‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’: Tom Cruise Says He’ll Never Stop Pushing to Do His Own Stunts

Forget the broken ankle and forget that he’s 56 years old — Tom Cruise says he’ll never stop doing his own stunts.

The Mission: Impossible – Fallout star told PopCulture.com at the movie’s Washington, D.C. premiere that he will “keep going” as long as he’s able.

In fact, Cruise said he and Christopher McQuarrie, the movie’s director-screenwriter-producer, were very hands-on when creating each stunt for Fallout.

“We’re developing it top to bottom,” Cruise said. “We’re developing it ourselves.”

In the skydiving scene, for example, Cruise and McQuarrie reviewed an animatic to decide which lens to use, how the stunt would be performed safely and what it would require to make sure no detail was left undone.

“You wake up every day thinking how can I do more, how can I push this farther, and we were confronting the material every day,” McQuarrie said. “And that meant re-writing the script every day, reinventing it every day. And a lot of times, we’d come to work not knowing what were going to do that day.”

The film involves cars, boats, motorcycles, running and helicopters. In fact, Cruise trained 18 months to learn how to fly a helicopter and said he broke his ankle doing an “easy” stunt — running and jumping from one building to the next.

McQuarrie, the only director of two Mission: Impossible movies — he also directed Rogue Nation, the fifth installment — says it took “a lot of persuading” on Cruise’s part to get him to return for Fallout. He agreed under one condition — Fallout had to be directed almost as if someone else directed the film.

When he took over Rogue Nation, McQuarrie felt he had to follow the same theme as Ghost Protocol, the fourth installment of Mission: Impossible. The tone for Fallen would need to change to make it his own.

“I knew if I was going to be a different director I was going to have to swim upstream, which is a little bit of a risk,” he said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Now Cruise and “McQ” — as Cruise calls McQuarrie — have made nine films together. Will there be more?

“if I could have him direct the next one and the next one,” Cruise said. “It would be my honor.”

Mission: Impossible – Fallout comes to theaters on Friday, July 27. The sixth installment of the franchise includes Cruise, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson.

Photo Credit: Paramount