[BRAKES SCREECH]
[CRASHING]
[GUNSHOTS]
[CRASHING]
This was insane.
But what if there was a way to go a little bit deeper
on something like this?
That's where this show comes in.
"The Rank Down" is a show where professionals in film and TV
rank and break down some of their favorite scenes
from their career.
And today, well, this is Jack Gill.
Hey, I'm Jack Gill, I'm an action designer and stunt
coordinator.
Some of the most popular scenes I've done are in "Fast 8",
"Venom", "Date Night".
Today I'm going to break down some
of the most favorite stunts I've done in my career.
[CAR ACCELERATING]
Look out!
[EXPLOSION]
This was the opening of the show,
and we had 10 days to shoot this entire sequence.
Originally, this was just a quarter mile
straight line drag race, and once we all
got the script, we wanted to have a Fast and Furious
chase that beats all the other chases,
can't do just another drag race, we've seen too many of those.
Let's make it big, long, lots of corners, lots of speed,
lots of things they crash into, and they latched onto it.
And then we started designing what you see on screen now.
We wanted to give Havana a great wide scope
look of what the city really looks like from the air
and from the ground.
It's very difficult to shoot 80 to 100 mile
an hour speed chases in such a tightly compacted city.
It was probably 10 square blocks that we had,
and we would take over four at a time,
and then another six at a time.
Everything we do is storyboarded,
and I storyboard the whole sequence,
and I also directed this entire sequence.
It's pretty much us just shooting everything,
and then the first unit director and the studio
interject all the actor's footage.
And so it's a combination of all of us getting together trying
to figure out what we want.
I have video editor that's editing every little piece
of it as we shoot.
So I can literally go back five minutes later
and he's got a rough cut of it, and I can see what I'm missing
and what I'm not.
It tells you what you need to make it a little more energetic
and to pump a little more excitement into the sequence.
We wanted Vin to be dealing with problems
the entire time because he's got a car that is not
as fast as the other car, he's got to be a better driver,
so we interjected the fire routine
to give us a little more problems within the chase.
We knew we were going to have fire on the vehicle,
but we knew we couldn't have so much fire that we don't have
visibility for the driver, and we have lots of other problems
with things that are burning on the car.
So we put propane pipes that would give us
fire that comes up and over the top of the windshield,
since there are already doors on this vehicle,
it tends to wrap around and get inside.
The driver was protected with a thing we call fire gel.
But if you have long sequences, the fire gel then evaporates
and then you can get burned.
In one of the sequences, the fire really
cracked the windshield, and we liked that,
so we kept that in and kept replacing
the windshield when we had to.
The spin-around 180 was because it got so hot on the stunt
driver that he said, I don't know how much longer I
can take this.
We said, why don't you drive in reverse,
because the transmission that Vin's character puts in the car
is a tractor transmission, and it really
goes just as fast in reverse as it does forward.
So the actual driver is on a pod on top of the car,
and the steering mechanism is on the back wheels,
and it looks like it's driving back.
No!
You're out of your mind!
[MOTORCYCLE REVVING]
[SCREAMS]
We got into San Francisco, we really wanted to get the hills,
we wanted to get some big jumps.
This was a huge place that we found in San Francisco.
And originally this was just going
to be a long jump of him going in the air
and landing on the other side.
But Robbie Maddison, he's a really famous motorcycle
jumper, when Robbie got there, Robbie said,
hey, I can jump this entire thing and land on the downhill.
What are you talking about, I said, it's like 150 feet.
He goes, no, no, I've just got to put
the forks of my motorcycle on this motorcycle
and we'll jump it.
When he launched this thing in the air,
everybody had their iPhones out and was just
in awe of him making this long jump like this.
It's unreal.
Once he's in the air, he can't alter his landing spot.
He can alter where the nose is and where the tail is,
but right to left, he has to be dead on line to land.
If he had landed left of that, he'd
have been right on top of those cars, and he can't change it.
That would be catastrophic.
He acted like it was nothing.
He actually got such a long jump, producers
and the director said we're going
to have the character lose the motorcycle,
and then have Venom reattach him to the motorcycle, which
is a really added piece that happened just because Robbie
was doing such a big and long jump here.
