Tom Cruise Trained for Three Months to Pull Off This Crazy Mission: Impossible – Fallout Stunt
Think you could pull off all the stunts Tom Cruise does in a Mission Impossible movie? Here’s what it would take to do just one of his death defying feats. That amazing helicopter sequence we got a glimpse of in the Fallout trailer is called a corkscrew dive, apparently. Cruise spent three months training at Airbus’ helicopter school in Texas so he could fly the helicopter himself. WIRED sent a crew there to go through some training of their own and see the kind of work Cruise put in to make the scene as thrilling as possible.
“Someone who doesn’t have any sort of flight training previously,” said Militza Konova, Director of Training Services for Airbus, on learning to fly, “it would probably take them — for a very, very talented, coordinated individual — two to three months.” It’s not only the mechanics of learning the controls or how to do aerial maneuvers, but the knowledge of theory required to fly that makes learning so quickly so difficult. Each training day would consist of 6-8 hours of theory and 3 hours of flying, but when looking at the footage the filmmakers were able to gather, it was well worth it.
To shoot the helicopter scenes, the crew mounted cameras onto the helicopter that pointed inward, and had cameras filming from the inside behind Cruise’s pilot seat. The goal was to sell the fact that Cruise was doing all of the flying himself — raising the stakes in the process. Instead of filming the sequence from the outside, the camera angles the crew used make the scene so much more intimate. The snippets from the trailer alone were enough to give me a shot of adrenalin. Despite the name of these movies, Tom Cruise continues to prove that with him in the center of the action, nothing is truly impossible.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout flies into theaters tomorrow.
Featured Image: Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2018 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.
