This was
the real helicopters interacting with a real train.
By the sixth or seventh take, I thought,
“Oh, this is fun, but this could go drastically wrong any second now.”
Yeah, it was dangerous and that's why I wanted
to be the guy walking under the helicopter.
Hey, Chris Hemsworth here.
Hi, my name is Sam Hargrave,
director of Extraction 2.
This is "Don't Try This at Home."
A deep dive into how we create the intense action
and stunts of our film.
When you're trying to create a memorable fight,
remember that you don't create memorable fights
from day one.
As Malcolm Gladwell says, it's 10,000 hours, right?
To become an expert at something.
I first started as a stuntman.
I met Chris in, I think, 2011
when we did the first Avengers.
I was doubling Chris Evans
and then Chris was Thor, obviously.
Sam has just an incredible attention to detail,
an amazing work ethic, comes from a stunt background.
There are many memorable moments
in the Marvel Universe,
for me, had a great run there.
It's like eight years I think, of working
on different movies.
I wanted to bring a little bit of that Hong Kong action
cinema that I was so inspired by to the Marvel Universe
and I thought,
what better way than throwing myself off a building
and hitting a bunch
of things on the way down.
He's an athlete.
He brings an athleticism to it that I think is second
to none as far as the people
that I've worked with.
From there, flash forward to on the set
of Infinity War which I was the stunt coordinator
on for the Russo Brothers.
So having done that for most of my stunt career,
for like 15 years, I would say I had at least 10,000 hours
of shooting, cutting action.
That translates over to when you're directing action
on a movie like Extraction 2,
you have this depth of confidence and resources to draw from
from the years of directing action.
Pause, then I follow him.
Yeah, you're doing that
and then I'm gonna go with these guys.
- Yeah. - Get right into your scene here.
If the stunts going not how he planned,
he'll get in and do it himself.
He'll often grab the camera
and also kind of do the camera work himself.
The oner in Extraction 2 is 21 minutes
and seven seconds, which is almost twice as long
as the oner in the first film.
It's a very delicate, intricate dance.
It's obviously not a 22 minute shot.
The logistics sometimes necessitate cuts
that we try to hide
because of the complexities of the action.
It's a series of different shots
that are stitched together
seamlessly to look like it's one piece.
We try to stitch, which is joins kinda seamlessly,
these sequences around big stunts
so that you can make sure it's prepared properly.
So we'd probably do two or three minute, I think, pieces
mostly, and yeah, there's a lot of pressure
to you know, you have a line of dialogue at the start
of the sequence, a big fight scene.
And then you move on
and you stitch the next one together.
But again, the intention is
for the audience to experience that moment
in time with the character in real time.
Whatever it is the character's going through,
that camera becomes the proxy for the audience.
And so you become like a character.
It's like a play.
You're putting it out there in real time,
and it's all about pacing and you wanna make sure
that the audience is able to experience it
but not be overwhelmed.
We did have three distinct sections we had to work through
which was the prison break, the car chase,
and the train.
Action!
Go!
I think the prison yard oner
was my favorite sequence to shoot.
It was the biggest mountain we had to climb,
it was the biggest mountain that I had to climb in the film.
There was so much choreography
and there were so many elements and people involved.
There were 300 extras
in that sequence and things were on fire.
It was actually snowing, we're on night shoots.
During that sequence around our hero,
I think there were 75 to 100 stunt performers
outside of that.
Next layer was action extras we called them
doing designed fights.
And then beyond that were just the background performers.
We had an amazing stunt team overseeing all
that and keeping eye as they're watching.
And I'm focusing on Chris, what's his journey
but also trying to open up my peripheral and say like,
"What's that guy doing over there?"
You have to have the team
not only the actor who has to try to recreate what he did
from one take to the next
because you're blending them together.
You have to have the background
in sync to match what they did
take after take,
they try to be in the same spot, which is almost impossible.
And the camera has to coordinate with the actors
and he's moving in amongst all the stunt people.
So they have to be fighting and looking over their shoulder
and moving for camera when he wants to cross behind them.
If someone made a mistake, or myself,
it was such a big orchestration to bring it back
and start again.
And the beauty of the oner is once you've got that piece,
you move on and you don't come back to it unless, you know
you get into editing and, "Oh, screwed that up."
But very rarely do you come back.
So it's like, you rehearse it, rehearse it, walk it,
and then when everyone's feeling good,
say, "Let's try it."
Ready and three, two, one.
Go!
Hands down, bar none, the most difficult moment to capture
in the oner was landing a helicopter on a moving train.
People will probably assume that a lot
of this was done on blue screen and it was,
you hang the thing on a crane.
That was not, it was real,
it was a real helicopter.
That was Fred North,
the helicopter pilot with five stunt performers
on the chopper flying in and landing on a train moving,
I think it was between 30 and 45 miles an hour.
We had a train moving at full speed.
We're in the middle of Prague, middle of winter,
so we had snow to deal with and all the elements.
There were a lot of discussions about that, like,
why do it that way?
Why take the risk?
I think audiences can tell the difference.
There's just a visceral experience of real stunts happening
that you can't replicate with CG or blue screen stuff.
It was about making the action authentic
and gritty and truthful.
To ask someone else to do that
where if things go wrong, things go really wrong.
It felt wrong.
So I did it myself.
I walked under the chopper
and we got a shot and I don't know
if you've ever walked into the downdraft of a helicopter,
but it's like walking into a hurricane.