When you're dealing with a motorcycle rider that's
not protected in a chase scene like this, when we get
into the really radical stuff we do put helmets on them and pads
and, realistically, we said, you might as well
wear a helmet because we're going
to replace your head with the actor's anyway,
so let's go ahead and protect you as much as we can,
just in case this thing does go over.
It's not cheap, but it's still there.
Let's pause it right here.
My daughter is in the foreground right there on the right,
and that's me grabbing her and pulling her out of the way
as we cannon these cars over.
Usually, in the stunt industry, it
stays within families quite a lot,
because they're trained from the time
that they are eight or nine years old all
the way to the time when they get into the business at 18.
You want to have people around that you
can trust your life with.
Here is a great sequence.
They wanted the motorcycle to make it through two cars
that he actually couldn't really make it through.
And special effects is going to pull
the cars only 6 inches apart.
There's no engine there, these cars are lightened up,
and also they're sitting on big huge flat pieces of steel
that we put grease on the top of, so that when we hit them,
I can push through them a lot easier than we
could in normal life.
Since we had two cars hitting on either side of the motorcycle,
we came up with the idea called a double sidewinder
crash, which is hitting stationary cars
on the side of the road, and crashing
going side over side over side.
And we've never really done that before in anything
that we've ever done, and we couldn't find it
on the internet.
But our two stunt drivers are protected in cages.
And I'm driving the third car with a camera
mounted to see the wreck.
And I said, well, there's no cage in my car so just get
as close as you can get.
The airbags are disconnected in my car completely,
I'm in a full five-point racing harness,
and I'm not wearing a helmet.
You just have to kind of grit your teeth and bear it,
because you know it's going to be a hard hit,
but it's not anything like it would be in real life.
After the sidewinders happened, the whole crew
was high-fiving everybody, and all the stunt guys were fine,
and nobody had even a scratch on them,
which is tough to do with something as big as this.
Why am I going backwards.
Hey, take your foot off the brake.
No, no, no!
There's a different way that you direct comedy sequences as
opposed to action sequences.
In comedies we're staying on the actors
a little longer, to get a little more comedy relief to it.
And it's more about camera movement,
the scenes breathe a little more,
whereas in action sequences you're
coming on and off the actor fairly quickly.
The preparation is still the same amount of time
because the action is still very large and hard to figure out.
We really wanted to have Steve Carell climb out
onto the hood of this car, as opposed to doing it
on green screen, so it was a lot more to this than what you
normally see in an action movie with actors who are just
on the green screen.
This was two weeks of shooting because it was night.
Back then, it was not digital, it was film,
and you have a lot of lighting to do.
We were going to shoot this entire sequence in New York,
and then we find out the constrictions
that they were going to put onto us were going
to be so severe that we can only shoot about half
a night to let all of the New York traffic
back out on the streets.
So the studio made a call and said,
I want you to shoot everything New York-ish that you
can get for the next two or three days,
and then we're going to move everything
to L.A., because we just can't afford
to shoot half nights here.
When you have a time frame and a budget
that you're dealing with, you have to get in the most
that you can for the time frame and the money
that they want to spend.
So there are always compromises you make,
and you have to be smart with the way you
shoot these sequences.
There's a lot of different things
that you do talk about way prior to when you shoot this stuff,
break each sequence down as to what you need for safety
aspects of it because, obviously, we
have 10 to 15 cameras for some of these crashes,
and you have to protect the camera crew.
So I, as the action designer, have
to bring in things like concrete barriers,
and you put in front of camera, and sometimes we
put parked cars in front of cameras,
and sometimes we have to put remote cameras that
aren't operated.
And we do have disposable cameras
that we know if they get hit, it's not that expensive,
and so we put those in, what we call, crash boxes.
We put them in harm's way.
We can't put a $200,000 camera in harm's way
because if it gets hit, that's a big hit for any studio,
no matter what your budget is.
Usually the cars that we know we're going to hit,
they're flood-damaged cars that they really can't sell anymore,
that don't run.
If cars go spinning out of control,
we've got crash cars around camera, or around a building,
or in front of a store that these will hit first
before they can get into something, that would not
be great for any of us.
When Steve Carell takes off in this Audi, he goes flying in
and slams into another car.
