Paris, France - Tom Cruise is well-known as a keen biker, and he’s famous for doing his own stunts. Put the two together and you have a recipe for spectacular action sequences, and never more so than in the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Here we go behind the scenes in Paris for the shooting of a hair-raising motorcycle chase sequence, featuring a
, for the latest instalment, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, now on circuit in South Africa.
Watch as Cruise explains how it was done, and director Christopher McQuarrie explains how nerve-wracking it was to have the film’s star riding “as fast as the bike will go” (Cruise’s words) through the streets of Paris without a crash helmet. Look closely during the Arc de Triomphe shots and you can clearly see that is is Cruise himself riding against the traffic on the world’s biggest and busiest traffic circle.
But perhaps the most telling moment is Cruise’s reaction when the safety harness for shot where he turns the bike by spinning the back wheel around doesn’t work.
“We gotta roll,” he says, “we gotta shoot this.” And they did, as you’ll see below.