Yes, Mission: Impossible 7 Has Tom Cruise Stunt Fighting On Top Of A Real Train Going 60mph
Hey everyone, come quick, Tom Cruise is doing the wildest thing we've ever seen a human being do on camera before! Again! It's yet another stunt for "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One," the movie for which he's already infamously ridden a motorcycle off a cliff in the name of cinema. This time around, the massive action sequence involves a moving train. According to a new featurette from Paramount Pictures titled "Train Stunt Behind-The-Scenes," Cruise and fellow actor Esai Morales actually shot their big fight scene on a real train that was traveling at least 60 miles per hour.
We say "at least" here because in an interview with /Film, original "Mission: Impossible" associate producer J.C. Calciano put the number at closer to 75 miles per hour. Either way, it was fast enough that, as Calciano recalled telling Cruise, "'Dude, if a piece of dirt or something just hits you in the eye, you're going to go and have these wind blowing you in the face at 75 miles an hour, and you are the star of the movie. You could go f***ing blind.'" Luckily, that didn't happen, but the new featurette shows some dizzying shots of filming the scene that demonstrate exactly how terrifying it likely was. "I've done fight scenes, but to do them on a moving train is trial by fire," Morales, who plays a villain named Gabriel in the film, said. "But that's how Tom like to do things."
The team also built the train from scratch
Tom Cruise isn't the only one gunning for hyper-realism in the long-running action franchise; writer-director Christopher McQuarrie also spoke about trying to nail the train scene, a seemingly herculean task that involved actually building a usable train from scratch. "There was not a surplus of trains available to be wrecked," he shared. "We had to build the train if we wanted to destroy it." McQuarrie called the practical shoot "extremely challenging." Aside from the actual day-of concerns with getting the action just right, his team had to "design all of the different train carts that could function on a real train track."
According to Calciano, the shoot involved a massive amount of wind in order to simulate the real conditions atop a speeding train. "We were generating wind from these ... when you're training for parachuting, they have these big fans that blow up, and you float around," the producer explained. "We were trying to get as much wind as possible, and we were using those giant wind fans, all being tunneled into a small thing" to replicate what it might be like within the real Channel Tunnel. Cruise is famous for requesting filmmaking that's as true-to-life as possible during his stunts, and this was no exception. "I think we were doing research that I think the train reached 150 miles an hour, and he was like, 'I want it to be real. I want it to be 150 miles an hour,'" Calciano recalled.
'No one else in the world is doing this level of practical filmmaking'
Apparently, the production had to settle with half of that speed or less, but it's worth noting that even at 60 miles per hour, that means Tom Cruise and other actors are working atop a vehicle going as fast as a car on the freeway — which we all know can do a lot of damage if something goes wrong. In the end, Cruise, Esai Morales, and co-star Hayley Atwell walked away unscathed, but the same can't be said for the train.
As the behind-the-scenes footage reveals, it ended up wrecked after being driven off a cliff in a shot that had to be accomplished in just one take. Christopher McQuarrie explained that the team had been thinking about doing a train sequence for a long time, and "wanted to build upon the previous films and apply that knowledge to something practical and real and bring this train sequence to another level."
McQuarrie is also quoted in the featurette saying something that at this point seems to be undeniably true: "No one else in the world is doing this practical level of filmmaking, and it may never be done again." Cruise's work on the "Mission: Impossible" movies calls to mind the days of early cinema, when Charlie Chaplin walked a tightrope with monkeys, Buster Keaton tried not to get flattened by a barn wall, and Harold Lloyd dangled from the hands of a giant clock. Back then, Hollywood didn't have the framework in place to tell these death-defying performers, "No." Now it does, yet somehow adrenaline junkie Cruise is still able to orchestrate a symphony of wild, dangerous action with each new film.
Hopefully, the train scene in "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" will be worth the risk and hassle. You can see for yourself if it pays off: The film premieres theaters on July 12, 2023.