Latest news with #biplane
The Sun
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Jeremy Clarkson's fury after pilot buzzes Diddly Squat farm four times while practising aerobatics in vintage plane
JEREMY Clarkson was left fuming when a biplane buzzed his farm, telling the pilot: 'Fit a f***ing silencer.' He took umbrage when ex- RAF ace and British Airways captain Mike Edwards looped Diddly Squat four times. 4 4 4 The star, 65, vented on Instagram and shared the flight path. Online data showed the Pitts Special S2A spent seven minutes circling the farm at 172mph on May 3. He also wrote: 'Fit it with a f***ing silencer.' But Mike, 57, told The Sun: 'I've written to Mr Clarkson to say I'm sorry and didn't mean to cause any problems. 'I was practising my aerobatics, going up to 2,000ft and doing loops and rolls — using a railway line as a guide. 'As a professional pilot of 40 years, safety is at the heart of all I do. 'That's why I practise the routines nice and high and try and get away from people. 'I live down the road so I wouldn't want to annoy my neighbours with the noise. 'If Mr Clarkson wanted to come up with me I'd be more than happy to show him Diddly Squat Farm.' Mike learned to fly aged ten. I don't want folk going veggie due to farming crisis, rages Jeremy Clarkson - so my pub will serve pig uterus & squirrel His restored Pitts Special was built in 1972 and flown by his dad Marcus in the 1970s Rothmans display team. Flying pal Tom Saunders, 44, posted in response to Jeremy, whose farm is near Chadlington, Oxon: 'Silencer was too expensive so I sent Jeremy these earmuffs.' In another post, Tom said: 'I think somebody needs a hug.' Other fans pointed out the irony of Jeremy's complaint. One sniped: 'Man drives the loudest cars forever. Retires and complains about noise.' Another added: 'Anyone else here for the irony of the loudest man on TV throwing his toys out of the pram over one little plane?'
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tom Cruise Understands Something Crucial About Stunts. (And Movies.)
Every 'Mission: Impossible' movie can be boiled down to a single, central image. Tom Cruise in glasses and a black vest, hanging by wires, inches above the floor. Tom Cruise dangling from a rocky cliff ledge. Tom Cruise sticking like a gecko to the glass panels of the Burj Khalifa. Tom Cruise in some kind of spacesuit, hurtling through the air toward the camera. Tom Cruise in midair again, arms stretched backward as a motorbike falls below him, making it look all the more as if he were flying. For the newest and purportedly last installment in the series, 'The Final Reckoning,' the iconography has been perfected: We see Cruise dangling from a banana-yellow biplane as it hurtles through the sky. Oh, and the plane is upside down. In the opening minutes of 'The Final Reckoning,' all of the iconic images from previous films are repeated back to us, reminding us that what we are here for is to see Tom Cruise perform breathtaking stunts. Of course, if you were in the theater, then you would have been sold on this idea already. The film's marketing has made the sight of the upside-down biplane so familiar that before the movie had even started, I overheard a couple in the seats behind me discussing how the stunt might have been done. ('Where are the wires, you think?') We're compelled to know how these stunts were done for one very simple reason: We believe that Tom Cruise really is clutching the side of a skyscraper or an upside-down plane. This is because Cruise and many, many other people have worked hard to ensure our belief that Tom Cruise does his own stunts. Some of this belief-bolstering work is technical and filmic: The cameras move close to Cruise and linger there, convincing us that it really is him doing the thing. But a monumental part of the effort has to do with Cruise himself, and his ability to persuade us that if we buy a ticket for his movie, we will see him create a harrowing spectacle. On one hand, we will be watching a movie about a fictional character named Ethan Hunt, whose mission seems impossible. On the other, we will be watching Tom Cruise, a movie star we have known for 40-plus years, doing the seemingly impossible. This collapsing of character and star has become only more central to the films as the franchise goes on, sometimes sabotaging the movies' impact, sometimes making them more interesting, sometimes both at the same time. For example, the antagonist in these final two installments is a runaway A.I. called the Entity. For a series that once had the great Philip Seymour Hoffman play a villain, evil software feels like a step down. But Ethan Hunt/Tom Cruise battling a faceless, ageless superintelligence that is able to fake practically anything? That is a rich text. Like Hunt, Cruise has lost women he loved — maybe not to international assassins and the like, but this is what keeps happening to Hunt, in film after film. He cannot maintain relationships with women, he cannot protect them, because he has devoted himself to saving the world. Cruise has also cast himself as a kind of savior — not of the world, but of cinema. He refuses, for example, to allow the movies he stars in to make their first appearances anywhere other than inside a movie theater, and preferably on an IMAX screen. He seems dedicated to the grandeur of the old-fashioned blockbuster; a Tom Cruise film must be big, a spectacle in the oldest, most cinematic sense. I suspect that his continued interest in pulling off huge stunts has, more than anything, to do with his understanding of what we are seeking when we go out to the movies. His stunt work, and this series of movies he has made effectively built around that work, is a monument to his particular belief in the power of that act. When we watch a movie, when it is really working on us, we are provoked into participation with it. This happens only when the film gives us some information, but not all of it. If a movie can require 'the audience to complete the ideas,' the film editor Walter Murch once told an interviewer, 'then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work.' One piece of information we have about Tom Cruise is that he does his own stunts. Another thing we know, as we watch these films, is that the stunts are incredible — as in, it is difficult to believe that Tom Cruise is really doing them. Yet we do believe. It's within this gap, between our momentary disbelief and our ultimate acceptance, that the movie has pulled us in. We have been provoked into participation