Mc Quarrie sat in the back seat of the P-51, with Maverick himself flying it. “He also flew in the jet as I was pulling heavy Gs and doing aerobatics, so that he understood. Most shocking of all is that walking out onto the wing of an airplane didn’t even turn out to be the most life-altering part of the process of filming the aerial sequence for Mc Quarrie. That distinction would go to the ducks
“Every morning, we would have a safety briefing, to go through what we were going to shoot that day. One day, at the end of the briefing, the safety guy said, ‘Does anyone have any ducks?’ Everyone looks around and apparently nobody has any ducks,” says Mc Quarrie. “Now, in aviation, a duck is any concern that you might have. Any anxiety, any stress, any doubts, any negative emotions about what you’re about to do.” Mc Quarrie took the safety guy to one side. “‘I’m curious,’” I said. “‘Why do they call it ducks?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s not the lion that eats you, it’s the thousands of ducks that peck you to death.’ In other words, it’s an accumulation of negative emotions across a group of people that leads to disasters, because numerous people are focused on things other than the task at hand. If they’re not all focused one hundred percent, those remaining percentages accumulate into disaster.”
This was when something really hit home. “It was the point that I realized, as the director and the person overseeing all of this, that I had to purge stress from my operating basis,” Mc Quarrie remembers. “It was an emotion I was not allowed to feel. I could not feel fear, I could not feel stress, I could not feel anger. You just can’t think about these things. If you have any kind of apprehension, that’s when bad things are going to happen.” That night, Mc Quarrie went home and called his wife, Heather, who was back in the States, temporarily grounded by the pandemic. “I said to her, ‘By the time I’m in Africa, I simply cannot have any sort of emotional distress or worry, or someone could die,’” he says. “My wife totally understood the concept. She was very, very supportive. She shielded me from a lot of the day-to-day stresses that you deal with at night when you go home. And I focused on a mindset of absolute serenity and absolute disregard for stress and fear. Once you take off, and you’re in the air, everyone is drilled – and you cannot change the brief. Even if you have the world’s greatest idea, you cannot say, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ All the time, I can’t worry about an accident. Because if I do, that accident will occur. I had to do it all with no regard for life and death,” Mc Quarrie says. “And you know what? After months of doing that, all those negative feelings were largely gone. It’s not that they don’t still exist. It’s just that you realize they’re wasted emotions.”
For the duration of the aerial sequence, there were always four people in the helicopter following Cruise: the camera helicopter pilot, Will Banks, the camera operator, Mc Quarrie himself, and his first assistant director, Mary Boulding. “When you see Tom flying through that canyon, five feet off the water, we’re in a helicopter flying just that bit lower than him, so I can see him under the wing when his wing is almost brushing the rocks. We’re basically flying in tandem,” the director says.
Mc Quarrie had to have eyes in the back of his head, watching the pilot of the helicopter and the pilots of both planes. He had to be aware of air temperature, air speed, altitude, fuel consumption, on top of everyone’s safety and precisely what the shot was that they were all trying to get. Boulding was Mc Quarrie’s right hand throughout. “Mary Boulding is quite extraordinary, completely unique in film,” is how Mc Quarrie describes her contribution to The Final Reckoning. “She had to keep all this on track from the ground up, literally.” Boulding first met Mc Quarrie and Cruise on Edge Of Tomorrow in 2011, when she was a PA. Working her way up through the AD department, she started Dead Reckoning as the floor 2nd assistant director. She’d been in the position just a couple of months when the current first assistant director, Tommy Gormley, stepped up to produce. “That was when Tom and Mc Q stepped me up to first AD,” Boulding says
That size of that step up was, according to Boulding, “huge – about a 20 or 30-year career jump and a baptism by fire. You don’t get any bigger than being a first on a Mission: Impossible.” But Mc Quarrie says that she took the opportunity and ran with it, becoming the most accomplished first assistant director he has ever encountered. On The Final Reckoning, Boulding’s responsibilities included scheduling a vast wall of ever changing storyboards, ensuring that all the planes were stripped and rebuilt overnight, so they could be in the air and shooting by 7am, as well as radioing back from inside the helicopter when two of the planes that had been in the air were heading back in, to have the other two warmed up, ready for immediate take off.
