Yet another Mission Impossible is on the way, they just keep making them.
So if you guys are still into these movies enough to keep seeing them,
you'll definitely also be into learning some lesser-known things about them.
We guess, maybe, we hope, look, I don't know.
So here are seven things you didn't know about the Mission Impossible movies,
probably.
(Sound) What Mission Impossible movie would be complete without a good
old fashioned gun fight?
Well apparently, the very first one.
That's right, even if you have seen Mission Impossible before you probably did
not know or at least did not notice that it doesn't have any shootouts,
like none at all, not even a little one.
Sure Tom Cruise handles a gun and later he gets a gun pointed at him, but
Ethan Hunt never actually fires a gun at any point in the entire film.
He relies only on classic espionage, an explosive or two and, of course,
spandex, a critical element for any spy.
But all you gun violence lovers don't worry your damaged little heads,
they more than make up for the lack of firearms in the first Mission Impossible
with the constant gun fighting in the rest of the movies in the franchise.
(Sound) >> Do you mind if I'm on top?
>> Either way, it works for me.
>> Moving on to M:I-2, you probably didn't know that Thandie Newton's character,
Nyah, is based almost entirely on the character Nicole from How to Steal
a Million, played by Audrey Hepburn.
>> Brilliant.
>> Originally, Nyah wasn't even a jewel thief, she was supposed to be a spy.
But director John Woo was so inspired by Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million,
he felt Nyah would be more charming and interesting as a thief.
>> I don't have a conscience, I'm a bloody thief.
>> Moving on.
(Sound) Sticking with the second film for a moment,
that guy really did just get kicked in the face.
Yep, on that pirouette round-house kick thingy, Tom Cruise accidentally connected,
kicking the guy in the chin.
You can even see the sand flying off his face if you look closely.
And as long as we're on this fight scene for
the famous knife in the eye shot, that's a real knife, and it's really pointy,
and really sharp, and it's really close to Tom Cruise's real eyeball.
Production rigged a cable on the other end of it and hooked it to a bar overhead so
that the knife could only go so far.
So far, as in,
still within a half inch to a quarter inch away from Tom Cruise's freaking eyeball.
Cruise wanted it to feel dangerous for him, as an actor and for
it to look dangerous to the audience.
Yeah, I think if you're goal was to get a theater full of people to
clinch their buttholes in perfect unison, then mission accomplished.
(Sound) Here's the thing from the third film.
Check out this stunt where Ethan and
Lindsay get thrown forward from the roof of the truck.
Tom Cruise and the team more or less came up with the idea for
the stunt on the spot, so they had to figure it out on the fly and
put a stunt driver behind the wheel.
Problem is, Stanley Tucci's former roommate,
Ving Rhames, is supposed to be the one driving in the scene.
They solved the problem by lighting it so that we can't see well enough
into the truck to see that it's not Ving behind the wheel.
Then, once the car stops,
Ving runs in from off camera as if he's just gotten out of the vehicle.
So thanks to a little smoke and mirrors,
the audience is none the wiser that they took the Ving out of driving.
I'll see myself out, right after these three things.
(Sound) >> Easy way to remember, blue is glue.
>> And when it's red?
>> Dead. >> Let's jump into Ghost Protocol.
There was a lot of press about this stunt where Tom Cruise scales the world's
tallest building in Dubai, the Wiz Khalifa.
I mean, the Burj Khalifa.
I will say though, both Khalifa's are very, very high.
(Laugh) >> This stunt got a lot of
press because Tom Cruise did the stunt for real.
He does nearly all his own stunts in the Mission Impossible movies,
which is pretty cool and also evidence of a severe midlife crisis.
Anyway, you may not have realized that they had to take several windows out of
the building to be able to shoot this stunt.
Production had planned to only remove three windows, one for the cameras,
one for the safety crew and then one for Tom Cruise to climb out of.
In the end, to film the sequence, they ended up having
to take 26 windows out which, by the way, is way more than 3.
You know how Ghost Protocol has parts of it that were shot in IMAX?
Well, did you know those IMAX sequences only exist because of the Dark Knight?
>> How about a magic trick?
>> Ghost Protocol's director Brad Bird was so
inspired by the use of IMAX in The Dark Knight, that he
wanted the same feeling of scope and of a movie as a major event, for his film.
The Ghost Protocol team even consulted with Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight
team to learn the ins and outs of shooting on IMAX and
to become familiar with the whole process.
Sort of like an IMAX crash course.
Hopefully, the first lesson was on how to not break the IMAX cameras.
If you don't know what I mean by that, then you haven't seen our episode on
The Dark Knight, and therefore, you should go watch it right now.
Seriously, I'll wait.
(Sound) Back, great, moving on.
(Sound) Going back to the first
Mission Impossible,
you probably didn't know that even though the train sequence is only 7 minutes and
28 seconds long, there are actually 152 shots in that time span.
That works out to almost 21 shots per minute, and
that works out to a lot of shots in a minute or
less than 3 seconds per shot on average if you want to be a mathlete about it.
And some of the shots in the sequence got as little as a quarter of a second screen
time, which is really, really short, kind of like Tom Cruise.
>> That's okay. Hang on, wait a second.
What's so funny about that.?
It's incredibly rude.
>> On that cheap shot we're going to end this one.
But as long as you're here, leave a comment letting us know what your favorite
spy movie or spy movie franchise is.
You going old school with the James Bond, the Connery era James Bond?
Or you going new school with the Kingsmen?
Let us know and discuss amongst yourselves.
Thanks for watching, be sure to check out cineflix.com, and subscribe for
more true-ish things about movies and
sometimes clenched buttholes right here on Things You Didn't Know.
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