- There were a lot of elements that had to come together.
- Well, we did something that's never been done
in the history of cinema.
- When people watch the movie,
they're going to have no idea that we did what we did.
We're about to go behind the FX of "Red Notice".
(adventurous music)
- The whole idea of "Red Notice" is that it's a throwback
to big fun swashbuckling movie-star movies.
- Of the greatest art thieves in the world.
- The opening shot of the movie
is perhaps the most complicated and difficult.
(police sirens wailing)
(engine revving)
- We paired a race drone
operated by this incredible race drone operator
named Johnny FPV.
With brand new technology from RED,
which is a 6K Komodo camera.
And it was just small enough to fit on the race drone,
and the race drone could still fly.
- And the operator has VR glasses on.
So he's operating or flying this thing
by seeing the image through the camera in his goggles.
We segue from that shot to a steady cam shot in Atlanta
with a reproduction of the face of Sant'Angelo.
Now the whole surroundings of the set in Atlanta
is a parking lot.
All of that had to be replaced with plates
in front of the Sant'Angelo in Rome,
which we did toward the end of the shoot
with extras and cars and the scooter
driving down over the bridge, et cetera.
And all of that is stitched together.
Pretty incredible shot though.
(helicopter chuffing)
(missile launcher's scope beeping)
(Dwayne screaming)
Yeah, the bridge explosion, of course,
is one of the most spectacular shots in the, in the movie.
The silhouette of the bridge and Dwayne Johnson's character
flying through the air is pretty epic.
- The director had created and designed
a shot where if I wanted to,
or it was going to be up to my stunt double,
we were going to run across the bridge,
and there was probably a 20 foot leap
to the bottom of the helicopter.
- [Richard] We did set off a very large explosion
in the middle of the bridge.
But of course it didn't blow it apart, it just fell apart.
It was rigged to, to fall apart.
- In the 11th hour.
I said, "Listen, no stunt double.
No wire.
I'll do it.
I'll run, and I'll jump 20 feet
and I'll grab on to that helicopter."
- The helicopter was on a crane and lifted up.
Ryan Reynolds or his double was in it at all times.
- The director had said, "Are you sure?"
Because the helicopter is suspended a 100 feet.
So if I miss the bottom of the helicopter,
I fall down a 100 feet.
I run across a bridge and I jumped 20 feet.
The helicopter suspended in the air about a 100 feet, 150.
When this airs, make sure it's a 150,
I jump and I grab the bottom of the helicopter,
pull myself up.
'Cause that's what I do.
- He was only six feet off the ground.
- It's incredible.
- [Interviewer] Yeah, it really is.
- It's incredible, the amount of bullshit.
- Yeah.
- He just fell a little bit, of course.
Dwayne Johnson's double was rigged to fly in the air
and that was shot separately.
And all that stitched together with
the Dolomite background plates and the set extension,
and so forth.
(helicopter chuffing)
(adventurous music)
- You know, originally this film was intended to have,
I think 4 or 500 visual effects shots.
And then after the pandemic that amount tripled.
- Most of the film was shot in Atlanta,
but was based on Sant'Angelo's in Rome, a museum in Rome,
the Dolomites in Italy.
We were intending to go to all those places.
- Shooting a globe-trotting action adventure in Atlanta
was not easy, and not the plan.
But we, we managed to pull it off.
- Everything you see in the movie is a set in some way.
My approach to the film was to be
as reality-based as possible, photographic-based.
Everything was sets or locations and CGE,
or the actual computer work was mostly augmentation
or enhancement of the photography that we made.
The prison was based on helicopter plates
in the Italian Dolomites.
- Is that your plan agent Hartley?
Or perhaps you just didn't think this all the way through?
- We had so many meetings about that sequence.
We're like, "We're making a giant action movie
but yet all of our meetings are about-
- Dance sequence.
- The dance ballroom scene.
- Yeah.
- We had to shoot it in such a way where Gal and Dwayne
were in a ballroom, in that ballroom by themselves.
- The principal actors were filmed
with the steady cam by themselves.
Just the way we had,
we'd done the first half of the movie.
And then I followed them with a second unit crew.
- And then we brought in all of the background
and we shot it again.
- And then we had a tape trail on the floor,
which looked like a snake.
And in order for the camera operator
to remember where he's needed to be,
we put little four inch numbers under each one.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and so on.
So we wouldn't get lost 'cause some of these tapes
are going this way and then this way,
and then back around and around.
- It took weeks and weeks and weeks of shooting just extras,
and trying to replicate every single thing.
And you watch that scene and is just elegant
and beautiful and fun.
- Seamless.
- In the final film it's invisible,
and you would never know.
Seeing audience's response to this film so far,
where they feel like they've been taken on the journey,
they feel like they've gone around the world with us.
When in fact we never left Atlanta.
- Checkout Red Notice now on Netflix.
(intense suspense music)