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For all of Cruise’s stomach-lurching stunt work in M:I sequels – including the latest, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning – the CIA heist is still the series’ most enduring moment. It’s also the truest to the 1966-1973 TV series: a seemingly impossible mission, pulled off via intricate planning, crafty deceptions, and teamwork.

It’s stunning craftsmanship from Brian De Palma – a true master of suspense, demonstrating the same precision-perfect execution as the Impossible Missions Force. The tension De Palma squeezes from a single bead of sweat is incredible.

Cruise did the stunt work, naturally, beginning a trend that has intensified across the sequels. Dangling upside down for a few hours seems like small potatoes compared to clinging onto a plane during take-off. But it was punishingly hard to do. Attempting to hang parallel to the floor, Cruise kept tipping forward and bashing his face – so he stuck £1 coins in his boots to balance himself out horizontally.

It was De Palma who came up with the sequence, inspired by a similar set-piece in the 1964 heist movie, Topkapi. De Palma filmed the heist in near-silence – another nod to Topkapi, and a deliberate reaction against the sheer racket of other blockbusters. “All the action films coming out were so noisy!” says [Paula] Wagner. “What could be done that was different? Silence. You couldn’t have a sound in that sequence. Nothing could disrupt the flow and ambiance in that room. That was unique unto itself – the concept of silence.”

Indeed, the 1996 Mission: Impossible was a different kind of blockbuster – a complex thriller with perspective-shifting rug-pulls – and markedly different from what the series is now. Not that modern M:I isn’t good stuff. It’s the most consistent and wildly inventive action series around. But even Dead Reckoning – out now – has tipped its hat and rubber mask to the first movie.

Mission: Impossible was the first film that Tom Cruise produced himself. It was also his idea. “The conversation I remember most clearly was Tom calling me and saying, ‘We’re going to do Mission: Impossible – I love the series!’” says Paula Wagner. “And I loved it too.” Cruise and Wagner would also produce Mission: Impossibles 2 and 3 together. More recently, Wagner produced the Pretty Woman musical – on tour across the UK later this year.

Back in the 1990s, there was a Hollywood gold rush on old school TV properties. Between 1993 and 1999, there were also film versions of The Fugitive, Maverick, The Saint, The Avengers, and Wild Wild West. It preempted the current blockbuster formula. Almost 30 years on, every blockbuster is essentially a re-run. “This was early in taking a TV show and making it a movie,” says Wagner. “Now it’s done all the time. And this was before all the Marvel franchises. I think we were pioneers out there working out ‘What is this? How does this work as a movie? What are the elements that you keep? What are the things that you change and evolve?’ It was more than making a movie. It was bigger than that.”

But unlike The Fugitive et al, Mission: Impossible hadn’t been off screens all that long. Paramount had made attempts at an M:I film in the 1980s and brought back the TV show in 1988, with original series star Peter Graves. When Tom Cruise whipped off the rubber mask for the first time, M:I had only been off air for six years.

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One of the major challenges, says Wagner, was “How do you reinvent a Cold War television series for a film in the mid-1990s?” Critics asked the same thing ahead of the film’s release. The original IMF team operated in the shadows of the Cold War. Regular targets included dictators and shady governments in made-up countries. Jon Voight’s IMF leader, Jim Phelps – the character played by Peter Graves on TV – comments on his place post-Cold War. “One day you wake up and the president of the United States is running the country without your permission. The son of a b––––, how dare he.” Phelps admits that he’s now just “an obsolete piece of hardware not worth upgrading.” GoldenEye, released just six months earlier, had similarly repositioned Bond for the 1990s – “a relic of the Cold War”.

Other changes were needed. The TV series had been about a team operation, with Phelps selecting his preferred agents at the start of each episode – each of whom had their own special skills to carry out their part of the mission. De Palma was not only subverting the conventions, he had to make M:I a star vehicle for Cruise, too. “The first thing we have to do is kill off the whole team,” said De Palma.

The film begins like the classic episodes: Phelps receives his mission (which he naturally chooses to accept) via a self-destructing tape, then assembles his team and plans out the mission. They have to seize a list of CIA agents from a target in Prague. But it’s a set-up. The team – including Emilio Estevez and Kristin Scott Thomas – are murdered one by one. Its rich De Palmian stuff: a dizzying swirl of trickery and kills, and shrouded in a thick fog of treachery. “You set the rules up and turn them on their head,” says Wagner. “You think you have your mission team, then they all die in the beginning! Just when you think it’s gonna turn out a certain way, it doesn’t.”

