A director’s objective should be making the audience believe anything – no matter
how fantastical – that’s on the screen, meaning sometimes they’ll have to pull out
all the stops and get really creative with how they film their scenes. They know they’ve
been successful when viewers walk away wondering how exactly that one jaw-dropping moment was
captured on film. Here is Screen Rant’s look at How It Was Shot: 10 Secrets Behind
Amazing Movie Scenes.
Skyfall
The James Bond movies are known for extravagant action, but this is crazy by even 007 standards.
When pursuing Silva through London’s tube, the villain tries to take Bond out by crashing
a train through the structure. For safety reasons, you’d think they’d do this digitally,
but director Sam Mendes went all-out. The crew built two replica train carriages that
weighed 5-7 tons and dropped them off of a track raised 20 feet above the Pinewood Studios
set. The model train dismantled a majority of the sound stage. Digital effects were added
in post, but most of the scene was filmed practically for maximum effect.
Interstellar
Though viewers remain divided on its story, there’s no denying that Interstellar is
a technical marvel full of beautiful visuals. The film made headlines for its limited emphasis
on digital effects, and that includes some of its other-dimension locations. Towards
the end of the film, Cooper ventures into the black hole and ends up in a tesseract
where he can communicate with his daughter Murph. What viewers are seeing is Matthew
McConaughey hanging from a harness, moving around in an actual set that was constructed.
In a time where green screen is over-used to fill in environments, it’s refreshing
to see a director go the extra mile.
Independence Day
It’s an iconic shot of 1990s cinema: an alien ship destroys the White House to send
America into chaos. To accomplish this, director Roland Emmerich didn’t resort to the digital
effects that were becoming more frequent. His crew built a 10x5 feet model and spent
a week planning an actual demolition to put on the screen that needed 40 explosive charges.
When they needed fire to shoot down the streets of New York, they tilted a model upright beneath
a camera filming downwards to create a rolling “wall of destruction.” ID4 is known for
its spectacle, and it’s quite impressive.
Speed
One of Speed’s most nail-biting moments is when a bus has to jump a 50 foot gap in
the incomplete highway. Sounds like a job for CGI, but the stunt was mostly done for
real. A ramp was built so the bus could get the necessary lift and only the stunt driver
was in the vehicle – wearing a shock-absorbing harness to avoid injury. When filming the
scene, the bus traveled further than anyone anticipated and broke one of the cameras.
Luckily, they got it all on film and the only digital effect needed was to add in the gap
that’s shown in the final product.
The Matrix
Groundbreaking for several reasons, The Matrix’s bullet time effects have been parodied endlessly
since 1999, but they weren’t easy to create. Bullet time scenes were created using a version
of time-slice photography, using temporal motion to make the shot progress in a slow
motion. Cameras were placed all around an object and started fractions of a second after
each other to create the slow-mo effect. The frames together reached a frequency of 12,000
frames per second, as opposed to the usual 24. The Wachowskis did have to use digital
effects – but just to remove the cameras that were all around.
The Dark Knight
One of the standout set pieces in Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel is the car chase through
Gotham City when the Joker attempts to track down Harvey Dent. What’s even more amazing
is that digital effects were not used for its two most iconic moments. When the Tumbler
makes its appearance and upends a garbage truck, what you’re seeing are third scale
models of the Tumbler, the truck, and the road. At the end of the sequence when the
Joker’s truck flips over, that was accomplished by building a steam-piston mechanism into
the trailer and actually flipping it in a closed off street section.
Die Hard
John McClane’s life is a living hell in the Die Hard franchise, and when shooting
the seminal first film, director John McTiernan didn’t make things any easier for Bruce
Willis. The crew strived for realism to portray the film’s high-octane action, meaning most
of what viewers see is real. For a majority of the exterior shots of Nakatomi showing
explosions, full-scale practical explosions were set off in and around the actual building.
So when Willis is jumping off rooftops and desperately trying to break through glass,
he may not even be acting due to what might happen if it goes wrong.
Gravity
Gravity is one of the most visually-stunning films ever made, as even some professional
critics thought they filmed it in actual space. What director Alfonso Cuaron did was shoot
the actors’ faces and filled everything else in digitally. They had to film the actors
in a way so that the light would match the all-CGI environment, or else it wouldn’t
look right. To combat this problem, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki folded an LED screen into
a box and suggested filming the actors standing in the box. That way, the projected image
could move while the actor stayed still, instead of vice versa. The end result was an Academy
Award.
Return of the Jedi
Before the dawn of CGI, George Lucas had to resort to old school techniques to make his
galaxy far, far away come to life. In Return of the Jedi, he originally wanted to shoot
the Luke vs. Rancor fight by placing a performer in a suit. When those attempts failed, the
crew used a high-speed puppet to film the creature in his pit. For the moments when
Luke is in its grasp and is about to be eaten, a Rancor hand prop had to be built so they
could shoot Mark Hamill’s close ups. It was a second resort, but it paid off in the
end and gave the trilogy one of its most thrilling moments.
E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial
It’s a magical moment of cinema: E.T. and the kids going flying in bikes. More than
30 years later, many are still wondering how that sequence was filmed. According to star
Henry Thomas, it wasn’t as awe-inspiring as the final product. Bikes were bolted to
the end of a camera crane in a studio and were dipped and lifted in front of a blue
screen. The environment was added later in post to create the visual effect that we all
remember. It may not have been exciting to shoot, but the scene is incredibly convincing
on film, leading several to believe that the bikes were actually up in the air.
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