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| MICHAEL BAY: Director, "Bad Boys 2" Michael Bay, What's the toughest stunt you've been involved with, and why? MB: I rarely faced a task as challenging or as spectacular as the "Bad Boys 2" sequence where Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are bombarded by automobiles propelled off a car carrier they're chasing down a freeway at 70 mph. And the scene was done entirely with old style stunts, because we didn't have the money for computer graphics. How did you go about planning the stunt? MB: Ideas for the sequence began to evolve when I first sat down with storyboard artist Robbie Consing. We always bat ideas around and we wanted to have a very long, cool car chase. Do you have a regular stunt man/coordinator you like to work with? MB: Yes, I quickly brought in regular stunt collaborator Kenny Bates because I knew he would help me. I will pitch an idea, ask: Can we do this? How do we do this? He is a big idea guy. At the beginning he helped me set it up, then stunt coordinators Steven Picerni and Andy Gill had to put it together." Did you have any preconceived location ideas? MB: "I knew I really liked this bridge right above Miami, and somehow I was able to manipulate the city to shut it down for four days." What are the qualities that make a good stunt? MB: "I am very demanding on my stunt people. I am very demanding on safety, but also for excelling in stunts and not making it feel like a stunt man is doing it. A good stunt coordinator knows a lot about physics. Physics is a way to help you understand what is going to happen in a stunt and also what can go wrong, because you've always got to think of the 'what ifs.' But you also need a stunt man who has cojones!" Did you have any special motivation for doing this stunt? MB: Joel Silver ("Matrix" producer) kept saying that there was this $40 million-$50 million car chase. He said, "We have the most incredible car chase ever known to mankind!' I was in a complete depression. And I was saying, 'OK you guys, we are going to have to go old school on this. They have the effects; we are just going to have to make it as real as possible." Did you have any special technical challenges? MB: We developed this camera system, eventually called the Bay Buster, this 'Mad Max'-looking vehicle that had four wheel cages and bars everywhere and looked like a moving wedge. We were able to place cameras in the bumper, cameras all over, and it was driven by a stunt driver. So you used a lot of cameras? MB: We had I think five cameras on the "Bad Boys" car. Then we had cameras on other cars, and the stunt drivers were the cameramen. If there was any other car that might be clipped (by the "Bad Boys" car), the driver of that car had to have a camera in his front seat. How do you test to see if the stunt will work? MB: You have to go through the testing phase, and practice. So you take the stunt men and the carrier to an airfield and bump cars off the carrier at the same speed you are going to be driving, to see what happens to the cars. And what did happen to the cars? MB: What we found was that they all flattened like pancakes! So we devised roll cages in the cars so they wouldn't crumple. Then you counter-weight the cars so that they flip in a weird way. And during the actual shooting? MB: When it came time to shoot, each stunt driver had a camera in his car, which meant the drivers had to be intensely aware of what the camera was seeing. We hired 100 policemen to make sure no civilian strayed onto the bridge and into one of the cars' paths What about driver safety? MB: There is this huge danger of these things dropping off the bridge, which is a 200-feet drop, but in the end we got through the four days with no damage to anyone, except the 100 cars that were destroyed along the way.  Overview Facts & Figures Top |
