Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’s South African stunts

The final film in the Mission: Impossible (MI) franchise sees Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) on a mission to stop The Entity, a rogue AI system. When the Entity’s human liaison, Gabriel (Esai Morales), steals a vital part of the plot, it leads to a wild biplane chase through South African skies – using locations suggested by Durban-born stunt coordinator and second unit director Wade Eastwood, who’s been a core part of the MI team since Rogue Nation in 2015.

Stream Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on Showmax. Also on M-Net (DStv Channel 101) at 8PM on Sunday, 28 December. All eight Mission: Impossible films are now available to binge on Showmax, here. 

The birth of a Mission

The Final Reckoning doesn’t just take Ethan back to the start of the M:I story, it took Tom Cruise there, too, back to a childhood fascination with heights, starting around the age of three. “It all started when I used to lay on the ground, looking up at the birds,” he says. “Then I’d climb the trees, because I liked the feeling of the wind and the feeling of the tree going back and forth in it. As a child, I used to climb out of the window and onto the gutters, to look at the stars. I was always doing stuff like that. I wanted to go to space and travel the world.” 

The second thing that would jolt these childhood daydreams into an obsession was when, early one Saturday morning, he switched on the black-and-white television in the family lounge. “On the TV was this programme about old aviation, and it was showing wing walking,” Tom says. “I remember looking at this wing walking and thinking how exciting it looked, to be the pilot flying the plane and to be the guy on the wing.” He pauses. “Now I look at things like, ‘How can I tell which story? How do I get a camera in there?’ Because doing it and not being able to tell the story about it, well, that's not worth it.” 

Now read on as stunt co-ordinator Wade Eastwood, Tom Cruise, and director Christopher McQuarrie reveal what it takes to create an Impossible stunt.

Testing, testing

Ethan and Gabriel’s 15-minute chase sequence was filmed over the course of four-and-a-half months across three locations: the Blyde River Canyon in Mpumalanga, which formed the backdrop for the start of the chase; the Drakensberg mountains in KZN for the plane-to-plane transfer and the wing walking; and the Wild Coast in the Eastern Cape, for the climactic cockpit fight. “That sequence is like Top Gun meets Mission: Impossible – the best of both worlds,” says Wade.

The biplane stunts were originally tested at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire, as Tom and fellow stunt pilots John Romain, Lee Proudfoot, Steven Jones and Jon Gowd got to grips with the production’s four 1940s Stearman biplanes, which had been modified with camera rigs and reinforced wings. Once the team got to South Africa, further testing and filming took around 4 000 flights, according to editor Eddie Hamilton.

“McQ and I didn't know until we got to South Africa what was going to work,” reveals Tom. “I knew I could do loops and rolls and hammer heads. Now I wanted to make sure I could explore and go Zero-G out on the wing, and travel along their fuselage… The only way you can do this is by building a programme that you move step by step through to build a level of skill and competency, without stepping over any boundaries that you cannot recover from.”

“These planes had to be Formula One mechanically sound,” adds Wade. “They were stripped, like a Formula One car is stripped before a race. The engine, the wing struts, spans, everything was checked daily.” 

Grandpa’s workout

The sheer physical strength it took for Tom, who was over 60 at the time, to do the stunts was its own mission. “I did heavy, heavy weights for this movie, and very different nutrition,” he says. “The forces I was dealing with when I was hanging on the fuselage and trying to get my foot up on the wing was like doing the heaviest squat in your life … I was slamming back and forth on the aeroplane. I was worried about the fuselage. I was worried about me going through the wing, because it was fabric. I had to protect myself, so I didn't get knocked out, because I didn't have a helmet on. Some of the forces were so tremendous that at times I couldn't move.” 

Wade explains, “You know when you put your hand out of the car window, and you feel the forces on your hand? Now imagine putting your whole body out the window and pushing against hurricane force winds, because that’s what he was doing … He would come slamming down onto the wing and lose all his air and be clinging on for his life, before continuing the action.”

Stressed to death!

“I realised, as the person overseeing all of this, that I had to purge stress from my operating basis,” admits Christopher. “I had to do it all with no regard for life and death.” So he made a phone call home to his wife, Heather. “I said to her, ‘By the time I’m in Africa, I simply cannot have any sort of emotional distress or worry, or someone could die.’”

Fear purged, the director took to the air for his own stunts. “When you see Tom flying through that canyon, five feet (one-and-a-half metres) off the water, we’re in a helicopter flying just that bit lower than him, so I can see him under the wing when his wing is almost brushing the rocks,” says Christopher. “The only way for me to communicate directly with Tom was to fly up next to his plane, open the door at 10 000 feet (3000km) and step out onto the skid so he could see me.”

The ultimate publicity stunt

Once Ethan has the all-important Entity-stopping widget in his hands, he can’t simply land the plane. This is an MI film! Cue the burning parachute jump from the biplane. 

This stunt featured Tom Cruise actually leaping from a helicopter over two kilometres up in the air over the Drakensberg, and grappling with a main parachute that’s on fire (having been soaked in a special fuel). 

Tom performed the jump 16 times before he was confident that they had all the angles needed for the shot of Ethan spinning out of control, kicking out of the spin, cutting the parachute loose, and deploying his emergency parachute. At the rate the parachute burned, Tom, who was operating the lightweight Snorricam rig attached to his torso, had just two-and-half to three seconds to capture footage of looking up at his burning chute, before the parachute completely disintegrated, and he would have to deploy his emergency parachute. “There is just no way you could have gotten the shots that we did had I not had that camera on me. They’re a very unique point of view,” Tom says proudly. 

The first time he pulled off the stunt, though, Christopher felt ill. “Then Tom did it another 15 times. He wanted to do one more and that’s when I said no. I was like, ‘Do not anger the gods. We have what we need.’”

As part of publicising the film, the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning production team entered Tom’s burning parachute stunt as a new record category, using Guinness’s Priority Application service at a cost of £650 (R14 720) for new record titles. Their submission was accepted, and Tom Cruise now holds the record for: “the most burning parachute jumps by an individual.” The record notes, “No other actor or stuntman has come close to that amount of death-defying drops.” Well, getting the budget alone might be impossible!

And the payoff? “One of our favourite lines is always when someone says to us, ‘I bought the whole seat, and I only used the edge.’” insists Tom. “That is what I want.”

Stream Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on Showmax.  Also on M-Net (DStv Channel 101) at 8PM on Sunday, 28 December. 

All eight Mission: Impossible films are now available to binge on Showmax, here. Trying to remember which M:I film is which? Read this!