Mission: Impossible Just Outdid James Bond’s Best Stunt

It all starts with the prologue, in which Bond escapes a squad of Soviet assassins during a thrilling downhill ski chase on a mountain in Austria, which climaxes with Bond skiing off the side of the mountain, falling thousands of feet before his Union Jack parachute blooms out behind him.

Although the scene takes place in the Alps in the movie, the sequence was filmed at Mount Asgard (yes, named after Thor’s home) on the remote Baffin Island in northern Canada. The mountain reaches an elevation of more than 6,000 feet, and the crew from the movie had to reach the glacier summit via helicopter. The man hired to perform the jump was a climber and professional ski instructor from California named Rick Sylvester, who was reportedly paid $30,000 to make the jump (the entire sequence cost $500,000 to film). Sylvester had previously performed a couple of 3,000-foot jumps from El Capitan in Yosemite Park, but this was new territory. He and the crew stayed at Baffin Island for two weeks before attempting the shot, testing out camera locations and waiting for the exact perfect weather conditions.

Four cameras were deployed to capture the jump, and Sylvester admitted years later that he had trouble getting into position to deploy the parachute—which made it possible that he had fallen out of the view of all the cameras before the Union Jack chute was released.

Once the footage was developed, however (and remember, this is 1976, so the actual celluloid had to be sent away from the location and developed before anyone could see what they got!), it was determined that the footage captured by the third camera was usable—a good thing, since bad weather rolled in immediately afterward.

Although the footage of the jump is heart-stopping to watch even today, it’s dampened a little by the insert of a close-up of Roger Moore, very obviously hanging from strings on a set as he prepares to “land.” Still, it stood for 46 years—until now—as perhaps the most daring film stunt ever successfully attempted.

The Spy Who Rode a Motorcycle Off a Cliff

No Roger Moore-like insert shots here! Over the years, Tom Cruise has insisted on performing most, if not all, of his own stunts, pulling off a series of escalating, death-defying sequences throughout the course of the Mission: Impossible series. But after hanging off ascending planes, helicopters, speeding trains, cliff faces, and the tallest skyscraper in the world in six previous films, Cruise had something even more spectacular in mind for the seventh M:I adventure: while pursuing a train, his Ethan Hunt drives a motorcycle off a massive cliff. Ethan then free falls until he can deploy a parachute to pilot himself safely onto the roof of a moving train.