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The 1996 action now seems relatively low-key – in contrast to Cruise trotting around the Burj Khalifa at 2,700ft, at least ­– though the film still hangs on three stunt sequences: the CIA HQ heist, a fight on a high-speed train, and Cruise jumping away from an exploding aquarium – a neat, watery twist on the standard jumping-away-from-an-explosion set-piece. Cruise performed the stunt himself, leaping away from literally tons of water, which required precision timing.

But Mission: Impossible is an unusually smart action film. In the later sequels, the trademark deceptions and confidence tricks are played like set pieces – usually punctuated by a punch-the-air mask rip. In the first Mission: Impossible, the deceptions are the fabric of the whole film. It wrong-foots viewers at almost every turn – a constant unraveling of misdirections, springing one reveal after another.

The labyrinthine plot wasn’t for everyone. After the film’s release, De Palma called Koepp and told him there was a one-word buzz about it: “Incomprehensible!”

In its smartest scene, Voight’s back-from-the-dead Phelps tries to sucker Hunt with an elaborate lie about how the botched Prague mission played out. Phelps narrates his version of events, but what we see is something completely different – Hunt figuring out what really happened. He knows that Phelps masterminded the double-cross. “If you look at De Palma films, his characters aren’t quite what you think they are – often appearances belie who the characters really are,” says Wagner about that sequence. “That was another aspect that Tom and I as producers really appreciated and supported. Not only the sleight of hand in terms of the action, but none of the characters were exactly who you thought they were.”

The film abandons the smarts for the final showdown. Phelps and Hunt fight across a train as it races through the Channel Tunnel – while Jean Reno gives chase in a helicopter. The new M:I film, Dead Reckoning, also stages a train fight – one of the seven-quel’s numerous nods to the first movie.

The original train showdown is still a thumping bit of action. It somehow puts you right onto the carriages – the feeling that you’re holding on for dear life just by watching it. When the classic Lalo Schifrin theme kicks in, and the helicopter rotor blade misses Cruise’s throat by a matter of inches, it’s undeniably thrilling.

Cruise and De Palma debated about whether to include the train-helicopter sequence. Cruise and Robert Towne, said De Palma, were pushing for the film to end with a mask reveal in the boxcar. De Palma would later deny reports of a rift between them, though they had a robust creative relationship.

“Tom is a very smart guy, and he had very strong opinions about things,” De Palma told Premiere magazine. “We would argue, but he always said, ‘Whatever you want to do, Brian.’ I made all the final decisions. We were deciding whether we needed the helicopter chase at the end. Tom thought about resolving the scene in the boxcar. I was pushing for the helicopter chase. I said, ‘We’re making Mission: Impossible here. We better have some wham-bang ending.’ I argued strongly about why I thought this would work, and he ultimately, I think, made the correct decision.”

Cruise certainly had no qualms about getting on that train. He clambered aboard the carriages at Pinewood Studios, in front of a blue screen, and was blasted by industrial-strength fans. “That’s really Tom standing on a train car with the wind coming in his face at hundreds of miles an hour. Trust me,” says Wagner. “It was very dangerous having to jump from one moving vehicle to another with the wind coming straight at him. We did it on the largest stage at Pinewood. It was very challenging. He would have been on a real train the whole time if he could.”

De Palma achieved what he’d set out to do. Released on May 22 1996, Mission: Impossible was the biggest hit of his career – $450 million at the global box office. “It’s better to make them at the end [of a career] rather than at the beginning,” De Palma told Wade Major about making a hit film.

Wagner credits its global success, aside from M:I being a great piece of cinema, to its international cast and clever promotion. “We treated Mission Impossible as a worldwide event,” she says. “This was an innovation in worldwide marketing because we focused on individual foreign markets rather than treating international box office as a monolith. We approached the rest of the world with the same fervour as domestic.” Paramount sent out a booklet of promotional ideas to cinema managers, which suggested – quite brilliantly – to put on helicopter rides or have sky divers dropping into cinema car parks for some extreme, gimmicky PR. (I must have missed that at our local Odeon.)