Mission: Impossible's Iconic CIA Vault Break-In Almost Didn't Make It Into The Movie

There's no more indelible image from the first "Mission: Impossible" movie than that of Tom Cruise suspended from a cable just inches above an all-white floor. Yet that image almost didn't make it into the 1996 film as is. 

The image comes from the scene where Cruise's protagonist, Ethan Hunt, breaks into the mainframe of the IMF (Impossible Missions Force) in CIA headquarters. Disavowed IMF agent Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) lowers Hunt head-first into the vault to pull off "the Mount Everest of hacks" at a standalone terminal that is not connected to any other computers. All is going well until a rat in the air duct causes Krieger to lose his grip on the cable and almost drop Hunt onto the floor.

As Hunt explains beforehand in the obligatory heist scene setup, the vault is sound-sensitive, its floor is pressure-sensitive, and it "detects any increase in temperature," even body heat, which means that a single drop of sweat could set off its intrusion countermeasures. You can see the veins bulging on Cruise's arms as he struggles to keep his limbs suspended above the floor, and as the actor explained in a 25th-anniversary video (via Paramount Movies) in 2021, he really was physically straining during that moment:

"I remember we were running out of time and I went down to the floor and I kept hitting my face. [...] So I went up to the stunt guys and I said gimme, you know, coins. Here in England, they have pound coins. So I put the pound coins in and I hung on the cable to see, was I level? And I had to make it. [Director Brian De Palma] was like, one more, and I'm going to cut into it and do it, and I said, 'I can do it.'"

As they shot another take and Cruise balanced himself above the vault floor with pound coins, he continued straining and sweating for real, while Brian De Palma continued rolling the camera so long that it turned into a standoff and an endurance test for the actor:

"[I] went down to the floor and I didn't touch, and I remember, I was there, I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, I didn't touch.' And I was holding it, holding it, holding it, holding it, and I'm sweating, and I'm sweating, and then he just keeps rolling."

This continued until Cruise heard De Palma laugh off-camera and say, "Alright, cut." They had finally nailed the scene, and the rest is movie history.

The first "Mission: Impossible" film came the same year as "Jerry Maguire," at a time in Cruise's career when he was between "Interview with the Vampire" and the one-two punch of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia." With De Palma's direction and a script co-written by Robert Towne ("Chinatown"), "Mission: Impossible" saw Cruise collaborating with a couple of filmmaking legends from the 1970s.

In the 2010s and 2020s, Cruise has been slightly less adventurous with his acting choices, appearing almost exclusively in action movies. Yet you could never accuse him of being unadventurous when it comes to doing his own stunts. Whether it be pushing through the pain of a broken ankle for a "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" scene, or casually standing on a flying plane in a promo for the upcoming "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One," the stories of Cruise putting his body on the line for the sake of showbiz have become the stuff of behind-the-scenes legend. The vault scene in "Mission: Impossible" is just one early example of that.