![Mission Impossible Fallout Paramount]()
Tom Cruise does a lot of amazing stunts in “Mission: Impossible - Fallout,” but the one that took the most work to pull off was the HALO jump over Paris in the beginning of the movie.
To get into Paris undetected, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and CIA tagalong August Walker (Henry Cavill) decide to do a HALO jump — High Altitude-Low Opening skydive, in which you open your parachute at a low altitude after free-falling for a period of time — at dusk out of a giant C-17 plane. But things get dangerous when Walker insists on jumping out of the plane, even though there’s a lightning storm brewing below them. Walker is so determined, he disconnects Hunt’s oxygen line to his mask and jumps. Hunt scrambles to reattach his line and jumps after Walker.
Before the audience knows it, they're free-falling with Hunt. The camera follows as Hunt catches up to Walker just before lightning strikes them both.
If you have seen any movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, this next fact won’t surprise you: Tom Cruise did the entire HALO sequence without a stuntman. But pulling off the sequence — which included 106 total jumps to get three scenes, and was all done after Cruise suffered a broken ankle earlier in production — was as epic as what is on the screen.
Business Insider spoke to the key members of the HALO jump sequence, including director Christopher McQuarrie, to break down its year-long planning and execution.
SEE ALSO: All 42 Tom Cruise movies, ranked from worst to best
Finding a unique way to get into Paris.
![]()
Generally, a movie is born from a screenwriter’s pen, but it turns out the recent “Mission: Impossible” movies are done a little differently.
“Fallout” director Christopher McQuarrie said the script is actually the last thing to be developed in the making of the movies. The movie is first fueled by the stunts that Cruise, McQuarrie, and others close to the franchise come up with.
“The script is more or less the instruction manual for this thing we all discussed at length about,” McQuarrie said.
So in the case of the HALO jump, they had developed a lot of action to take place in Paris, but then the question remained, how does Hunt get to the City of Lights?
“A HALO jump came up and we started talking about what that would take: this many jumps, learning this and that,” “Fallout” stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood said. “Everyone thought that kind of time didn’t fit in the film schedule, but we made it fit, even thought on paper it didn’t.”
With the stunt decided on, now the hard part started — how to fit Cruise’s HALO training in a schedule that was already filled with motorcycle, fighting, and helicopter training. (Yes, he flew that helicopter himself in the movie.)
More on that later.
Creating a helmet so we could see Tom Cruise’s face.
![]()
If you were to do a HALO jump in real life, a clear helmet showing your whole face wouldn’t be needed. But this is Tom Cruise we’re taking about!
When Cruise and the “Fallout” team learned that the proper gear for a HALO jump is an oxygen mask that covers most of your face and a helmet leaving just your eyes to be seen, there was an immediate rush to come up with something better for Cruise to wear.
“We created a helmet that had a good look and the oxygen sustained,” Eastwood said.
But the mask also had to have lights inside of it so we, the audience, could see that it is in fact Cruise doing the jump. That brought another set of concerns.
“It took extensive pressure testing and altitude testing to get the lighting system consistently safe,” Eastwood said. “We didn’t want them to explode. A fiery Tom Cruise head, that’s very bad.”
Building the largest wind tunnel in the world.
![]()
Before getting in a plane and jumping enough times to get a certified skydiver license, Cruise started his HALO training in a wind tunnel at Leavesden Studios in the UK. And as you can guess, a normal wind tunnel just wouldn’t do.
“I suggested we get a vertical wind tunnel, they said that was a good idea,” said Neil Corbould, the “Fallout” special effects supervisor. “We found a portable wind tunnel and brought it to England but found out very quickly that it was too small.”
The wind tunnel would be used to learn the choreography for the HALO jump sequence devised by Eastwood, but to train properly there would need to be six people in the wind tunnel at the same time (made up of actors, stuntmen, and the camera operators). The wind tunnel Corbould provided could only have two people in it.
“Tom said, ‘Can we make a bigger one,’ and I asked how big, and he said, ‘As big as you can make it,’” Corbould said.
So Corbould found a company to build in 12 weeks what would turn out to be the biggest wind tunnel ever created.
Housed inside an empty exterior water tank at Leavesden, the wind tunnel was 20 feet wide by 10 feet high. Powered by four 1-megawatt generators (enough to power a small town, Corbould noted), the wind tunnel blades would spin 150 miles per hour and raise the people in the tunnel seven feet high.
The large size of the wind tunnel also helped Cruise, who wanted to keep from bumping into the sides of the tunnel as he was still trying to heal his broken ankle while training.
“He had to be rolled into the wind tunnel and then would lay there flat until the power went on and then he would take off,” said Allan Hewitt, “Fallout” skydiving coordinator. “We put some orange tape around his foot so we knew which was the bad foot. We didn't want to touch the wrong one.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
