The Mummy with Tom Cruise: return to the plane scene, worthy of Mission Impossible

We all know that Tom Cruise loves impossible missions, especially when they involve planes, free falls and a good dose of adrenaline. After having spent a whole scene harnessed to the wing of an Airbus in full flight (at an altitude of 1500 meters and at 400 km/h) for Rogue Nation, and while he promises us the biggest stunt of all time in the next installment of the Mission Impossible saga, he’s off to play with gravity again in one of The Mummy’s most incredible scenes.

“Sometimes people are terrified of flying. And me, I’ve always loved it. I fly planes. And I think about different things I could do to involve the spectators. Scare them, thrill, I like to do that kind of stuff,” he told us on the red carpet of the Parisian premiere.

But for the time being, it is aboard an Airbus A310 that he is offering us to board. As his character (Nick Morton) and that of Annabelle Wallis (Jenny Halsey) try to fly the mummy’s sarcophagus back to England, a flock of crows damage the engines of the plane, which immediately crashes. free fall.

A fall that will be momentarily fatal to Nick Morton, and a scene that the film crew should not soon forget, if we are to believe what director Alex Kurtzman told us in an interview:

“We shot the sequence at zero gravity. The plane had been designed for travel in zero gravity. It is propelled into the sky, at the speed of a rocket going into space, it balances itself, and then he’s in free fall for 22 seconds, and that’s when the camera rolls.

We find ourselves in weightlessness. You can plan things out, choreograph the scene ahead of time, expect Tom Cruise to hit the ceiling, grab a parachute and give it to Annabelle Wallis, but once you get down to zero gravity, anything can happen. That’s what makes things magical and funny.”

A method that is unusual to say the least, and which allows a particularly immersive experience for the viewer, unlike what the same scene shot in the studio could have given:

“We felt very strongly that we had to do that rather than shoot this sequence on a green screen with cables, which would not have given a really realistic result, no matter how good the special effects were. We had to can experience that, being on that plane as it’s falling, not cutting out the scene too much, and watching Tom and Annabelle circle around the camera.

There’s a moment where Tom walks right past the lens, and I used that take because I actually thought his foot was going to hit the camera as we were shooting. If you see the scene in 3D, it really misses it. So it was great, and it was a real challenge for the actors, because when gravity comes back, it comes back twice as strong. So it crushes you to the ground. It’s very difficult to move around in these conditions,” says the director.

We will understand, Tom Cruise and planes, it’s a long story that continues today. The opportunity to take a short tour of all his previous aeronautical adventures…