More than a little impressed by Tom Cruise's insane dedication to the most dangerous stunts? You're not the only one. In an interview with Collider, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation producers David Ellison and Dana Goldberg praise the star's commitment as "sensational."
"These stunts are rehearsed to within an inch of their life," Ellison explains, "but the one thing that Tom feels very passionately about, and it really comes from a place of wanting to entertain the audience, is in a movie like Mission: Impossible, where it’s possible to do these things using a camera that doesn’t rely on the CG that Star Trek or Terminator relied on, when you actually see Tom Cruise holding onto the side of the airplane and the camera doesn’t cut, you get this pit in your stomach that’s just uncomfortable. It puts the audience there in a way you could never do with CG."
One-upping the spectacle in a blockbuster franchise that has already seen the likes of a Channel Tunnel explosion and a Burj Khalifa climbing sequence couldn't have been easy. Aside from Rogue Nation's heavily trailered plane sequence, there's also a daredevil motorbike chase (throwing back to the second movie but hopefully a whole lot better) and an underwater set piece in which Cruise held his breath on camera for a remarkable six minutes.
"We love working with Tom," Goldberg enthuses. "The truth is Tom spoils you because you work with Tom and you then have the expectation that of course every movie star/producer is going to be like that. Because he’s typically the first person on the set and the last person on the set. And he will openly look at you and say ‘I don’t expect you to work harder than me, but I expect you to keep up with me.’ He says it by example, which is beyond impressive."
And it seems Cruise's fearless attitude has more than paid off: the producers say Rogue Nation has scored higher with test audiences than any of the previous films in the series. Could this be the best Mission: Impossible movie so far? Unsurprisingly, Goldberg thinks so.
"It’s a phenomenal movie and I think I’m officially allowed to say that we tested even higher than Ghost Protocol," she says. "There’s not a lot of times in your life, you dream about them, but those moments you go to a preview screening and everybody’s there, your director, your star, the studio, you sit there and from the second the movie starts, you’re just like ‘oh, this feels really, really good’. It feels that way from top to bottom, and then they walk in and they tell you what the audience thought and it felt even better to the audience than it did to you, and that’s how we felt in Arizona a couple weeks ago."
Not long to wait until we see the thrilling end result. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation hits our screens on 30th July.
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