How Tom Cruise Pulled Off the HALO Jump in 'Mission: Impossible

The quick decision that saved the HALO sequence

In March, "Fallout" production wrapped up in Abu Dhabi with the HALO sequence. The months of training and creation of prototype equipment for Cruise to wear on the jump finally came together on film.

And luckily, the team had finally found a skydiver who would strap the 20-pound camera rig on his head to film Cruise's jump: Craig O'Brien.

"There was a lot of reluctance," McQuarrie said of trying to find someone who would film the HALO sequence. "The first two cameramen, they gave us a lot of rules and telling us what was and wasn't possible, and we're not into that at all. We're not reckless, but what we want to hear are solutions, not restrictions."

Enter O'Brien, who had experience as a skydiving camera operator, though he had to learn a more cinematic way of shooting.

"Narrative storytelling is a very different style of framing. You're not just capturing an event — you're directing the eye," McQuarrie said. "I'm making you look where I want you to look. He had to learn how to do that."

And O'Brien wasn't looking through a camera lens — the camera was strapped to the top of his head — so he had to do all of that while, as McQuarrie put it, "shooting a scene through a periscope, and you're not looking through the periscope."

Not only did O'Brien pull it off amazingly, but he also solved one of the biggest problems that had befuddled everyone for the first seven jumps: out-of-focus footage.

Because the scene starts inside the C-17 plane, a focus puller was in there, responsible for that part of the sequence. For Cruise's jump (Cavill, playing Walker, never did the jump, as a stuntman went in his place), O'Brien jumped out first and had to slow himself down as Cruise sped up to him. When Cruise got 3 feet from O'Brien's helmet camera, O'Brien would then have to become the focus puller and put the dial in his hand to its closest focus.

But when they would land and look at the footage, Cruise would be out of focus.

"Tom said, 'I was there,' and Craig said, 'I had the dial buried,'" McQuarrie said. "Someone was f---ing up, and we couldn't figure out who."

The next day, O'Brien told the focus puller on the plane to shut off his remote once Cruise jumped out of the plane. To everyone's surprise, that was the problem — the equipment inside the plane was fighting with O'Brien's camera.

Two weeks and 106 jumps later — many done at "magic hour," at dusk, when they had only three minutes of perfect light to shoot — the three parts of the HALO sequence were in the can.

In postproduction, the Abu Dhabi ground was replaced with Paris lights, and a CGI lightning storm was added. But other than that, it was all Cruise, diving and twisting 25,000 feet above the ground (with O'Brien following him the whole way).

Now all that's left is: Can "Mission: Impossible" top this stunt?

"I know there's something out there. We just don't know what it is yet," McQuarrie said. "Whether it's me or someone else, as long as Tom is willing to do it, you can think up crazy s---."

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