Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Director Teases Massive Tom Cruise Train Stunt

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning‘s director is already teasing one massive Tom Cruise train stunt. Empire Magazine interviewed Christopher McQuarrie and got the details of a massive locomotive brawl in the upcoming movie. In an announcement that should shock no one, they decided to film the fight on top of a train practically. However, the ambitious nature of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One makes it so both actors and crew have to be very careful bringing such a stunt to life. Tom Cruise famously pushes for such flourishes in his films. However, the director realizes that accomplishing something this grand has to be done with an eye towards safety.

“We’re making a movie that involves sequence that they just don’t shoot practically anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time,” McQuarrie told the publication. “The sequence that we’re shooting right now is no exception. And like most things on Mission: Impossible, if we had known what the challenges were when we started, we would never have done it.”

“There’s a whole class of action movies centred around awe,” McQuarrie added later. “For me, awe is a condiment, not a course. I have an actor who will drive a motorcycle off a cliff. Now the hard part is, I gotta make the audience care about that.”

What Else Happens In the New Mission: Impossible?

The filmmaker previously talked to Light the Fuse about how the title hints toward where we’re going in Dead Reckoning. It seems like we’re in for a pretty massive ride in a few weeks.

“When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two,” McQuarrie explained. “The title for the first movie was nearly … a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn’t a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One.”

He continued, “And yet, Dead Reckoning didn’t really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie? And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you’ll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it’s conceptually represented in every character’s journey in this film we’re in.”

What other stunts would you like to see Cruise complete? Let us know down in the comments!