by Mark McDermott
Everybody knows the scene. The plane is taking off, carrying black-clad bad guys and a pallet of nerve gas capable of killing an entire city. Tom Cruise, aka superagent Ethan Hunt, is clinging to a closed door — that is, outside the plane. The plane steeply ascends to the skies, and Cruise, his whole body rattling in the turbulence, is holding on for dear life, thousands of feet above the Earth. It’s such an iconic image that it graced the movie poster for “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation,” the 2015 hit movie that was the franchise’s fifth installment.
What few people knew is there was another man dangling off the side of that plane. He didn’t appear in the movie, but that iconic movie poster image is his shot, because this superagent of a sort specializes in high-degree-of-difficulty photography, much as Cruise famously does his own stunts, the more insane the better.
Bo Bridges got the shot. And as Mission Impossible rolls to its culminating eighth film, “Final Reckoning,” Bridges is still marveling at the sequence of events that led to him dangling outside an airbus going 180 miles per hour with a camera duct-taped onto his wrists, his eyelids getting whipped so vigorously by the wind that he thought he might lose one, and his subject, Cruise, barely visible as a nearby dark object swinging alongside the plane’s fuselage.
The adventure began during the summer of 2014 when Bridges, a Manhattan Beach-based photographer renowned for his work in action sports, got a call from Paramount Pictures asking if he was available to take still photography for Mission Impossible. But the offer came with two caveats: one, they weren’t sure they could get Bridges access to the shoot, which was about to commence in Morocco; and two, there was no guarantee even if he got access that they’d end up using his photos. It would depend on how good the photos were.
His response was, essentially, hell yes.
“So it was kind of a gamble on their end to bring me in, because no one could really stop this production and say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’ve got a specialty photographer we’re bringing in. Can you stop all production so Bo can step in and shoot?’” Bridges recalled. “So it was definitely a gamble, but I was willing to take it, and I figured I’d probably meet the right people and manage to get my way in there.”
Bridges arrived in Marrakesh and then the entire production trucked east to the rugged Atlas Mountains.
“It was a pretty good hike to get up there, and I’d never been,” Bridges said. “I was looking around, and this was a big, big production, a couple hundred people, and I was being introduced to some of the directors and stuntmen and everything else around the scene.”
Early on the first morning of shooting, Bridges was poking around, trying to figure out his angles, not so much shooting-wise but in terms of his place in the scheme of things.
“Tom wasn’t there yet, but the next thing we know, we hear this air in the mountains and here comes a helicopter,” he said. “It’s Tom, flying in. He lands pretty close to us, gets out, and I am standing in the back, not expecting to meet him, just like, ‘Well, alright, he’s coming to set.’ And the head of PR grabs him, brings him straight over to me, and he walks right up, like full Tom Cruise style, “Great to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m looking forward to working with you. I’ll see you in a little bit.’ And that was it. He just walks off, and I was like, ‘Alright. Cool.’”
Bridges had been shooting movies off and on for the better part of a decade, and he’d learned the best way into the inner workings of a production.
“I kind of embed myself with the stuntmen, because those guys, they know everything, right?” Bridges said. “And I am only there to shoot the stunts, so as much as I can, I become friends with those guys. Then I can figure my way around.”
On this set, legendary stuntman and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood was in charge. He’s done all the Mission Impossible movies and has served as Cruise’s stuntman in other movies, as well, although Cruise famously does almost all his own stunts, particularly the most challenging ones.
“So I quickly became good friends with him, and he was giving me the lowdown of how it’s going to work that day,” Bridges said. “And basically he’s like, ‘Look, we’re going to do a stunt later in the day where Tom is going to ride this motorcycle through the mountains, and we’re going to have a follow cam right in front of him — he’s going to stay around the tail of this contraption, and he’s going to be hairpinning anywhere from 30 to 80 100 miles an hour through the mountains, depending on the turns and the straightaways and everything else. And then we’re going to have this motorcycle on a pulley getting pulled off the side of the mountain, and we’ve got a pyro guy that’s going to blow the motorcycle up right as Tom makes this turn around this corner on the side of a cliff.’”
“Alright,” Bridges thought. “So how am I going to get that shot?”
