Staging a complex stunt or a giant set piece is a massive challenge.
These achievements are incredible to watch, but learning about what needed to happen behind
the scenes only makes us appreciate them more.
Here's a look at some iconic movie scenes that were nearly impossible to capture on
film.
Fast Five
As quick-moving as its title suggests, Fast Five is at its best during the climactic car
chase through the streets of Rio.
Protagonists Dom and Brian have to drag a 100-ton bank vault behind them with the police
hot on their tail.
[Tires squealing]
It's such an enormous set piece that it would be totally understandable to assume it's mostly
CGI.
Instead, it's nearly all practical effects.
Director Justin Lin was adamant about using as little CGI as possible, so stunt coordinator
Jack Gill built a replica vault that weighed 10,000 pounds.
Although lighter than a real metal vault, it still required souped-up cars with oversized
tires and 400-horsepower engines so that they could actually swing around the replica.
When you're watching Dom and Brian swing a vault through buildings and cement like a
wrecking ball, that's actually happening.
Somewhat surprisingly, no one was hurt in the scene's filming.
[APPLAUSE]
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
The Mission: Impossible franchise has mostly become a series of films where we watch Tom
Cruise cheat death over and over.
"I'm actually scared s---less"
But all other stunts pale in comparison next to the tower-climbing sequence in Mission:
Impossible - Ghost Protocol.
This sequence sees Cruise's Ethan Hunt climbing the exterior of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest
building in the world.
Cruise actually fired the film's insurance company so he could perform the climb without
a stunt double, with only some rigging between him and the ground.
What's more, there was no way to cushion Cruise's landing during the climactic jump back onto
the tower.
[THUD]
He just went for it, landing full force on the glass.
Iron Man 3
Sometimes a well-performed practical effects stunt actually looks like CGI because of how
impossible it seems.
Case in point, the breathtaking airplane rescue set piece from Iron Man 3.
"Remember that game called Barrel of Monkeys?
That's what we're gonna do.
18,000 feet.
Come on people, everybody grab your monkey."
In order to shoot the scene without CGI, the filmmakers began with two days of testing
at the airport to make sure it could even work.
Once they determined it was possible, they proceeded to make the jump multiple times
a day all alongside a cameraman.
"8 days to shoot it and we ended up making 62 airplane loads, over 600 parachute jumps,
480-some hidden parachute jumps."
The extra effort of using practical effects resulted in a genuinely thrilling action sequence.
Cliffhanger
1993's Cliffhanger is a perfect example of a dangerous stunt making a movie a classic.
One jaw-dropping scene involves a character traveling from one airplane to another via
a single cable.
The planes had to travel at an exact speed of 150 miles per hour each.
If either sped up, stuntman Simon Crane could have been ripped in half.
"Any faster, and the force of the wind would likely pull Crane's limbs from his torso."
The altitude and wind created numbing temperatures as well, with Crane having to don a special
prosthetic face mask in order to endure the cold.
Luckily, Crane managed to perform the stunt almost perfectly, except for some trouble
getting pulled into the second plane.
"I actually bounced into the door and bounced out again and that's when I hit, went above,
and slid along the roof."
Crane's death-defying stunt is as breathtaking now as it was when the film first came out.
Ben-Hur
Shooting a biblical drama in the 1950s offered very little room for cinematic sleight of
hand and 1959's Ben-Hur was no different.
The famous chariot race took nearly a year to prepare, with the million-dollar arena
set carved out of a quarry by a thousand workmen, among other intense preparations.
"I was about to start shooting on Ben-Hur in Rome.
I went over about a month early to learn how to drive a four-horse chariot."
The shoot itself required nearly a hundred trained racehorses that actually ended up
being faster than the car carrying the camera.
This gave the cameramen only a few seconds to get each shot per take, even with a head
start.
In addition, the heat limited the horses to eight runs a day, and a stunt gone wrong very
nearly resulted in stuntman Joe Canutt being trampled by his horses and chariot.
[Crowd cheering]
Despite everything, the filmmakers and crew managed to pull the whole thing off.
For that alone, they deserved all 11 of the Oscars the film received.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is chock full of some of the most memorable
imagery in film history.
One particularly famous stunt proved more difficult than others: the sequence in which
Harrison Ford's stuntman, Terry Leonard, is dragged along a dirt road behind a speeding
truck.
Despite the fact that Leonard only drifts under the truck for six seconds, the stunt
was immensely dangerous.
Thankfully, Leonard came away unscathed, pulling off one of the greatest stunts of all time.