Tom Cruise recalls his deathly "Long Line" stunt sequence for Mission Impossible: Fallout

Among the first few stunt sequences that were shot for Mission Impossible : Fallout was one their most extreme stunts called the "long-line". It was shot in New Zealand involving leading man Tom Cruise to climb up a rope that was dangling from a helicopter flying at roughly 2,000 feet and then free-falling 40 feet onto a payload at the end of the rope and bouncing off of it.

According to Tom Cruise, the stunt was in the design and planning stages for two years. “It was definitely one of the most extreme things we did on this movie, but you can’t get this stuff on a green screen. It’s very technical: You have to figure out what the helicopter can hold, the payload, where you can put the cameras, what the angles can be. All the rigs have to check out, any little particle that comes off and hits the rotor blades is a real problem. It required great flying from the pilot and rigging from the stunt guys, who all did an incredible job.”

The sequence also required extensive physical preparation on Cruise’s part. “I’ve been training for this for a long time,” he says. “The climb was very difficult. It’s hard to catch your breath because there is less oxygen up there because of the low pressure under the rotor. It was bitter cold, and I was wearing a rig that cuts off the blood circulation so my legs were numb. Then it’s a 40-foot drop and you don’t know what’s going to happen. I was free-falling away from the camera, and there is that point when you’ve just got to let go. The first time my hands literally locked, it was like I couldn’t let go of the rope.”

Once he did let go, Cruise had to try to control his positioning as he fell. “I wanted to hit the bag on my back and roll,” he says. “I knew there was going to be an impact and it really knocked the wind out of me. If I hit my shoulder too hard or I went head first that wouldn’t have been good.” 

Ask MI-6 co-star Henry Cavill about watching the man in action first hand and he says, “To see Tom climbing up that long-line and then fall was quite amazing actually. All he was attached to was the helicopter. If there was a huge gust of wind or something went wrong it could have been extremely dangerous. This crew has seen many stunts before, but when he dropped there was an audible gasp from the crowd, and that’s exactly what we wanted” recalling his experience watching the stunt from a safe vantage point.

Releasing on July 27, 2018, ‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT‘– A Paramount Pictures movie, will be exclusively distributed in India by Viacom18 Motion Pictures. The film releases in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

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Tags: Bollywood, Bollywood News, Bollywood Updates, Television, Telly News, Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible: Fallout, New Zealand, Hollywood News