“I’m trying to put it all together,” he said. “I end up going in what was basically a race car on a chassis with a roll bar cage around it, and it had some seats in the rear aimed straight back. So you are sitting on the ground like a go-cart, but you are going backwards, and you are in a five point harness system. You don’t know where you are going, you are at the mercy of the race car drivers driving you forwards, and you are looking backwards. It was a crazy contraption, and we got in it and Tom was right behind us, and he’s banking these turns, and we’re going around these mountains, and I’m shooting in reverse, just looking at Tom.”
The money shot would have to achieve several things. It had to make Cruise look good, of course, which was the easiest part. But the rest of the logistics were mindboggling.
“He’s got to be at the right angle, we’ve got to get the explosion, we’ve got the motorcycle flying off the cliff, and everything has to come together in one frame,” Bridges said. “So it took us five takes to get the timing down in terms of the speed, the pulley, and the explosion. But once it was dialed in, we nailed it. Right out of the gate, we got it all on the camera, all in the frame.”
After the shoot, Bridges went back to his “little tent in the middle of nowhere” and began downloading the photos. The film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, suddenly appeared over his shoulder, checking out the photos as they popped up on Bridges’ laptop.
“Whoa,” McQuarrie said. “Has TC seen these?” He was referring to Cruise, who everyone on set simply called “TC.”
“No,” Bridges said.
“Not yet,” McQuarrie said.
Bridges tried to explain that he was just beginning the downloading process and needed to go through them to pare down to a selection of the best shots — like all photographers, he needed to review his work before deciding which to use — but McQuarrie wasn’t having it. He told Bridges to grab his laptop, and they marched off to Cruise’s trailer.
“We walk over there, and I didn’t realize the ring of fire that surrounds Tom,” Bridges said. “You can’t just access Tom any time of the day. But the director pulls me over there.”
“Tom,” McQuarrie said. “You’ve got to see these photos.”
They all sit down at Bridges’ laptop and he’s quietly horrified, because this is his first look at most of the shots, as well.
“I’m kind of like, ‘Oh geez, hopefully he’s going to like them,” Bridges said.
Cruise looked up from the laptop.
“How long are you here for?” he asked Bridges.
Bridges explained he was booked for a week, including two days travel and five days shooting.
“So basically I have like four days left,” he said.
“Well, do you think you can stick around a little bit longer and shoot some more?” Cruise asked.
Bridges said he would check his schedule.
“But I really didn’t have anything more important to do than shoot Tom Cruise, right? So whatever I have on my schedule I can definitely move.”
But he told Cruise it would also depend on Paramount, who after all were paying his fees.
“I’ll tell you what,” Cruise said. “You check your schedule. I’ll take care of Paramount. We’d love to keep you around longer.”
Bridges ended up staying in Morocco for three weeks, shooting on the days big stunts were happening, which ended up being about five days. They ranged from the mountains to Rabat, the capital city, as well as Marrakech and Casablanca. What Bridges best remembers from those days wasn’t just the stunts, but watching Cruise work, and the conversations the two of them had, both about ideas for stunt shots and their work in general.
“It was pretty cool, because his background is obviously a love for action, and my background was a love for action sports, in terms of capturing it,” he said. “So we got to talking and he was like, we could do this, and this, and this…We kind of made a quick bond just talking about the things we love to do. And it was obvious in watching him make the movie that the guy lives to do his own stunts, which I didn’t know coming into this. I knew he did his own stuff, but I didn’t realize the caliber of what he was doing with these stunts. Like, he wants to rock climb, but not just that, but free climb, with no ropes. Then he wants to fly helicopters, and not just fly, but get his own pilot’s license and then flies it by himself. Same with airplanes, motorcycles, race cars. He just goes out and learns it.”
Maybe even more impressive was Cruise’s presence on set.
“He can remember every single person’s name,” Bridges said. “He could walk into a massive room and just rattle off everybody’s names. It was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
No sooner had Bridges arrived back home to Manhattan Beach three weeks later than he received another call from Paramount. “Tom wants you to come back,” he was told. They were in Austria, shooting at the Opera House in Vienna, and there was a particularly crazy stunt in which Cruise was leaping from a high scaffolding that he wanted Bridges to capture with still photos. Bridges flew to Vienna, got the shot, and once again went back home to Manhattan Beach, only to have the phone ring again. Now the production had moved to London, and they were getting ready to do the craziest stunt in the whole film — the airplane scene, which actually opens the movie but was not shot in sequence.