On take one it actually blew me off the top of the train.
Hit my knees and I went, I held the camera,
but went off the side of the train into the net.
Now we know what to expect, let's do it again.
And Sam had, you know, very specific ideas
about how this had to look
and so we did a lot of takes and 15 takes in,
I was like, "I think we got it. This is cool. Time to move on. Get me off the train."
Hands down, the most difficult shot of the movie.
It was pretty exhilarating and nerve wracking
but makes for one
of the coolest kind
of action sequences I've been a part of.
When designing large action sequences, specifically
like a battle sequence or a large prison brawl,
there's so many elements that have to be designed
and put into place for everything to go smoothly
that you gotta just break it down piece by piece.
One of the first things is, what's the journey
of your main character or characters through that sequence?
Once you get that kind of sorted out or at least an idea,
then you start building around them.
Okay, who do they interact with?
What's the most exciting thing to happen close to them?
And you just keep building and building and building
from the foundation of the journey
of your hero through that scene.
Not just having action for the sake of action
but having a story within that action
and having there be drama
because otherwise it just becomes a little redundant.
My line comes after Ketavan’s?
Yeah. When you hear him say
"Don't push me" just like you say to him, "Don't push me. You're scaring him.”
Like, just -
So whether it's Thor or Tyler Rake you're like,
"What does this character want
during the course of this sequence?"
And so you have to kind of chart that.
We wanted to make sure that each character
within the action scene had a very strong
emotional motivation and we're staying true to that.
We see you see that, and I go
And you have to route his journey
and so what's the most interesting conflict along the way?
Who does he come across
and what skills does he use to get out?
And anytime it sort of felt gimmicky or felt
like we were kind of doing it just for the sake of,
then we'd have to reassess and go,
"Okay, how can we insert something here
that grounds this moment?"
You need the armature of the character's journey
in order to build the action around it.
A big part of my process is a stunt previs
which we call fight vis or stunt vis.
When we get the script and, from the directing side
I turn it over to the stunt team.
I rely heavily on that team and after discussions
with me we talk about, all right,
what's the character's journey,
what's the arc, what's happening emotionally
before and after?
Okay, you have those parameters, it's in a prison, and go.
And they'll go into this rented out warehouse
usually, put down a soft matted floor
and then use boxes
and you use those as kind of a mock set building.
The choreography is like a play, like a dance,
like any beautiful piece of theater
where multiple elements are having to be as specific
and accurate as one another for it to work.
So it's really cool.
I pulled up some footage,
some nature footage of a lion being surrounded
and attacked by a bunch of hyenas.
I was like, "That, that's the thing."
The look in that lion's eye
and the way the hyenas were attacking is like,
that's what I want.
And so they're like, "Okay."
Give that to the stunt team.
And they look at this lion being attacked
by hyenas and they're like, "You're sure?"
And you know, we had moments
in there that it felt very much like that.
Could I start to film it?
And you start to get an idea when you review those kind
of weekly, as they shoot them, edit them,
they'll put sound effects to 'em.
I take my hat off to the stunt team.
It was some of the most amazing commitment
that I'd seen on a film set.
So the next step is once you're happy with the action,
you bring in the rest of the stunt team and the actors
'cause they have to learn that dance.
We had a lot of weapons,
a lot of improvising and kind of brainstorming sessions
on how we could kill one another
and what instruments we could use to do so.
I like to give them as much time as possible whoever it is
just 'cause the more you rehearse it,
the more it's ingrained,
and then the more spontaneous you can be
on the day so it doesn't feel like a rehearsed fight.
You know, there were guys that I'd been training
with for months and months.
Pop the leg.
Yeah.
She's behind you.
You back into people behind you.
And it came up when we were brainstorming, it was like,
we wanted it to be snowing outside.
It's winter, it's cold.
What if Tyler Rake was on fire?
Yes, we have to do that.
And so talking that over with Chris, he was game for it.
Not a lot of actors would agree
to being lit on fire for their art.
He did, multiple times, because you know,
not every take is perfect.
The director and all the stunt performers
and myself have to be in sync perfectly
in order for this to sell.
Chris being the stud that he is, he only takes, sometimes...
That sequence was a couple weeks, but sometimes
a couple days for a fight scene, he'll absorb it,
he'll do it with stunt team,
his double, Bobby Holland Hanton, will go work with him.
Underneath at the bottom, push forward.
And then you push down and they both fall into the wall.
It's like improv, right?
That doesn't just come out of nothing.
It comes out of massive preparation.
Rehearsal is the reason you can be spontaneous on set.
Study the masters, study Jackie Chan films,
study Chad Stahelski's movies, Dave Leitch's movies,
people that do great action, study the movies.
How do they capture action?
Where do they put the camera for this punch?
And a great way to do that is try
to recreate your favorite scenes from those movies.
Shot for shot, move for move, get that to where you look
at it and you go, "That's pretty darn close."
Then do the next one.
And you do that,
so now you start to understand the fundamentals.
'Cause all of the great designers,
they adhere to the fundamentals, which is like,
do simple well and tell a story with your action,
and then try to have at least one memorable moment
for your character in that.
Learn to do what the best do, first.
And your voice will emerge from that.
For young filmmakers out there, it's not only putting out
into the universe what you want, but then telling people.
'Cause if people don't know what you want
or what you want to do, they can't help you.
Thanks for watching and remember:
Don't try this at home.
Or do, but just do it safely.
Don't miss Extraction 2, only on Netflix.