The speed of these pit stops were critical to making the day and the light. “On every one of these movies, people ask, ‘Aren’t you scared?’ And Tom always answers the same way. He says, ‘I don’t mind being scared. It’s not that I’m not scared. I just don’t mind.’ And I didn’t understand that. But now I know that it’s not that you are oblivious. You can’t be, because if you factor out the fear entirely, if you don’t maintain an awareness of your own mortality, the scale tips too far the other way,” Mc Quarrie says. “When we’re in that helicopter, each of us knows that our communications represent the difference between life and death. If the communications become too overwhelming or confusing, that can lead to a dangerous situation. The atmosphere in there has to be very, very calm. And that’s what Mary makes happen. The assistant director directs the director, handles all the scheduling, manages our shot list, puts together everything I want to do. She organizes everything in a way that the plan is achievable. That way I can always focus on the creative while shooting, and she manages all the logistics. She’s incredible.”
But even though Boulding was also responsible for evacuating the cast and crew back down to base camp from 6,000 feet even higher above sea level in the case of extreme weather – which she had to do twice over the course of filming – her principal concerns were always for Cruise himself. “My main memories of the shoot in South Africa were feeling scared for Tom’s life. Watching him do what he did was absolutely terrifying,” Boulding says. “This film has been five years of our lives. Up there some days it could feel like that in an afternoon.” Before Cruise and Mc Quarrie had developed the sign language they did, communication at altitude had proved frustratingly laboured, with the director initially giving instruction on his headset to Banks, and Banks then communicating it to both the planes
“Will was very good at translating what I was saying so another pilot could understand it, but even so, it was a bit like trying to fix a pocket watch with boxing gloves on. It just wasn’t as functional as direct communication,” Mc Quarrie says. “The only way for me to communicate directly with Tom was to fly up next to his plane, open the door at 10,000 feet and step out onto the skid so he could see me. The hand signals came in because Tom had no radio on, so we developed a shorthand. So long as I could manage Tom’s expectations, Tom could manage his energy.”
After they pried him off the wing, the stunt team would take Cruise to a heated tent, to sleep and warm up, his body slowly reacclimatizing to the temperature on the ground, recharging. “We kept pushing certain aerobatic manoeuvres, how I could manoeuvre my body within the framework of what that aircraft could do. With all my years of flying, I knew that aircraft could be put in a position where I could manoeuvere certain way. I always believed that was possible, and we were able to find it,” is how Cruise describes it.
But it didn’t come easy. “It was so brutal on that wing that it wasn’t something I could do for long periods of time,” Cruise remembers. “After I did it, they would take me into that tent, and I would lay down for two hours, asleep. Then they would wake me up, we’d look at the footage, and then we’d go again.” Mc Quarrie shrugs his shoulders. “I did suggest he should rest longer. But you know Tom. He’d sleep for just those two hours then wake up. And the first thing he’d always say was, ‘Did we get the shot?’”
Ask any of Cruise’s co-stars about what their boss and mentor achieved in the skies over South Africa and you’ll get all manner of rave reviews. Of all of them, Henry Czerny probably says it simplest. “What Tom does up there is something you’ll never forget, for the rest of your life.” But maybe the most vivid recollection comes from Shea Whigham, who remembers flying to South Africa from Los Angeles for the shoot.
“So, I get in the helicopter, and we watch Tom take off. Then we’re following him, as Tom walks on the wing. I remember just looking. I was looking at Mc Q too, but I couldn’t say anything,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘How lucky am I to be seeing this? How lucky are people to be getting to see this [soon]?’ Tom is giving them a gift on this one.”
related feature : Story behind the Shot – Mission Impossible Rogue Nation
related feature : TOP GUN MAVERICK – WORLDWIDE PREMIERE May25th 2022 on the USS MIDWAY SAN DIEGO with TOM CRUISE