“We can’t really give you much information about it,” Bridges was told. “But we’re hoping that you can get in a helicopter and follow Tom and get these shots of him on the side of the airplane.”
He flew to London, and almost immediately after arriving, jet-lagged and all, was told that there had been a change in the schedule. A practice day for the stunt had been scuttled. “Bo, can you come on set immediately?” he was asked. “Because Tom’s thinking the weather is looking good so he just might want to do the stunt today.”
Whew, okay, Bridges thought. He still didn’t even know exactly what the stunt was, or what he was getting himself into, but he arrived at Royal Air Force Wittering station, about two hours north of London, where the plane, a giant A400 Atlas airbus, was getting readied for the stunt. A helicopter equipped with mounted Cineflex camera was nearby, and Bridges beelined for it, explaining to the pilot that he’d been asked to shoot from the copter.
“He’s got this giant apparatus set on his helicopter with a Cineflex mounted on it, he’s got the [director of photography] in the cockpit with him, and it’s not a very big helicopter,” Bridges said. “I was like, ‘Hey, they were hoping I could get in the helicopter and shoot some stills for the movie poster.’ They were like, ‘There’s no way. We are red-lining the threshold on this thing already.’”
There’s was no way to argue that, so Bridges was left on the runway, wondering how he was going to get the shot. He borrowed the Ghillie camouflage suit that actor Simon Pegg, who plays the tech sidekick/wizard Benji in the MI movies, had worn earlier and asked to be allowed to shoot from near where the plane would take off.
“Sure enough, they drop me off on the tarmac,” Bridges said. “I’ve got a 600 millimeter lens, and I am sitting on the tarmac underneath the Ghillie suit. Tom goes up. He does like a full touch and go. It’s like a two mile pattern. They fly this big airbus, an A400 beast of a thing, and they take off. I get a couple of shots of Tom on the side, kind of tethered. He’s got a harness on, so he’s got some safety, but he’s hanging on and then as it takes off, there’s a platform underneath his feet that slides away. So the spot where he stands just disappears and immediately he’s dangling from the side of the airplane….But I can’t really see that from where I am. I am getting what I can get but I don’t have access to aerial stuff.”
Afterwards Bridges was back at his spot on the set, downloading photos, and along comes Tom Cruise.
“Did you get some shots in the heli?” he asked.
Bridges explained that there wasn’t room in the heli.
“Hold on,” Cruise said, and jumps immediately onto his radio, instructing somebody at the other end, “We need another helicopter. Right now.”
“I am like, ‘Oh geez, here we go, because that’s going to come out of production costs, right?” Bridges said. “But all of a sudden, I’ve got my own helicopter, which they fly up from London. Beautiful helicopter. It arrives and now I have my own bird, but I know somebody is tripping. Because it’s an expensive helicopter.”
Bridges and his pilot take the doors off so Bridges can shoot out the side. The airbus goes back up, and they follow.
“Tom’s hanging off the side of the airplane. I’m hovering next to him, flying parallel with him, shooting super cool shots,” Bridges said. “I used a 7200 millimeter lens so you could definitely see him on the plane, and you want to see the plane too, so I pulled back enough so you could see the plane and see that he was probably 2,000 feet plus above the ground.”
Bridges was downloading back down on the set and liked what he saw but couldn’t get over the nagging feeling that something key was missing — namely, the sense of vertigo that the movie shot was all about. Cruise and the director to check out what he’s got.
“What do you think?” Cruise asked.
“Well, to be fair, like, it’s awesome. It’s insane. I can’t believe you’re hanging off the side of an airplane,” Bridges said. “But that being said, we all know it could be a stunt man. We only know it’s you because we’re here with you. But that’s one thing. And the second thing is, I don’t really get a vertigo effect looking at this. So I think the only way for me to get that shot would be with a wide angle lens, and I’d either have to tether myself to the top of the airplane, which I don’t think is doable, or I’d have to hang out of that one window. And there’s only two windows on the airplane, right?”
There are several problems with this scenario. One is that both windows are being utilized by cameras that have been welded in, months earlier.
“The only way for me to do it would be for me to hang out that window and shoot back at you,” Bridges said.
“Let’s make it happen,” Cruise said.
Which, coming from TC, of course meant it would happen. Which both thrilled and somewhat terrified Bridges.
