Sawt Falasteen - Tom Cruise nearly met his end on 'The Final Reckoning'

The 62-year-old, who does his own stunts and was flying the biplane alone, was laid out flat on the wing after spending 22 minutes out of the cockpit -- 10 more than safety guidelines allowed, his director Christopher McQuarrie told a masterclass at the Cannes film festival, where "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is premiering Wednesday.

"When you leave the cockpit of the plane, it's like stepping onto the surface of another planet," McQuarrie said.

"The wind is hitting you in excess of 140 miles an hour (225 kph) coming off the propeller. You're breathing, but only physically. You're not actually getting oxygen.

"Tom had pushed himself to the point that he was so physically exhausted, he couldn't get back up off the wing. He was laying on the wing of the plane, his arms were hanging over the front of the wing. We could not tell if he was conscious or not," said the American filmmaker, who has shot the four last movies of the franchise.

Cruise, a trained acrobatics pilot, was alone on the biplane and had agreed a hand signal to show if he was in trouble, McQuarrie said.

"You can't do this when you're unconscious," the director told an audience at Cannes, with Cruise sitting beside him nodding sheepishly.

To make matter worse, the plane had only six minutes of fuel left. But the star finally stirred.

"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 and bring the plane safely down to land.

"No one on Earth can do that but Tom Cruise," he said to rapturous applause.

Asked about how he dealt with the fear, Cruise pointed to the years of preparation that went into his movies. But in the end, "I like the feeling. It's just an emotion for me. It's something that is not paralysing.

"I'm like, 'Oh, that's exciting'... I don't mind kind of encountering the unknown."

It was far from the only scare the pair had on the $400 million epic, the eighth in the franchise known for its dizzying set pieces and heart-stopping action scenes.

- 'No way to test that thing' -

With fans fearing that the "The Final Reckoning" title meant it might be the last in the series, McQuarrie said the plane scene was not the only one that could have ended everything.

One of the new movie's most dramatic moments involves Cruise's character Ethan Hunt diving inside a sunk Russian nuclear submarine in the Bering Sea.

McQuarrie said it took two and a half years to build the set in London.

"Remember that when you're watching Tom inside this semi-submerged rotating room inside the submarine, that is housed inside a 60-foot diameter, 1,000-ton, 360-degree rotating, fully submersible steel gimbal in a 8.5-million-litre tanker. And he's inside it," he said.

"And what you're watching is us testing it. Because there is no way to test that thing.

"We built a model, and we put a little plastic figure and a bunch of torpedoes in it, and rotated it once, and they smashed the little plastic figure."

Neither Cruise nor McQuarrie would confirm or deny if the new movie was the final "Mission: Impossible", with Cruise calling it the "culmination of three decades of work".

The film is being released in India, Australia and South Korea this weekend, with audiences in Europe and the Middle East having to wait until May 21 and those in North America until May 23.

S.AbuJamous--SF-PST