Set-pieces

The freeway chase between the Penguin's SUV and Batman's BatMobile — a custom-built picture car based on a 1970 Pontiac Firebird with a hot-rod chassis and rear-mounted twin afterburner. The sequence used four BatMobile picture cars (one hero, three stunt) and seven Penguin SUVs, with precision driving through a closed Brooklyn freeway tunnel.

Maverick test-flies the Darkstar prototype past Mach 10 against shutdown orders. The Darkstar mock-up — a full-scale practical airframe built at Plant 42 with consultation from the Lockheed Skunk Works — was static, but Scott Fisher's SFX team gimballed it on a hydraulic pivot to sell the buffeting. The flight footage cuts to plate photography of the actual Skunk-Works-derived A-12 airframe at Edwards.

A magic-hour beach-football scene in lieu of mission chalk-talk: practical sun-position blocking, four consecutive afternoons of 25-minute shoot windows, no electric supplements. Stunt coordinator Casey O'Neill choreographed the running pattern + tackle blocking; cast performed their own choreography over multiple takes.

Sam Mendes' apparent-single-take coverage required the stunt unit to choreograph multi-minute traversals of a fully-built No Man's Land trench set, with performers landing precisely at marked positions for each blocking change. The set was rigged top-to-bottom for falls, fire stings, and impact reaction shots; performers had to reset between takes because each take ran the full length of the sequence in real time.

Steve Rogers's confrontation with his own past self during the Battle of New York time-heist. Sam Hargrave performed both halves of the choreography to the working-take camera plate — first as Cap-A facing an empty mark, then as Cap-B reacting to the playback. The composite stitches the two passes together via plate-matching at the marble-floor pivot.

Black Widow's sacrifice on Vormir to retrieve the Soul Stone. Heidi Moneymaker performed the rigged fall from the cliff edge on a hydraulic decelerator system, with the upper section of the cable disappearing in compositing. The decelerator was tuned to produce a 6-G arrest profile in the last two metres so the body's pose at the bottom of the fall would read as motionless on impact rather than rebound.

K's opening retirement of Sapper Morton — a brutal close-quarters fight in the cramped protein-farm kitchen. Choreographed by Vic Armstrong's team; the practical kitchen-table impact (Bautista crashing through the table) used a Korda Studios-fabricated breakaway prop with foam-core supports.

Niander Wallace inspects a newly-decanted female replicant prototype in the Wallace Corp inner sanctum, and casually murders her — a single-line stab, performed in one take by Sallie Harmsen on a body-rig wrist-knife with a retracting-blade prop. The blood reveal is a practical Tom Savini-derived squib synced to the prop's retraction. Choreographed in tight 360° camera sweep.

Performers ride long carbon-fibre poles fitted to picture vehicles, swinging cab-to-cab while the convoy travels at speed. The pole-cat rig was designed in collaboration with Australian rigger Glenn Suter (ARK Stunts) — a rear-mounted carbon-fibre pole, counterweighted at the base, with the performer harnessed to a sliding ring along the pole length. A safety cable ran from the harness to a winch-controlled tether mounted on the chase vehicle.

The War Rig rollover sequence — the multi-axle truck collapsing onto its side mid-convoy — was performed practically using the actual picture-car War Rig with internal roll-cage reinforcement and a counterweighted impact rig. Multiple cameras (eight to twelve, depending on take) covered the sequence; reset between takes took roughly 24 hours.

The five-minute continuous-take grizzly bear attack — DiCaprio performed against a stand-in actor in a rough motion-capture suit; ILM's photoreal CG bear was animation-blocked to the stand-in's motion. The choreography combined practical impact + body-roll work by stunt double Mark Mottram with ILM's digital bear handoff in compositing.

Glass rides his horse off a 50-foot tree-lined cliff edge and lands in a pine grove below. Practical horse-fall stunt + pine-cushion landing rig + ILM CG horse for the in-air mid-flight beats. Stunt rider performed the take-off; Mark Mottram doubled DiCaprio for the on-ground aftermath.

Sandra Bullock spent the bulk of principal photography suspended on a 12-axis rig inside the Light Box. The rig's motion-control was timecode-locked to the camera move and the LED panel imagery — when Stone tumbled, all three motion vectors phased together as a single edited motion plate. Bullock performed extreme positional + rotational arcs over 80+ shoot days while wearing the prop NASA EMU suit. Riggers + stunt coordinator Steven Pope supervised every take.

Practical fire-bar SFX inside the Light Box capsule mock-up. Bullock performed at close proximity to a controlled gas-bar fed at 35 psi. SFX coordinator Neil Corbould (later Best VFX Oscar winner) supervised the gag with full medical + fire suppression on standby.

The pre-titles foot-pursuit and fight on top of a moving train through Istanbul. Performers ran across the carriage roofs at speed with magnetised footwear and a low-profile safety harness running on a continuous cable along the train length. The cable was hidden in the rendering by careful camera placement and post-clean; the harness was rated for fall arrest at the train's 50-mph cruising speed.

Arthur's zero-gravity fight with the projection security through the rotating hotel corridor. The corridor was built as a full-rotating practical set — a 100-foot tube on hydraulic rams that spun on its long axis at variable speed. Joseph Gordon-Levitt performed the close-quarters work himself with a stunt double for the over-the-head wire transitions; the rig's safety officer monitored the tilt rate against the choreography in real time.

The chase set-piece on Lower Wacker Drive (filmed under Chicago) where the Joker's Mack truck is flipped end-over-end by the Batpod's grappling hook. Achieved practically using a high-pressure nitrogen ram fitted under the front of the truck cab; the ram fired on cue, lifting the cab so the truck pitched forward into a controlled longitudinal roll. No CG in the flip itself; minor digital extension was added for the Batpod cable line.

The Bride versus the Crazy 88 — fifteen minutes of continuous sword choreography in Tokyo's House of Blue Leaves restaurant. Zoë Bell performed the bulk of the rigged action opposite the eighty-eight performers, with breakaway katana props and full-body pad arrangements behind every set wall.

The pre-rooftop assault on the lobby — Neo and Trinity entering with the duffel of weapons, the metal-detector stripping, the marble-pillar gunfight, and the column-sliding back-bend that lands Neo on the lobby floor. Choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping with the Wachowskis specifying every camera position; Stahelski performed Neo's wirework rehearsals at full speed before Reeves stepped into the slow-shutter takes.