Impossible’ Stunt Coordinator Reveals Secrets Behind Tom Cruise’s Death-Defying Tricks

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was recently released in theaters, and once again, audiences were witness to Tom Cruise‘s ambition to perform the most dangerous stunts for entertainment purposes. By this point, it’s hard to deny that with every Mission: Impossible film, the Hollywood star kept pushing boundaries and breaking some rules to achieve the… impossible. As quickly as those scenes go by, to accomplish these mind-bending stunts, Cruise and his crew work for months. Designing, testing, and fixing what needs fixing. One of his closest collaborators, stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, has revealed some of the secrets behind Cruise’s skills in making us believe in the impossible.

The stunt coordinator sat down with IndieWire to discuss his 12-year run working with the Top Gun star in the Mission: Impossible movies. Eastwood is a veteran, having participated in films like Inception and franchises like James Bond. However, it’s his work in the Mission: Impossible franchise that stands out, given how much effort and preparation it requires from him.

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Eastwood revealed many details about his work in the spy action universe that ended with the recently released film. In the interview, he describes what it’s like working alongside Cruise, saying that “Tom designs his own training, not stunt training, but the physical training of the diet and so on. He knows what his body’s going to go through and endure and how he’s moving.” The stunt specialist confirms that almost everything is carefully planned to avoid what could be a very expensive injury:

“He will work on things like, when we do the speed fly sequence, he designed a system that could get his core engaged, working with his arms up, so he’s not fatiguing or having injury, because if Tom has an injury then we have to stop shooting.

“So he’s 100% in control of that and he’s got a great team on the physical side, on the diet side. My job is on the stunt side, like learning the fights, choreography, the movement for the fights, I’ll get with his trainer, and say, ‘These are the sorts of movements Tom will be doing.’ And then they know which muscle groups to work on to make sure that we prevent injury.”

Is CGI a Part of the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Stunt Work?

Paramount Pictures

Eastwood also talked about using CGI in Cruise’s most dangerous sequences. You would think that green screens were involved to make the stunts as risk-free as possible, but Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films are famous for elaborate practical effects. The stunt coordinator says that CGI is only used to remove elements, clean up the frame, and enhance the sets:

“When you interact with things, everything is practical on a Mission. Everything on the plane is practical. If there’s visual effects in that, it’s painting out a wire or enhancing a sky. There are no other visual effects in the plane sequence. It’s 100% real. It might be a little cleanup here, or there, or a little bit of damage on a plane here or there, but the planes are really flying and Tom is really on the wing. And when Tom’s flying, he’s really flying. There’s no trickery rigs, or stage rigs.

“And so the visual effects side is not like if I went and did a Marvel movie, and I’m like, ‘We are creating a wall on the blue screen over there, and then he’s going to fight this dragon,’ which is actually a stunt double in a blue suit with pads on… We don’t have to imagine a world because we shoot in the real world, and we use visual effects to enhance and to extend sets, and things like that.”

Source: IndieWire

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