This weekend they were shooting some car chase scenes for the Bourne Ultimatum outside my apartment. Check out the pictures I took. Last Saturday they closed off 26th street from 8th ave to Broadway to film some cars driving down the street, this weekend they closed off 7th ave as well to film some crashes at 26th and 7th. I awoke at 7am on Saturday to lots of clomping around overhead, a camera crew was setting up on the roof.
Throughout the morning we peeked out the windows to see what was going on. Three cars were involved in the scene, a police car, a Ford Taurus, and a Volkswagen SUV. The Volkswagen rear-ended the Taurus, pushing it into the police car. I’m not sure if the police car was supposed to get hit or not, because on one take it didn’t and on the next one it did.
They started the scene by lining the accident up like a pool shot. The police car was pulled along by a wire, while the SUV pulled a wire behind it. Perhaps they were the same wire. The lining up of the shot involved setting the proper length of the wire(s) to make sure the cars would hit each other. I missed the first take of the scene, but successive takes used different cameras and angles and things. The second one appeared to use two high-speed cameras, one of which got hit (slowly) by one of the cars.
On the last take, they brought in a pickup truck without the bed, just the frame, to which they attached a trailer which was likewise stripped down to the frame with two cameras mounted on top. This they set up right in front of the Taurus, which slammed into it in the course of the accident. For this take, the police car wasn’t around, the SUV didn’t have the wire attached to it, and it went slamming into the Taurus more quickly.
One interesting thing to mention is that they seemed to use the same cars for all of the takes. The Taurus’ trunk got progressively smashed in, but the SUV was surprisingly undamaged. Perhaps they weakened the Taurus’ frame to make it crumple better. I guess they’ll edit it in such a way that you won’t notice the progressive damage. Another interesting part was the dummy that they had sitting in the driver’s seat of the police car. I wouldn’t confuse him with a real person on the street, but maybe he would be more convincing if I saw him driving a car out of the corner of my eye.
I guess this means I’ll have to check out the movie to see how they put all of this together.