The actor takes on some death-defying stunts in his latest installment of the 'M:I' franchise, out July 12.
Tom Cruise is bringing more death-defying stunts than ever before to Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.
In a new behind-the-scenes clip from the upcoming action flick, Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie headed to the Lake District in northwest England to film the franchise star participating in "one of the most dangerous sports in the world," speedflying.
"While it may look similar, speedflying is not skydiving," McQuarrie explains in the clip. "Skydiving is fairly predictable, speedflying is incredibly unpredictable."
While skydivers look for an open field to land in comfortably, for speedflyers, the point is to accelerate and spiral as close as possible to the mountains and rock formations -- just feet off the ground -- before landing at a high rate of speed.
The intense scenes were too dangerous to film with a helicopter or drone, so the Dead Reckoning crew had to construct their own gimbal system, rigging up two cameras to track Cruise's rapid descent down the mountains, reaching speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.
"It is truly a one-of-a-kind adventure," McQuarrie says in the clip of directing Cruise through his increasingly daring stunts in the Mission: Impossible films. "With Tom there are no limits, so we become a little bit more adventurous every time."
Cruise sat down with ET's Nischelle Turner in Rome last week to preview the upcoming action film, and he shared an interesting fact about the production, revealing that the most dangerous stunt of his career -- a motorcycle jump off of a cliff into a base jump -- was the first-ever scene filmed for Dead Reckoning Part One.
"Well, we know either we're gonna continue with the film or we're not," Cruise said with a laugh of planning the death-defying stunt. "Let's know day one... Do we all continue, or is it a major rewrite?"
In all seriousness, the actor added, it all came down to focus. "It was years preparing. I mean, I've been riding motorcycles since I was a little kid, raced cars and spent a lot of time just with aerobatics, airplanes, helicopters and parachutes... It all kind of came to that moment."
"You have to be razor sharp when you do something like that, so it was very important as we were prepping the film that that actually was the first thing [to shoot], because I don't want to drop that and go shoot other things and then have my mind somewhere else," he continued. "Everyone was prepped, let's just get it done."
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters July 12.
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