There’s a time in every great action movie where the film transforms into a microcosm of badassry, its most perfect version of itself. We’re referring to the pursuit scene involving the airplane hangar in Face-Off, the fight in the zero-gravity hallway in Inception, the large truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the scene in Die Hard where Bruce Willis walks on glass. A viewer may find themselves saying “holy shit!” or “hell ya!” after watching these moments. And for his newest movie, Skyscraper, director Rawson Marshall Thurber recorded a moment that instantly became iconic. This is the method.
The one-legged protagonist of the film, Will Sawyer (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), must sprint across a crane that is hundreds of feet in the air and then literally jump off of the crane to get into a burning building where his family is being held hostage. This is the movie’s best scene. The sight is remarkable not merely for its visual appeal but also for its deeper significance.
“It’s a pivotal scene in the film,” Thurber informs Fatherly. Since everything changed at that point, it served as the film’s literal starting point. You understand that there is nothing this man won’t do to keep his wife and children safe when he figures out this crazy technique to enter the building and save his family. Therefore, we treated it seriously.
Naturally, it’s difficult to make a scene like that feel and appear natural. However, what proportion of it is phony and what is real? Was The Rock thrown from a crane? According to Rawson, “a practical shoot and special effects were combined.” “First, we constructed the actual super-crane framework that Dwayne descends. We filmed it on a stage, where he jumps off the end of a gimbal wire and appears to be marionetted into the air.
However, a building is necessary for the scene to be truly complete, and Thurber informed us of the special effects procedure his team used to create the illusion that The Rock was actually diving into the highest structure in the world.
“We filmed in Hong Kong, and Industrial Light and Magic [ILM] added the background. They then used computer-generated imagery to add the building into the skyline,” says Thurber. It’s similar to piece by piece assembling a mosaic. And it’s seamless if done correctly. We didn’t have a building or a fire when we set out to make a movie about one that was on fire. Thus, it was difficult.
Although it may seem like a lot of labor for a single scene, The Rock’s incredible leap appears on the big screen, proving that all of his hard work was worthwhile. Thurber saw more in this moment than merely a lighthearted method to amuse viewers. Johnson assures the audience that they will be fully engaged for the duration of the film by bringing them along for the leap.
Thurber maintains that “action movies blur the lines of reality at their best.” You don’t want to shatter the audience’s illusion of reality, but you still want the show. And the key question is how to set that tone. It should seem unlikely but not unfeasible. Crazy but not foolish.
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