We asked two of the people most responsible for the action in the seventh installment of the Fast & Furious franchise—second unit director Spiro Razatos and second unit stunt coordinator Andy Gill—to walk us through a particularly tough but amazing shot in which the cars appear to drive out of a C-130, skydive (!), and land on a Colorado highway.

Spiro Razatos:

"One of the aerial photographers needed to be so close to the ar. He stood at the end of the ramp, and as the car came out, he put his hand in front of the bumper and fell back with the car. He had to wait for the car to knock him back.

"One car's parachute didn't open. That car was toast."

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Andy Gill:

"Originally we contacted the Air Force and got a hold of GPS parachutes. With those you could drop a car and hit within a 10-foot area. But those chutes were so big that it didn't look good on the cars. The only place to put them was on the hood of the car—we didn't like the look of that right off the bat.

"We wanted to drop the cars from 12,000 feet and open the chutes at 2,500-3,000. The Air Force wanted us to drop them from 18,000 feet and open at 12,000, because the chute needs time to find out where it is. We ended up going with ballistic recovery shoots. They were welded to the back of the cars, but to do that, we had to cut the roof parts out and put fiberglass sheeting in its place. When it was time to deploy, that panel would be blown off and the chute would come out. Now it looked like a standard car.

The car was dropped from eight feet up—as high as possible without causing damage

"The skydivers requested that we not take the engines and trannys out, because the heavier the car was, the better it would be for the skydivers. The extra mass in the middle of the cars stabilized them. Because of the airspeed and the skydiver proximity, anything that could come off the car was screwed on.

"Still, pieces came off."

Here's how the shot came off, step by step:

Wiring

In this scene Vin Diesel and his crew of affable criminal grease monkeys are chasing a bus with valuable cargo. The bus is racing down a secluded road, so they've just parachuted their cars out of a plane to catch up to it. (Obviously.) To get forward movement in the car, we brought in two 300-ton cranes, one at the top of the road and the other at the bottom. They had one-inch rope strung between them. The car is on a skate and hanging on that rope. At the start mark it was forty to sixty feet off the ground.

Altitude

The high altitude at Colorado's Pikes Peak—the summit is 14,115 feet, and this scene was shot at 12,000 feet—was tough on the crew in terms of breathing but also tough on the cars. At 10,000 feet you lose 30 percent of your horsepower, and it keeps dropping from there. The lack of oxygen interferes with the combustion process.

"One car's parachute didn't open. That car was toast"

The car

This 1970 Dodge Charger is hand-built. The only stock parts are the roof and the tops of the quarter-panels, and even those are fabricated a bit, adjusted to fit. It has a tube-framed chassis similar to a Pro 2 truck's, King coil-over and bypass shocks, and an independent front suspension. The 520-horsepower LS3 motor was moved back to shift the center of gravity to handle the jumps.

Location

The road is a section of Pikes Peak Highway, which we were allowed to close down for eight days. The rest of the time we filmed in fifteen- to twenty-minute increments while a line of traffic formed behind us. Some of the people waiting—especially the cyclists—made it clear they were unhappy with the delay.

Environment

The right side of the road was a dirt lane and a culvert, so the crew brought in their own rocks, along with trees up to twenty-five feet high mounted on a steel pallet.

Digital Effects

We didn't want to do these scenes in CGI. We wanted them real. (We even dropped real cars from the airplane to set up this shot.) The only CGI was painting out the overhead and pullback wires and adding in a parachute.

Speed

The parachuted car fell at twenty-five miles per hour. Once it reached that speed on the rope, the car was dropped from eight feet up—as high as possible without causing damage.

Drop point

The parachute lines are actually CGI to cover the cables suspending the car. They're attached by steel pick points welded into the roll cage. The driver hits a release inside the car to trigger explosive cable cutters.

The drop

With the car suspended on the cable, the driver would give a thumbs-up and start the engine. We'd count down: "3-2-1-drop." He would start out in neutral, and as he got close he'd put the car in gear, then throttle up a little. When he got to his mark, he'd hit the release button and hammer the gas pedal so the car would peel out when it hit the road. It was actually less of a peel-out than we'd hoped for.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io