Colour us impressed.
Tom Cruise is known to perform some outrageously bold stunts in his films. Think wing-walking on an Airbus A400m that’s going full throttle down the runway or scaling the outside face of the Burj Khalifa (with a helicopter-bound safety harness) or even precariously dangling off cliffs while indulging in some vertigo-inducing free climbing.
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But even by Cruise standards, his recent stunt was pretty impressive. While filming in the UAE, he completed a HALO jump as part of the Mission: Impossible Fallout.
Now, weeks before the film comes to the theatres, a short video tweeted from the official Mission: Impossible twitter handle goes behind the scenes to show what it took to put together one particularly dangerous move.
Our stunts keep getting higher in altitude and lower in oxygen.
Go behind the scenes of one of @TomCruise‘s most dangerous stunts yet, the halo jump. #MissionImpossible pic.twitter.com/T9jIUOWYcw
— Mission: Impossible (@MissionFilm) June 3, 2018
HALO stands for high altitude low open, and the manoeuvre is typically undertaken by the military when they want to parachute into enemy territory undetected.
As the video explains, it involves jumping from above 25,000 feet and then deploying the chute below 2,000 feet. Oxygen is scarce at that height and so the film crew created a special helmet which acted as a film prop and a life-saving device.
Thank you to the amazing cast, crew and people of Abu Dhabi. That’s a wrap. #MissionImpossibleFallout pic.twitter.com/yKhcO9Cy61
— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) March 27, 2018
Jumping out of a plane into air you can’t breathe, then hurtling towards the ground while keeping yourself in shot?
Filming this scene was no easy task. Apparently, it took over 100 jumps to shoot this one sequence alone, with up to eight practice jumps a day before they could get it right.
Before the plane could thunder off the runway, the crew including Tom Cruise would have to spend 20 minutes on the ground breathing pure oxygen. The sequence was a sunset shot and this meant that the team who had a window of just three minutes to get the exact shot.
Tom Cruise makes an appearance in the video explaining how the UAE facilitated the filming of this shot and said, “We needed the UAE. Had they not stepped in, we would not have been able to accomplish this sequence.”
All in a day’s work for Cruise.
Images: Twitter, Instagram
