48
•
LMGI COMPASS
|
Fall 2020
The Chase to End All Chases
Action cinema has featured many a car chase over the years.
Among the most celebrated in cinema history is the first (and
still often cited as the best) modern chase in Bullitt (1968), the
insane chase through Brooklyn in The French Connection (1971),
the Moscow sequence in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the Paris
chase in Ronin (1998) and George Miller's absolutely stunning,
near-feature-length chase in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
6 Underground stars Ryan Reynolds, as a tech billionaire who
fakes his death and builds a team of "ghosts"—untraceable
agents—for a bold mission to take down a brutal dictator. With
that kind of setup, there was no question that what filmmaker
Michael Bay would want to pull off would be a challenge.
"I thought the chase sequence would be impossible to shoot as
written," Latella said. "I imagined most of it was going to be CG
but, in the end, I was confident we could find a way no matter
what, and we did. We really exceeded our highest expectations."
What the team ultimately cooked up is an absolutely insane
18-minute extended car-chase sequence through the historic, art-
filled core of Florence where our heroes are pursued by, at any
given moment, fancy European sports cars, SUVs, motorcycles
and helicopters all while one of the operatives is bleeding out in
the back seat. And nearly all of it done in-camera with minimal
use of CGI.
They roar around tight curves and between ancient buildings
in what the script describes as an "ALPHA ROMEO GIULIA
QUADRIFOGLIO, PAINTED IN HOLY-FUCKING-SHIT, LOOK-AT-ME
NEON GREEN," as pedestrians and, yes, even puppies dive out of
the way! It's the kind of cinematic madness you'll only find in a
Michael Bay film.
"We wanted to open the movie with an outdoor/indoor car chase
in a beautiful labyrinthine setting with historic overtones," said
screenwriter/executive producer Rhett Reese. "Florence fit the
bill perfectly, and Michael pushed the action even further."
It was going to be the chase to end all chases.
Latella began prepping the Italian portion of the shoot in April of
2018. "We did our scout with Jeffrey in mid-April and then in May,
we took Michael to Florence, Siena and Taranto," said Latella. All
three cities were used for filming.
il Duomo
As if cars racing, jumping and flipping through the historic center
of Florence—a first for any production—wasn't enough, in prep,
Beecroft had casually mentioned seeing a YouTube video of a
parkour group called Storror and wondered if they wouldn't be a
great addition to the film. Parkour is the sport of moving rapidly
through typically urban areas, negotiating obstacles by running,
jumping and climbing. Bayhem amps it up to include scaling
Photo courtesy of Enrico Latella/LMGI
