Cruise Fired Insurers Who Complained About Stunts

Tom Cruise has developed something of a reputation in his action movies for rolling his sleeves up when it comes to stunt and action sequences.  He prefers making things are realistic as possible.  During a group interview at the Berlin premiere of “Terminator Genisys“, and during the course of their wide-ranging conversation, Ellison told a great story about the Burj Khalifa stunt sequence from Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol:

“On Ghost Protocol, we wanted to hang Tom off the side of a building and we actually couldn’t get insurance, and Tom wanted to fire the insurance company [laughs]. And we did and we got somebody to insure the movie. A hilarious but true story is it was the day we were actually rehearsing the Burj Khalifa, it was the whole stunt team, Tom on the side of the building, me, [director] Brad Bird, and [producer] Bryan Burk, and Tom was padded up, had the helmet on, and we had rehearsed for months inside these hangars and sound stages and Tom kicked off the building and, as he would describe it, spectacularly crashed into it head first, and me and Burk and Brad were like ‘this is a really bad idea’. In true Tom fashion, while we were all arguing amongst ourselves about how we were the largest idiots known to mankind for putting ourselves in this situation, Tom reset back to one with the stunt guys and nailed it perfectly on the second rehearsal. And we all kind of looked at each other and were like, ‘Well, that’s why he’s Tom Cruise.’ We shot it the next day. We shot it twice and it was spectacular.”

It looks like there will be more of the same in the next movie as Cruise was seen doing most of his actual stunt driving and, of course, hanging on to the side of that plane.  Kudos to Tom Cruise.