We thought one car was just going
to pull the other car backwards, attached with the chain.
But what really happens is, when you drive backwards,
the other car starts doing S turns behind you,
and going right and left, and right and left,
and you really get no speed and you have no control.
So he said, let's try and build two frames that we stick
together, and we can disconnect them
when we want to disconnect them, and the actual steering
mechanism is going to be on the rear end of the taxicab.
But it's a long train now and very
difficult to steer in and out of other cars,
so we put steerable wheels on the back of the Audi as well.
And it's something that took a long time
to try and figure out.
Dom, cars don't fly.
[GLASS SHATTERING]
So this is when we're stealing a $3 million car
and trying to jump it from high-rise to high-rise.
That really is a $3 million car, and there's only one of them
that they gave us.
It had diamond-encrusted headlights,
it had everything you can think of.
They said you can't scratch it, you can't touch it,
if anybody gets in it, everything metal
has to come off.
So we had to make other versions of this car
to do what we needed to do with it.
We bought Porsche Boxsters, which are essentially
the same frame, and we handmade a body
that fits over the top to then do all of the action
that you see in this sequence.
With the hero cars, I like to have at least six
of each and every car so that we can do two and three takes
to get exactly what we want.
What you see here is the $3 million car, he gets in it,
and he starts to drive out of frame, and that's it,
the rest of it is not the $3 million car.
Most of this is all the stunt guys,
but we brought the actors in for pieces of this.
Jason Statham was going to do the part where
he leaps over the car, tucks and rolls, and lands
and comes up shooting.
And I said, look, the car is going to come in pretty fast.
Once we did it with a stunt double,
Jason did exactly the same thing and was just as agile.
There's a lot of people who are very unathletic that
want to do their own stunts, and you have to go back
and say we're not going to advise it,
it's not a good idea.
There's other people who are super athletic
and you still want to say you're going to go overboard here,
and if you get hurt, we're all in trouble.
You see him jump out of the window.
Originally they said, we're never going to do real jumps.
It's all going to be CGI, take them through glass windows,
that's it.
And then Spiro Razatos, the team leader of our whole Fast
franchise, he came up with the idea of let's build
a three story set where we can actually jump cars out, and get
real glass going through the air,
and a real car flying through the air.
We'll just jump on the boxes and just
make the buildings look different every time.
So the car flying through the air is real,
it's just nobody's in it.
A lot of this stuff, it worked great,
but like one of these times we launch the cars out,
it landed short of the boxes and destroyed the car.
A lot of things don't go absolutely perfect,
and it's great to have backup cars.
But the thing that really makes these pieces work so well
is the fact that they give us the time
to rehearse it, to get all the kinks
and all the problems worked out in rehearsal.
So when you go to shooting, you know exactly what's
going to happen.
And it makes it much more safe for all of the people that
were in that art gallery.
They knew exactly what the car was going to do,
so you can put the stunt people really
close to a real spinning car, with really a lot of stuff
flying in the air, and that kind of stuff
I think we all live for, because it
makes the audience viewer that's sitting in the seat
feel like they're part of the sequence,
not that they're just watching a bunch of CGI,
and they get lost in it.
I think the fact that it's real gives the audience viewing
member something where they think
they were part of the sequence.
Luckily, we're all starting to work hand-in-hand with CGI,
and they're saying let's do as much as we can in reality,
and then we'll try and make it as real as we can in CGI,
as well.
Because the stunt industry is such a small and controlled
industry, you know everybody that's in the business,
and when something is big, it just excites me.
Because I know how much trouble they
went through to get it done.
And what really irks the entire industry is the fact
that we don't have an Oscar for our abilities
as action arrangers.
What I'm trying to do now is to get the studios' publicity
firms to get involved.
Because Marvel and Universal and Disney
all are putting out a lot of action movies,
and I think if we can get them involved
in saying help us get a category, maybe it'll happen.
So hey, remember, it's Jack Gill, and thanks for having me
here, we had a great time talking.
I hope you enjoyed some of this stuff.
And if you can, try and push the Academy
to get an Oscar category for stunt people.
You can write, email, call, anything the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, we need an Oscar category
for action.
[OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING]