Extraction 2 | Behind the Scenes With Chris Hemsworth | Netflix

This was real helicopters interacting with a real train. By the 6th or 7th take, I thought, well, this is fun, but this could go drastically wrong any second now. Yeah, it was dangerous, and that's why I wanted to be the guy walking under the helicopter. Hey, Chris Hemsworth here. Hi, my name is Sam Hargrave, director of Extraction 2. This is Don't Try This at Home. A deep dive into how we create the intense action and stunts of our film. When you're trying to create a memorable fight, remember that you don't create memorable fights from day one. As Malcolm Gladwell says, it's 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. I first started as a stuntman. I met Chris in 2011 when we did the first Avengers. I was doubling Chris Evans, and then Chris was Thor, obviously. Sam has just an incredible attention to detail, an amazing work ethic, comes from a stunt background. There are many memorable moments in the Marvel Universe for me. I had a great run there. It's like eight years, I think, of working on different movies. I wanted to bring a little bit of that Hong Kong action cinema that I was so inspired by to the Marvel Universe, and I thought, what better way than throwing myself off a building and hitting a bunch of things on the way down. He's an athlete. He brings an athleticism to it that I think is second to none as far as the people that I've worked with. From there, flash forward to on the set of Infinity War, which I was the stunt coordinator on for the Russo brothers. So having done that for most of my stunt career, for like 15 years, I would say I had at least 10,000 hours of shooting and cutting action. That translates over to when you're directing action on a movie like Attraction 2. You have this depth of confidence and resources to draw from from the years of directing action. If the stunt's going not how he planned, he'll get in and do it himself. He'll often grab the camera and also kind of do the camera work himself. The Warner in Attraction 2 is 21 minutes and 7 seconds, which is almost twice as long as the Warner in the first film. It's a very delicate, intricate dance. It's obviously not a 22-minute shot. The logistics sometimes necessitate cuts that we try to hide because of the complexities of the action. It's a series of different shots that are stitched together seamlessly to look like it's one piece. We try to stitch, which is joined kind of seamlessly, these sequences around big stunts so that you can make sure it's prepared properly. So we'd probably do two or three minute, I think, pieces mostly. And yeah, there's a lot of pressure to, you know, you have a line of dialogue at the start of the sequence, a big fight scene. And then you move on and you stitch the next one together. But again, the intention is for the audience to experience that moment in time with the character in real time. Whatever it is the character's going through, that camera becomes the proxy for the audience. And so you become like a character. It's like a play. You're putting it out there in real time, and it's all about pacing, and you want to make sure that the audience is able to experience it but not be overwhelmed. Two more chapters. Ready for action. We did have three distinct sections we had to work through, which was the prison break, the car chase, and the train. Action! I think the prison yard one, it was my favorite sequence to shoot. It was the biggest mountain we had to climb. It was the biggest mountain that I had to climb in the film. There was so much choreography, and there were so many elements and people involved. There were 300 extras in that sequence, and things were on fire. It was actually snowing. We're on night shoots. During that sequence, around our hero, I think there were 75 to 100 stunt performers. Outside of that, next layer was action extras, we called them, doing design fights. And then beyond that were just the background performers. We had an amazing stunt team overseeing all that and keeping an eye as they're watching. I'm focusing on Chris, what's his journey, but also trying to open up my peripheral and say, what's that guy doing over there? You have to have a team, not only the actor, who has to try to recreate what he did from one take to the next because you're blending them together. You have to have the background in sync to match what they did take after take. They try to be in the same spot, which is almost impossible. And the camera has to coordinate with the actors, and he's moving in amongst all the stunt people, so they have to be fighting and looking over their shoulder and moving for camera when he wants to cross behind them. If someone made a mistake, or myself, it was such a big orchestration to bring it back and start again. And the beauty of the Warner is once you've got that piece, you move on and you don't come back to it unless you get into editing and, oh, screw that up. But very rarely do you come back. So it's like rehearse it, rehearse it, walk it, and then if everyone's feeling good, say, let's try it. Hands down, bar none, the most difficult moment to capture in the Warner was landing a helicopter on a moving train. People will probably assume that a lot of this was done on blue screen and it was like you hang the thing on a crane. That was not. It was real. It was a real helicopter. That was Fred North, the helicopter pilot, with five stunt performers on the chopper, flying in and landing on a train moving, I think it was between 30 and 45 miles an hour. We had a train moving at full speed. We were in the middle of Prague, middle of winter, so we had snow to deal with and all the elements. There were a lot of discussions about that, like why do it that way, why take the risk? I think audiences can tell the difference. There's just a visceral experience of real stunts happening that you can't replicate with CG or blue screen stuff. It was about making the action authentic and gritty and truthful. To ask someone else to do that where things go wrong, things go really wrong, it felt wrong, so I did it myself. I walked under the chopper and we got a shot. I don't know if you've ever walked into the downdraft of a helicopter, but it's like walking