Remember when everyone went nuts about the bear attack scene in The Revenant?
Even though everything looked shockingly real, it turns out the CGI bear, and Leo, were just
really good actors.
Unlike that scene, however, many other seemingly unreal movie moments were actually done with
practical effects in very real, sometimes death-defying, conditions.
Here are some movie scenes you thought were fake but were actually real.
Hanging from the hood
Zoe Bell is an accomplished stunt performer.
She caught Quentin Tarantino's attention when she worked as Uma Thurman's double in Kill
Bill, so the director cast her in 2007's Death Proof.
Bell spent the better part of six weeks amazingly not dying while hanging onto the hood of a
Dodge Challenger while speeding around desolate, Eastern European roads.
The result is a harrowing sequence in which she clings to the Challenger’s hood as Kurt
Russell slams his car into hers again and again.
"By the end of it, I mean we were clickin at 80 or 90 miles an hour at one point.
Miles, I mean that's fast."
It would have been far too ironic to die making a film called Death Proof anyhow.
The wingsuit
A remake of Point Break was never really necessary, and especially not one that got rid of the
film’s original surfers for, well…
"I believe that like me, the people behind these robberies are extreme athletes."
Some of the world's top extreme athletes were invited to do their own stunts.
The wingsuit scene, in particular, was shot with four athletes who did 60 jumps, all while
going faster than 145 miles per hour, according to the film’s behind-the-scenes featurette.
"The first time I watched those 5 guys enter that crack, and I literally am like 'Wow,
we are now watching one of the greatest stunts that's ever been pulled off by human beings."
Next time, it might not be worth risking their lives for a remake of a movie with stunning
dialogue like this...
"I was taking shrapnel in Khe Sanh, while you were crapping in your hands and rubbing
it on your face!"
The ol' road poles
Almost every action sequence in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road was created with human stunt
performers, culminating in one insane final battle featuring weapon-firing bad guys riding
giant poles mounted onto speeding vehicles.
Stunt coordinator Guy Norris told Rolling Stone that a Cirque du Soleil performer trained
the stuntmen in "Chinese pole work" during an eight-week course.
That's an interesting way to phrase it: The actors were repeatedly smashed into the ground
and run over by giant speeding tires.
The entire movie is an astonishing adrenaline rush, and the fact that this scene was pulled
off by real people, who weren’t killed in the process, just makes it even more incredible.
Bane’s escape
Christopher Nolan's love of practical effects is no secret, so it's no surprise the director
ramped up the real-life action for 2012's The Dark Knight Rises.
"Now what's the next step of your master plan?"
"Crashing this plane!"
In the opening scene, the villainous Bane blows a plane in half and escapes the wreck
by being pulled onto another plane by henchmen dangling from ropes.
No big deal, right?
When discussing the scene at the Tribeca Film Festival, Nolan revealed they dropped a real
plane out of the sky.
That means real people dropped a real plane out of the sky for a movie about a guy who
dresses like a bat.
Seems perfectly reasonable.
Speaking of insane plane stunts...
That's one way to hitchhike
It’s well-known that Tom Cruise does much of his own stunt work in the Mission Impossible
series, but some of his exploits defy belief.
Case in point: 2015's Rogue Nation, where Cruise pulls off at least one irresponsibly
crazy maneuver: hanging from the side of a massive cargo plane during takeoff.
While the dangers involved with this stunt are obvious, Cruise could have been killed
if so much as a random bird flew into him.
"I mean, but you were getting hit with jet fuel and-"
"Jet fuel and, ya know I just didn't wanna get hit by a bird or any particle, ya know-"
"No seriously that-"
"No seriously I got hit by a little stone about that big and we were going so fast,
luckily it hit my rib.
I thought I broke my rib."
So they had to do it in one take, right?
Think again.
Cruise did it eight times.
There's dedication to a role, and then there's whatever you call what Tom Cruise does.
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
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