The Mission: Impossible series is one of my favorite movie franchises, not because the plots are particularly good—though the writing of the last few have been incredibly solid—but because the stuntwork is just plain astounding. Those stunts are often helmed by none other than the film's star, Tom Cruise, who has a penchant for the dramatic and zero fear of, well, anything.
And because of this, we get close-ups of the movie star in all sorts of death-defying action, including riding BMW's S1000RR along a desert mountain road in 2015's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. But not everyone is Tom Cruise. So how do you get your other actors to look the part and make the audience believe they're just as nuts as he is?
That was definitely a question the production had and the stunt crew came up with a need-to-see solution with some incredibly awesome engineering. In particular, how they got Rebecca Ferguson's character to be the BMW rabbit to Cruise's BMW fox.
Check out this behind-the-scenes footage recently uploaded to Instagram from the film's stunt folks.
The sequence, when Ferguson's character is running from Cruise's, required the actors to ride motorcycles at high rates of speed through a canyon road. Cruise, a long-time and talented motorcyclist, had no trouble riding for camera. But Ferguson, to make the scene believable, needed some movie magic and a heavily modified "Biscuit rig."
Biscuit rigs have been around for ages for both cars and motorcycles, but they're always quite static with the vehicle just stationary on a platform. It looks pretty fake and the audience can tell the production is cheating. But the Rogue Nation folks came up with one that allowed Ferguson to actually lean her BMW S1000RR over, so it made her look like she could go toe-to-toe with Cruise.
As such, the footage we get from Jem FX's Elia Popov is wild, the poster of the video and person who built it, but I'd love to see more of how this whole rig works.
Popov in the post says, "Today we were looking back at some of the #jemfxbuilt motorcycle rigs we have created over the years and this one has to be the top dog of insanity! 90mph in the Atlas Mountains and chased by @fred_north and @rpnagle at the helm of the biscuit rig always tryin to “do better”.
Stunt work is something I love to watch occur and get nerdy with, and this most definitely scratched that itch. Maybe we'll see the MI stunt folks get on with Corridor Digital's Stuntmen React series. Likewise, hopefully we get more motorcycle chases in the next installment of Mission: Impossible, though that last jump was pretty nuts.