into a hurricane. On take one, it actually blew me off the top of the train, hit my knees, and I held the camera, but went off the side of the train into the net. Now we know what to expect. Let's do it again. Sam had very specific ideas about how this had to look, so we did a lot of takes, 15 takes, and I was like, I think we got it, this is cool. Time to move on, get me off the train. Hands down the most difficult shot of the movie. It was pretty exhilarating and nerve-wracking, but makes for one of the coolest action sequences I've been a part of. When designing large action sequences, specifically a battle sequence or a large prison brawl, there's so many elements that have to be designed and put into place for everything to go smoothly that you've got to break it down piece by piece. One of the first things is, what's the journey of your main character or characters through that sequence? Once you get that sorted out, or at least an idea, then you start building around them. Who do they interact with? What's the most exciting thing to happen close to them? And you just keep building and building and building from the foundation of the journey of your hero through that scene. Not just having action for the sake of action, but having a story within that action, and having there be drama, because otherwise it just becomes a little redundant. So whether it's Thor or Tyler Rake, what does this character want during the course of this sequence? So you have to kind of chart that. We wanted to make sure that each character within the action scene had a very strong emotional motivation, and we were staying true to that. And you have to route his journey. And so what's the most interesting conflict along the way? Who does he come across, and what skills does he use to get out? And any time it sort of felt gimmicky or felt like we were kind of doing it just for the sake of, then we'd have to reassess and go, OK, how can we insert something here that grounds this moment? You need the armature of the character's journey in order to build the action around it. A big part of my process is a stunt previs, which we call fight vis or stunt vis. When we get the script, and from the directing side, I turn it over to the stunt team. I rely heavily on that team, and after discussions with me, we talk about, all right, what's the character's journey? What's the arc? What's happening emotionally before and after? OK, you have those parameters, it's in a prison, and go. And they'll go into this rented-out warehouse, usually, put down a soft, matted floor, and then use boxes, and you use those as kind of a mock set building. The choreography is like a play, like a dance, like any beautiful piece of theatre where multiple elements are having to be as specific and accurate as one another for it to work. So it's really cool. I pulled up some footage, some nature footage, of a lion being surrounded and attacked by a bunch of hyenas. I was like, that, that's the thing. The look in that lion's eye, and the way the hyenas were attacking, I was like, that's what I want. And so they're like, OK, give that to the stunt team, and they look at this lion being attacked by hyenas, and they're like, are you sure? And we had moments in there that it felt very much like that. And they start to film it, and they start to get an idea. When you review those kind of weekly, as they shoot them, edit them, they'll put sound effects to them. To take my hat off to the stunt team, it was some of the most amazing commitment that I'd seen on a film set. So the next step is once you're happy with the action, you bring in the rest of the stunt team and the actors, because they have to learn that dance. We had a lot of weapons, a lot of improvising and kind of brainstorming sessions on how we could kill one another and what instruments we could use to do so. I like to give them as much time as possible, whoever it is, just because the more you rehearse it, the more it's ingrained, and then the more spontaneous you can be on the day, so it doesn't feel like a rehearsed fight. There were guys that I'd been training with for months and months. It came up when we were brainstorming, it was like, we want it to be snowing outside, it's winter, it's cold, what if Tyler Rake was on fire? Yes, we have to do that. And so talking that over with Chris, he was game for it. Not a lot of actors would agree to being lit on fire for their art. And he did, multiple times, because, you know, not every take is perfect. The director and all the stunt performers and myself have to be in sync perfectly in order for this to sell. Chris, being the stud that he is, he only takes, you know, sometimes, that sequence was a couple weeks, but sometimes a couple days for a fight scene. He'll absorb it, he'll do it with the stunt team. His double, Bobby Holland-Hatton, will go work with him. Underneath at the bottom, push forward, and then you push down and they both fall into the wall. It's like improv, right? That doesn't just come out of nothing. It comes out of massive preparation. Rehearsal is the reason you can be spontaneous on set. Study the masters. Study Jackie Chan films. Study, you know, Chad Stahelski's movies, Dave Leitch's movies, people that do great action. Study the movies. How do they capture action? Where do they put the camera for this punch? And a great way to do that is try to recreate your favorite scenes from those movies. Shot for shot, move for move. Get that to where you look at it and you go, that's pretty darn close. Then do the next one, and you do that, so now you start to understand the fundamentals, because all of the great designers, they adhere to the fundamentals, which is like, you know, do simple well and tell a story with your action, and then try to have at least one memorable moment for your character in that. Learn to do what the best do first, and your voice will emerge from that. For young filmmakers out there, it's like not only putting out into the universe what you want, but then telling people, because if people don't know what you want, or what you want to do, they can't help you. Thanks for watching, and remember, don't try this at home, or do, but just do it safely. Don't miss Extraction 2, only on Netflix.