Tom Cruise explains his death-defying stunts in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning

Hollywood star Tom Cruise went all out for his upcoming film Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. On the first day of principal photography on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One – he drove a motorbike off a mountain. He didn’t stop there, the actor did that seven more times to get the take right.
He drove a custom-made Honda CRF 250 off a purpose-built ramp on the side of Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain, a vertiginous rock face sat some 1,200 metres above sea level. Then he plunged 4,000 feet into the ravine below before opening his parachute barely 500 feet from the ground.When he landed, director, Christopher McQuarrie, and the small crew of his Mission co-stars who had assembled to watch the seminal cinematic sequence from the safety of video village, breathed a collective sigh of relief.
The actor picked himself up and did it all again another seven times, just to make sure the footage was perfect. Talking about the stunt, Tom Cruise says: “Every time I went off the ramp, it was dangerous. It was risking my life. And we wanted to keep that to a minimum. We have a saying on Mission: Impossible movies: ‘Don’t be safe. Be competent’.”
As is Cruise’s now standard practice, the motorbike jump – in which Ethan Hunt zooms off the edge, ditches the bike and executes a high-risk BASE jump in the six-second window he has before impact, had been long in the planning. After rehearsing for a year in the UK during pre-production, by the time the cameras rolled he’d completed over 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps in readiness to prepare for the most dangerous stunt he has ever completed on screen.
“I started down a hill on my bicycle, hit the ramp, split the wood in two and smashed into some garbage cans. There was blood everywhere,” he laughs. “I’ve had a lot of blood and broken bones and teeth from doing that over the years, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
The perfect example of Cruise’s constant quest for competency is his speedometer. Or, rather, his lack of one. He said: “I needed to be at a certain speed when I jumped off the ramp [in the BASE jump stunt], but I couldn’t have a speedometer on the bike because the ramp was so narrow that if I looked down, I could come off it. (IANS)