Tom Cruise Shares the Story Behind His Epic Rock-Climbing Stunt From MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2

Tom Cruise has been doing his own stunts for decades, from clinging to the side of a plane mid-takeoff to scaling the Burj Khalifa without a stunt double, his relentless pursuit of cinematic spectacle has become legendary.

But before all of that, there was Mission: Impossible 2, where Cruise introduced audiences to his love for insanity with the free-climbing sequence in Utah’s Moab desert at the beginning of the movie.

The opens with Ethan Hunt casually scaling a sheer rock face without any rope. It’s a moment that instantly set the tone for the film and became one of the the many iconic shots in the Mission: Impossible franchise. But, as Cruise recently reflected, getting that shot wasn’t as smooth as his climb made it look.

From the beginning, Cruise was adamant about opening the movie with a climbing sequence. But getting there wasn’t easy. Mission: Impossible 2 was primarily shot in Australia, where the weather refused to cooperate.

Cruise said: “It rained for 40 days. I felt like Noah, and the studio was like, ‘Listen, because of the rain, and [because] the schedule is over, let’s find another opening to the movie.’ Every day people were coming in with different pitches. I was like, ‘I don’t know how else to open the movie.’”

Determined to stick with his vision, Cruise pushed for the sequence. But when he arrived in Utah after a brutal trip from Australia, the conditions weren’t much better.

He said: “So, now we’re into the winter months in Moab, I’ve flown all the way from Australia, and there are gale-force winds. So we can’t even have my crew up on the mountain.

“I have pushed the studio for the opening of this movie, and you can’t even get there to set up the camera. I am so exhausted from jet lag, and I don’t know how to call the studio, and I’m not shooting, and you feel the pressure of shooting something, and for six months they’ve been wanting me to change the opening sequence.”

Then, just when things seemed impossible, nature finally played along. Cruise added: “And what happened is, I remember waking up the next day, and I was just like, ‘You have to confront this.’ And the sun was coming up, and the wind was gone, and the temperatures had come up. So I was like, ‘Let’s get to the top of the mountain and just start shooting it now.’”

This was long before the days of high-tech safety measures and radio communication. Cruise wasn’t just performing the stunt, he was literally climbing to the shot location himself.

He continued: “This is back in the days where you didn’t have radios, and I’m free climbing as I’m going up to where I need to be for that opening shot.

“I had to pace myself, because I had to climb down afterwards, and if I fall, there’s a cable that’s going to get me, but I’m going to be slamming up against the mountain. And the rock is very soft rock. At certain times you’re going, ‘Jesus, I’m sliding, it’s breaking away.’”

That’s already more than most actors would willingly endure, but it got even worse when it came time to pull off the now-famous “Iron Cross” moment where Cruise hangs horizontally between two rock formations.

“As I’m doing the Iron Cross, I’m actually hanging there, but it isn’t quite right, and you can see it. I was like, ‘Just tell me this is the shot, because I can’t do it again.’”

As if scaling a crumbling rock face wasn’t difficult enough, Cruise was also secretly nursing a broken foot during one of the film’s biggest jumps.

“What people don’t know is that there’s a section where I’m jumping high to low, but my foot was broken. And I never mentioned it to anyone. Some of these injuries, what’s the point? You just keep going. So I’m jumping, and my foot wasn’t right.”

John Woo, the film’s director, was ready to move on. But Cruise wasn’t satisfied until he nailed it in a single shot.

“John Woo was like, ‘We’ve got the shot.’ I was like, ‘No, we want it in one shot, I gotta keep doing it.’ And that’s the shot that’s in the movie. But it was so much fun working with John, doing that sequence, because I knew it was our [marketing] campaign.”

I love these kinds of behind the scenes filmmaking stories! The stunt in that movie pretty much set the precedent for every gravity-defying stunt he would go on to perform in the franchise.

Source: Empire