Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise carried out their dream stunts in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

Director Christopher McQuarrie has revealed how eager action hero Tom Cruise was to drive off a cliff in the latest Mission: Impossible outing, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Speaking with EW, the filmmaker not only says how much Cruise yearned for this death-defying stunt, but he also revealed how he himself was equally desperate to destroy a train.

“At the start of this movie, I said to Tom, ‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to drive a motorcycle off of a cliff. What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to wreck a train.’ We’re enormous fans of Buster Keaton, John Frankenheimer, David Lean, all of these filmmakers who at one time or another had a fabulous train wreck. I thought, I’ve earned that, I want to wreck one too.”

And drive off a cliff Tom Cruise will in a stunt that has been described by Christopher McQuarrie as “the biggest stunt in cinema history.” While we currently have no idea what kind of world-saving antics will lead to Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt risking life and limb, we do know that it will involve Cruise first leaping out of a helicopter before driving a motorcycle at high speed off a ramp and off the edge of a cliff. The actor then ditches his ride, watching it fall to the ground, before falling himself into a base jump.

The sequence is sure to be one of the most exciting, not just in the movie, but in the whole of the Mission: Impossible franchise. With the only sequence likely to beat it being one in which Cruise battles enemies atop a speeding train before the locomotive is, according to McQuarrie, wrecked.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Will Land in Theaters in July

Written, produced, and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One follows on from the events of Mission: Impossible – Fallout and once again finds Tom Cruise leading the way as unstoppable secret agent Ethan Hunt. The sequel also finds the likes of Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Frederick Schmidt, and Henry Czerny reprising their respective roles from the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will add several new faces to the roster, with Captain America star Hayley Atwell playing a mysterious character named Grace. A character that Christopher McQuarrie has called a “destructive force of nature.” The rest of the supporting cast includes Esai Morales as the main antagonist, Shea Whigham as a man trying to track Ethan Hunt, and Pom Klementieff as an assassin hunting Ethan and Grace, with Mariela Garriga, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Rob Delaney, Cary Elwes, Indira Varma, and Mark Gatiss cast in undisclosed roles.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is scheduled for release in the United States on July 12, 2023, by Paramount Pictures with a further sequel, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part Two, set to be released on June 28, 2024.