“I’m kind of tripping because I’m definitely like getting along with all the stuntmen, the director, everyone,” he said. “Everything’s gibing. But I would say the executive producers weren’t as tickled to death with me, because it was going to be a whole different price point in terms of stopping production in order for me to hang out that airplane. That plane was probably about $50,000 an hour to run. So they were going to have to stop all production, take [the welded cameras] out of the window and have me hang out to get the shot. I was like, ‘Whoa.”
McQuarrie struck the perfect compromise. “We are going to get your shot,” he said. “But we are going to do it at the end of the day tomorrow, after we make sure we get all our shots.”
“Fair enough,” Bridges said.
Sure enough, at the end of the next day, Bridges was taken aboard the airbus. It’s late October, so the days are short, and by 4 p.m. the light was already fading and a sharp chill was in the air.
“We’re going out to the airplane and I am like, ‘Boy, here we go. No pressure, right?’” Bridges said.
He brought two cameras, one with a fisheye lens and another with a 16 to 35 millimeter lens. The crew put a harness on him, and duct taped his camera to his hands. Cruise was wearing contacts that would protect him from the surging air, maybe a pebble, but not flying camera.
“Because nothing can come loose, right? Like nothing can hit Tom going 200 miles an hour,” Bridges said.
The plane is a cargo plane, so it’s sort of ominously empty as the engine revs and they quickly gain altitude. There’s not much talking going on, and then Cruise looks at him and is gone.
“Tom goes out the side. There’s like a little side door you can kind of step in and out of, so he goes out,” Bridges said. “They close the door. Now it’s my turn to go outside the window. I’m hanging out the window like, kind of like by my waist. I’ve got two guys flanking both of my legs. I also have a safety harness on. If they did let go of me, I would have been dangling out there. I had the camera tethered to my wrist, plus duct taped to my hand. So I’m dangling outside the airplane. We get going, I think it was about 180 miles an hour, and I’m looking back. You know how when you get something caught in your eyeball, you kind of reach up and grab your eyelid and pull it down? And it makes you teary-eyed. Well, imagine going 180 mph. I’m going backwards, so I can’t see where we’re going, but the wind vortex is coming around my head, bouncing off my view finder, and it’s whipping my eyelid like a hurricane. A shutter in the wind. Like, I can see my eyelid. I’m thinking I might lose it, like it might get ripped, because it’s fluttering so fast and so and so violently. But it’s also making tears, like a flow of water is coming out of my eye, and it’s going right into my viewfinder. So now I can’t even see Tom anymore, but I know he’s there, right? It’s like opening your eyes underwater. You just see blurry things. I can see a dark object, I am just shooting.”
It’s also freezing cold and at some point Bridges can’t feel his fingers anymore. He gets pulled back inside for a short break, trying to warm his hands to the point of functionality. Cruise stays outside the whole time. Bridges goes back out as soon as he can feel his fingers.
“Because we only have one chance to get these shots,” Bridges said. “So I’m shooting and it’s cold and he’s outside, dangling off the side of the plane, I’m hanging out, shooting, with him.”
This time, when the photos downloaded, they all knew they’d gotten the shot. All lot of film productions no longer use still photography, instead using screen grabs from the film, but nothing can create the kind of iconographic image like a skilled still photographer who has been training his whole life essentially to capture uncapturable images. Bridges’ photos from both the airbus and flaming motorcycle stunt in the Atlas Mountains were on movie posters and billboards around the world. They have become a part of the lasting iconography of Mission Impossible.
Bridges said working with Cruise was not unlike working with the elite athletes he’s photographed.
“He’s a stuntman at heart,” Bridges said. “I mean, he’s a great actor. He’s got a great memory, and he can just hone in on whatever he’s doing and really focus like a laser. I would say the same of a pro athlete.
They hone in and get their job done. They show up and they just crush it when it’s their turn to deliver.”
As astonishing as it was to witness this level of ability, it was Cruise’s vast attention to detail, and the fact he actually cared about Bridges pulling off what he set out to do, that lingers with the photographer these years later.
“I was always flattered and humbled that he wanted to take the time to review my angles and my shots,” Bridges said. “Obviously he wants to make sure he looks good, too, but he was also very curious in how I was working and how I was getting the shots I was getting. And he wanted to go out on a limb to help me get those shots. A lot of times you’re just kind of stuck standing there with a camera and just getting what you get. Tom Cruise definitely took it to heart and helped me get those shots. So that was pretty neat.” ER
