Thanks to Frosty over at Collider for this little tidbit he got while interviewing MI:6 producer David Ellison at SXSW:
“We’re thrilled. Chris is back, obviously, writing and directing after Rogue Nation. We could not be more excited about the character Henry Cavill’s going to play. And I will say after the Burj [Khalifa] we thought it was going to be impossible to top that stunt, and then Tom did the A380 for the plane. What Tom is doing in this movie I believe will top anything that’s come before. It is absolutely unbelievable—he’s been training for a year. It is going to be, I believe, the most impressive and unbelievable thing that Tom Cruise has done in a movie, and he has been working on it since right after Rogue Nation came out. It’s gonna be mind-blowing.”
"It all comes from the best place. It is all about entertaining an audience. Tom’s entire mantra for hanging on the side of the Burj Khalifa or the A380 or literally holding your breath for six minutes underwater to do the Taurus sequence is, in a world of massive [visual] effects, he said the audience can tell when it’s you on a green screen or when you’re actually doing it live. And the tension, because the stunt is real, actually puts the audience where Ethan Hunt is where they are in the movie. He said that’s why he does it; it’s all about entertaining an audience and it makes the movie better.”
Scientology stuff aside, Cruise is a genuine actor that is serious about his craft. The plane stunt from MI:5 and the Burj Kalifa from MI:4 were both fantastic. I'm not sure how they're going to top "strapping the world's biggest movie star to an actual plane during take off," but, hell, I'm all eyes and ears for this next installment.
MI:6 is set for release on July 27, 2018.
I wrote earlier last week about Cruise's passion for stunts:
"If you saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in IMAX, for my money the best installment of the never ending franchise, this is the scene you will remember the most. The story goes Tom Cruise fired his own insurance company so he could perform this gravity-defying stunt atop Dubai's Burj Kalifa. In the scene, Cruise runs, slides, crawls and, yes, even flies around the tall skyscraper. That's 28,000 feet above the ground. The fact that Cruise looked so comfortable and at ease doing this stunt does show the high that results from performing such a risk-taking, death-defying endeavor. I wholly recommend you check out the behind-the-scenes featurette of the stunt HERE."
"It also doesn't look it;s going to stop. This here is a picture of Cruise in a preparation meeting for The Mummy's zero-gravity plane scene. He looks like a a kid in the candy store, pumped for the stunt. Cruise does most of his own stunts. Having spoken to a few stuntmen, it's all about the rush. Once you start doing it, it's very hard to stop. Much props to him, I don't think anyone else in Hollywood goes to the extent that Cruise does in making his action scenes look as realistic as possible."
