Tom Cruise’s daring stunts have been a defining feature of the Mission: Impossible franchise, and the upcoming Dead Reckoning Part One promises to be no exception. In an exclusive still from the film released to Empire, it’s revealed that one of the film’s most impressive sequences involves a fight scene atop a speeding steam train.
Director Christopher McQuarrie admits that the train sequence was one of the most challenging scenes to shoot. In an interview with Empire on set in 2021, he said, “We’re making a movie that involves a sequence that they just don’t shoot practically anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time.” McQuarrie explained that filming the scene on an actual moving train added an element of realism that would be impossible to replicate in a studio.
EXCLUSIVE 🚨#MissionImpossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has Tom Cruise fighting on top of a moving train: ‘If we’d known the challenges, we’d never have done it,’ director Christopher McQuarrie tells Empire.
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— Empire Magazine (@empiremagazine) May 5, 2023
He added that the difficulty of the scene was not just in executing the stunts, but also in creating an emotional connection between the audience and the characters. McQuarrie said, “There’s a whole class of action movies centered around awe. 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.”