because we do not know just how or why Tom Cruise is doing these extremely dangerous things. Only — what if we did know exactly how he did the thing, and why? Before the previous installment of the franchise, 'Dead Reckoning,' Paramount released a nine-minute featurette titled 'The Biggest Stunt in Cinema History.' It was a behind-the-scenes look at that midair-motorbike moment, tracking how Cruise and his crew pulled it off. We saw a huge ramp running off the edge of a Norwegian fjord. We heard about Cruise doing endless motocross jumps as preparation (13,000 of them, the featurette claims) and skydiving repeatedly (more than 500 dives). We saw him touching down from a jump, his parachute still airborne above him, and giving the director Christopher McQuarrie a dap and a casual 'Hey, McQ.' We heard a chorus of stunt trainers telling us how fantastic Cruise is ('an amazing individual,' his base-jumping coach says). And we hear from Cruise himself, asking his driving question: 'How can we involve the audience?' The featurette was an excellent bit of Tom Cruise propaganda and a compelling look at his dedication to (or obsession with) his own mythology (or pathology). But for the movie itself, the advance release of this featurette was completely undermining. When the jump scene finally arrived, it was impossible to ignore what you already knew about it. The monumental ramp had disappeared, replaced with mossy, rocky, computer-generated cliffside; if you were aware of this trickery, your involvement was diminished. Because of the featurette, you knew too much, and could fill that vital information gap Murch spoke of. In wanting so badly to show you his extraordinary work, Cruise had diminished it. One of Cruise's cinema heroes is Buster Keaton. The action set piece immediately following his cliff jump, in fact, has him aboard a runaway steam train that falls off an exploding bridge, a clear homage to a famously expensive Keaton stunt from the 1926 film 'The General.' Keaton, like Cruise, knew how to use that knowledge gap to involve the audience. He, too, did his own death-defying stunt work. But he did it all with a face so blank as to be entirely open to interpretation — a face that belied the effort behind the stunts, making it all seem accidental, even casual. That face is the information gap. When we watch, we are not thinking about Keaton's effort; we are wondering what he is thinking. Cruise has always wanted us to know that he is working very hard. But with 'Final Reckoning,' he has clearly learned from past missteps. This time, there is no analogous prerelease featurette giving away the upside-down biplane stunt. Instead, at the end of the film's trailer, he — or Hunt, or probably both — simply tells us, looking straight to camera, 'I need you to trust me, one last time.' When, in the movie itself, he is at last dangling from that banana-yellow biplane, the clock, attached to a bomb, is ticking, and the fate of the world is at stake. Exactly what Tom Cruise is thinking as he dangles there, the wind blowing his cheeks back, is unknowable — which is the whole point.
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We couldn't tell if he was conscious': Tom Cruise got stuck on top of biplane shooting Mission: Impossible sequel
Tom Cruise got stuck on the wing of a biplane shortly before it ran out fuel during the filming of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the director of the eighth instalment of the action franchise has revealed. Speaking to an audience at the Cannes film festival hours before the film's premiere, director Christopher McQuarrie recounted the filming of a stunt sequence in which Cruise, in his long-running role as the field agent Ethan Hunt, walked between between the two wings of a biplane as the aircraft was mid-air over South Africa. Cruise, who at 62 continues to insist on performing his own stunts, had himself come up with the action sequence where he would float 'zero-G' between the wings of the plane and dismissed the initial warnings of professional wing-walking stuntmen, said McQuarrie, who has directed the actor in the last four Mission: Impossibles as well as the Jack Reacher series of action films. Wing-walking is extremely risky because the human body starts to break down after about 12 minutes due to the impact of wind at extreme speed and the difficulty of breathing in dispersed molecules, explained the director, who was overseeing the stunt from a helicopter flying alongside. 'It's literally like two hours in the gym.' Nonetheless, Cruise had signalled to McQuarrie that he wanted to continue filming after the 12-minute mark had passed. 'There was a moment where Tom had pushed himself to the point that he was so physically exhausted, he couldn't get back up off the wing,' McQuarrie said, speaking alongside Cruise in an on-stage interview at Cannes. 'He was lying on the wing of the plane, his arms were hanging over the front. We could not tell if he was conscious or not.' In McQuarrie's telling, the pilot communicated at this point that the plane had only three minutes' worth of fuel remaining, but that the plane couldn't have landed with the actor lying prone on the wing. 'We watched Tom as he pulled himself up and stuck his head in the cockpit, so that he could replenish the oxygen in his body and then climb up into the cockpit', McQuarrie said. 'No one on earth can do that but Tom.' Cruise, who swooped into the Palais de Festivals as part of a multi-stop promotional tour also including stops in Japan, Korea and London, talked up his prowess as he joined the director on stage. 'I don't mind encountering the unknown,' he said. 'It's just an emotion for me and it's something that is not paralysing.'. McQuarrie, who first made a mark in Hollywood as the scriptwriter behind 1995 cult thriller The Usual Suspects, bemoaned that the US film industry in its current state was 'driving a wedge through cinema' by increasingly forcing film-makers to choose between seeing themselves as artists or as entertainers. He questioned the claims of streaming giants to be 'saving Hollywood', saying that Netflix and co were 'cutting the audience off from the history of cinema' by prioritising their own productions over classic films on their home pages. 'The number of people I meet who have never heard of The Best Years of Our Lives, who have never heard of William Wyler's The Big Country, who have never seen Cool Hand Luke, and whose history of cinema begins at Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean.'
