Even he was a bit worried about doing this stunt for real.
Director David Leitch knows his way around an action set piece.
He was co-director of the first John Wick movie, before moving on to make Charlize Theron a kick-ass double agent in Atomic Blonde, and most recently he filled the director’s chair on huge comic-book sequel Deadpool 2.
His movies are mostly known for down-and-dirty fight scenes, so when it came to taking on an action juggernaut like Hobbs & Shaw, would he be ready for the humongous action sequences?
Especially in an age when the Fast & Furious movies are held on par with James Bond, Mission: Impossible, and most other major action franchises, and audiences are wise enough to know that Tom Cruise is 100% hanging off the side of that plane, and that the overt use of CGI is now more of a turn-off for adrenaline junkies.
So when JOE sat down with Leitch in the run-up to the release of the movie, we wanted to know if there were any major set-pieces in the movie that audiences might not believe were actually done for real:
“A lot of the Samoan car chase, where the cars are linking up,” Leitch tell us. “There is a tonne of practical effects in that sequence. We had a great special effects team, and a great stunt time. We built rigs to drive the trucks on two wheels, pretending that they’re hanging from the helicopter.
“Fred North, who is a prolific helicopter pilot in the business – we shot the Black Hawk in probably 90% of those shots, it is a real Black Hawk. Whether the cars are connected on a chain in CG, there is a real car, there is a real helicopter, in a real place.
“There is a lot of amazing in-camera stuff that I was even like [pulls collar away from neck] ‘We can probably use the CGI here, I think!'”
Check out our full interview with Leitch, including which other Fast & Furious characters he’d like to see get their own spin-off, right here:
JOE was also lucky enough to chat to the movie’s stars Jason Statham, Idris Elba, and Vanessa Kirby, as well as the movie’s writer Chris Morgan (who has written every Fast & Furious movie since Tokyo Drift), and you can catch all those on The Big Reviewski in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Hobbs & Shaw screeches into Irish cinemas on Thursday 1 August.
Clip via Universal Pictures Ireland
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