All of it begins with the prologue, by which Bond escapes a squad of Soviet assassins throughout an exciting downhill ski chase on a mountain in Austria, which climaxes with Bond skiing off the side of the mountain, falling hundreds of ft earlier than his Union Jack parachute blooms out behind him.
Though the scene takes place within the Alps within the film, the sequence was filmed at Mount Asgard (sure, named after Thor’s residence) on the distant Baffin Island in northern Canada. The mountain reaches an elevation of greater than 6,000 ft, and the crew from the film needed to attain the glacier summit through helicopter. The person employed to carry out the soar was a climber {and professional} ski teacher from California named Rick Sylvester, who was reportedly paid $30,000 to make the soar (your complete sequence price $500,000 to movie). Sylvester had beforehand carried out a few 3,000-foot jumps from El Capitan in Yosemite Park, however this was new territory. He and the crew stayed at Baffin Island for 2 weeks earlier than making an attempt the shot, testing out digicam areas and ready for the precise good climate situations.
4 cameras had been deployed to seize the soar, and Sylvester admitted years later that he had hassle moving into place to deploy the parachute—which made it doable that he had fallen out of the view of all of the cameras earlier than the Union Jack chute was launched.
As soon as the footage was developed, nonetheless (and keep in mind, that is 1976, so the precise celluloid needed to be despatched away from the placement and developed earlier than anybody may see what they acquired!), it was decided that the footage captured by the third digicam was usable—a very good factor, since dangerous climate rolled in instantly afterward.
Though the footage of the jump is heart-stopping to observe even at this time, it’s dampened somewhat by the insert of a close-up of Roger Moore, very clearly hanging from strings on a set as he prepares to “land.” Nonetheless, it stood for 46 years—till now—as maybe probably the most daring movie stunt ever efficiently tried.
The Spy Who Rode a Bike Off a Cliff
No Roger Moore-like insert photographs right here! Through the years, Tom Cruise has insisted on performing most, if not all, of his personal stunts, pulling off a sequence of escalating, death-defying sequences all through the course of the Mission: Unattainable sequence. However after hanging off ascending planes, helicopters, rushing trains, cliff faces, and the tallest skyscraper on the earth in six earlier movies, Cruise had one thing much more spectacular in thoughts for the seventh M:I journey: whereas pursuing a practice, his Ethan Hunt drives a bike off an enormous cliff. Ethan then free falls till he can deploy a parachute to pilot himself safely onto the roof of a transferring practice.
