With Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation out now, let’s take a look at 7 things you probably
didn’t know about the fifth film in the super-spy series.
Although Tom Cruise has a good deal of experience stunt driving, before filming Rogue Nation's
high-speed car and motorbike chases along winding Moroccan roads, he spent an intensive
six weeks training, working with stunt co-ordinator Wade Eastwood, whose speciality is car stunts.
Cruise learnt to drift drive and, according to Eastwood, the actor rode the BMW S1000RR
sport bike at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour!
When Ethan Hunt dives into an underwater facility to change a security profile card, the chamber
where he has to swap out the card is labelled 108.
This is an Easter Egg for JJ Abrams' TV series Lost, where the number 108, or a sequence
of numbers which added up to 108, often appeared.
Rogue Nation is produced by Bad Robot, a production company founded by Abrams, who also directed
Mission: Impossible 3.
The name of Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson's character Ilsa was inspired by a character
of the same name played by another Swedish actress in a 1940s movie.
That actress was Ingrid Bergman and the movie was Casablanca, which starred Humphrey Bogart.
By the way, not so coincidentally, part of Rogue Nation was actually filmed in Casablanca,
Morocco.
During Ferguson's first meeting with director Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise, they compared
Ilsa in Mission: Impossible to Ingrid Bergman and fellow Swedish actress Greta Garbo in
terms of their grace and the use of light and shadows in the way they were filmed.
To get ready for some especially dizzying stunts, Rebecca Ferguson spent over a month
training in pilates, explosive running, fight technique and firearms for 6 hours a day 6
days a week.
Her training also included numerous 12-foot practice drops in the stunt rehearsal area
before she tackled the real 75-foot drop from the roof of the Vienna State Opera House on
her first day of filming!
By the end of the shoot, Ferguson had done that drop 40 times!
Oh, and by the way, she also had to overcome her fear of heights and claustrophobia to
bring those stunts to life.
Remember the movie's opening stunt which Tom Cruise actually did himself, hanging on to
the outside of an Airbus A-400-M military transport plane as it flew up to 5,000 feet
in the air?
Well, that scene was shot at the RAF Wittering airbase in Cambridgeshire, England.
A special rig was built to attach the camera to the outside of the plane and the movie's
cinematographer operated it remotely from inside the plane.
To capture additional footage from a different angle, they also filmed from a helicopter
flying beside the plane.
As the airplane was travelling up to 180 miles per hour, the force of the wind was so great
during filming that Cruise had to have special contact lenses made to cover his eyeballs
so he could keep his eyes open and still protect them from engine fumes and airborne debris.
Cruise gave director Christopher McQuarrie strict instructions not to cut once they started
filming unless he gave a signal to do so by touching the top of his head!
In the end, Cruise did the stunt a total of 8 times to make sure they got all the shots
they needed.
To make the movie's underwater heist scene as real as possible, Tom Cruise trained intensively
in free diving, which is basically diving without breathing apparatus!
Cruise built up to doing a 40-metre free dive and could actually hold his breath underwater
for around 6 minutes after training in Florida and the Cayman Islands with veteran athletes
including freediving expert Kirk Krack.
The scene was filmed in a tank measuring about 40 foot square at Leavesden Studios in the
UK.
For added realism, water movers from the Special Effects department were used in the tank to
make Cruise's hair move and so he could swim against the current.
However, the force of the moving water was so strong that they had to tether Cruise to
avoid him getting pushed backwards.
Cruise has said that the dive scene was the most physically challenging part of the movie
for him, and it took him significantly longer to recover from than any other scene.
Although shooting a Mission: Impossible action scene can be pretty intense, Tom Cruise and
Simon Pegg still found time for fun on set while they were filming a car chase scene
in Casablanca.
The two actors kept themselves amused during long stretches in the car in the scorching
Moroccan heat by playing pranks, including sneakily switching on each other's car seat
heater and waiting to see how long it took the other one to notice!
Now, let me know in the comments below, what crazy stunts would you like to see Tom Cruise
do next in Mission: Impossible 6?
And which is your favourite Mission: Impossible movie and why?
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Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!