Mission Impossible: How Cruise’s Record Breaking Underwater Heist Was Shot

Tom Cruise’s underwater stunt in the fifth Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, was one of the hardest to shoot and remains one of the craziest stunts in a franchise full of them. The memorable sequence involving Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt even tops the Burj Khalifa stunt in Ghost Protocol. During the heist, Cruise’s character has to access a secure vault in order to swap out some personnel data – normally an easy mission for Ethan. However, because it’s a Mission: Impossible movie, the vault is, naturally, underwater and can only be accessed by diving through a giant vertical tunnel. Additionally, security alarms were set to go off if any metal was sensed in the vault’s perimeter, meaning no air tanks. This led to Ethan holding his breath for at least three minutes to pull off the heist.

But, as things tend to do in Mission: Impossible movies, the heist went awry and Ethan was underwater for over six grueling minutes getting bounced around by the cyclonic current surrounding the vault. The Rogue Nation stunt one of the most nerve-wracking scenes in any M:I movie. One could easily be forgiven for thinking it was CGI or that the scene was shot in multiple, short takes to allow Cruise to resurface and breathe. However, it was not. The entire sequence was shot in one long take, with Cruise holding his breath for over six and a half minutes, a whopping feat of lung capacity and breath control.

Pulling off the shot required an enormous amount of work on both sides of the camera. First, being the stunt disciple and adrenaline junkie he is, Cruise was determined to learn how to hold his breath for real. He trained with freediving specialist and stunt consultant Kirk Crack to learn how to train his body to hold his breath and go without oxygen for an extended period of time. Initially, Crack trained Cruise to hold it for up to three minutes. When it came time to shoot the actual stunt, however, Cruise ended up holding his breath for over six minutes, an astonishing feat stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood corroborated. Perhaps it helped that Cruise runs so much.

To accomplish the actual stunt, Cruise first jumped off a 120-foot ledge to mimic diving into the water tunnel, because it simply wouldn’t be a Tom Cruise movie without a stunt involving height. The tunnel of the water cooling system was one of the few things that was CGI, but Cruise really did shoot the vertical jump to composite it into the CGI. Also CGI was the giant, sweeping arm of the underwater cooling system. However, everything else was Cruise’s practical stuntwork, which was shot in a giant tank set filled with 20 feet of water. The finished scene was interspersed with multiple cuts, which is why it appears to have been shot in several takes instead of the single, continuous one it actually was.

In underwater sequences, actors hold their breath for only ten seconds at a time, fifteen at most. Cruise attempting to hold his for six minutes understandably made the insurance and safety team nervous. In fact, the scene was so dangerous Cruise had to convince the safety and compliance officers he could do the stunt himself. That’s why the actor started working with Crack in the first place, to convince the safety officers he’d be better off doing the stunt if he knew how to hold his breath. Luckily, they relented and cleared Cruise to do the scene, as it remains one of the most eye-popping stunts ever pulled off in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

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