Salt Movie Bike
The new Angelina Jolie action movie, "Salt", has sparked a number of discussions about where, when and how it was filmed. The number one question?
1. Was that really Angelina Jolie doing all those dangerous stunts? "Yes," says Ms. Jolie, in interviews. In one sequence, Ms. Jolie's character (Evelyn Salt) leaps off a bridge, lands on top of a speeding container truck and then jumps to another moving truck and then another before bike-jacking a motorcyclist and escaping between lanes full of stopped traffic. At an interview at the Comic Con convention in San Diego, in conjunction with the film's opening, Ms. Jolie confirmed she did every one of those jumps herself. And Simon Crane, a stunt coordinator for the film, confirms it. "It seems crazy, but it's true," Crane told the Los Angeles Times. "We rehearsed everything with doubles, but Angelina was really game." The film's director, Phillip Noyce, said he was "horrified" by her action scenes (click on link in #8 below for an informative interview with him, and "Salt" action clips.) But hold your applause. Read on:
2. What about insurance prohibitions against dangerous stunts for stars? Of course, all movie productions must have insurance, and no insurance agent in his or her right mind would ever sign off on life-threatening stunts by the stars themselves. So, what gives? A bit of movie magic was employed here. Each one of the vehicle to vehicle jumping stunts was shot component by component. Huh? Let's explain: Jumping off the bridge was one component. Cut! Flying through the air was another component. Cut! Landing on the container truck was yet another. Cut! None of the components, in and of themselves, was that scary or impossible. She didn't jump off the bridge, fly through the air, and land on the top of a passing container truck – all in one take. Not even Hollywood's best stunt professionals could (or would) do that. All the short cuts were edited together into the sequence shown in the film – which was probably comprised of dozens of short takes. Ms. Jolie was fitted with a safety harness and plenty of padding (which is why she wore a heavy coat: to hide the protective gear); then she was held by cables in place over each jump. To her credit, Ms. Jolie successfully made each one, Mr. Crane said. What happened to the very visible cables? In post-production, they were digitally erased. (I explain in an earlier column how this technique was also used in the spinning room sequences in "Inception".)
2. Who is Janene Carleton? On "Salt", she was listed as Ms. Jolie's stunt double. She was more of an understudy on this film; practicing all the same moves Ms. Jolie was to make, just in case the star couldn't make them. She didn't wind up being very busy (see her atop the trailer truck with Jolie in various YouTube videos). The 32-year-old Canadian beauty is, however, one of Hollywood's hottest – and busiest – stunt women; she's doubled for dozens of actresses including Emmy Rossum, Emmaneulle Vaugier and Ashley Judd.
3. Did Ms. Jolie successfully pull off all her stunts? No. She managed to scar her iconic face in the final fight sequence with Liev Schreiber, where she bursts through a door shooting a gun, and rolls across the floor. Ms. Jolie's momentum carried her into the corner of a desk (edited out of the final cut). "I thought I had really hurt myself," she said later, "because I was bleeding and couldn't hear anything. But then I remembered I had earplugs in to protect against the gunshot sounds."
4. How did they fake the stunt of Ms. Jolie crawling around barefoot on that narrow building ledge, many stories above the ground? It wasn't faked – not completely anyway. That was really Ms. Jolie, again wearing her harness, and dangling by cables from a helicopter.
The cables, again, were later digitally erased (a really painstaking process requiring a frame by frame erasure; at 30 frames per second, that can really add up to a long day at the office for some film editor.)
5. How did the filmmakers get permission to do so many seemingly out of control and dangerous stunts in Washington, D.C., where security is so tight these days? Not all that much was filmed in Washington itself. Albany, New York, was a reasonable enough facsimile. Most of the vehicular mayhem was shot there, including the truck to truck jumps.
6. Any other wacky stand-ins for real places? How about Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, as a stand-in for the North Korea-South Korea border exchange scene? Bennett Field, opened in 1930, was New York City's first municipal airfield; Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart and "Wrong Way" Corrigan were among those who flew in and out of it.
7. When was the filming done? The Albany scenes were shot in late April 2009, and they were notorious for snarling the city's traffic for days. (Brad Pitt joined her, further complicating logistics.) The crews moved on to the New York City area and Long Island locations, where the balance of the movie was shot, by June 2009.
8. Director Phillip Noyce says his father was actually a spy. So Mr. Noyce says he has a unique perspective on the whole topic. On the subject of Russian "sleeper agents", which when the movie was written and shot, seemed preposterous. But it gained credibility with the discovery in summer 2010 of an actual Russian sleeper agent spy ring. "This is a true story!" he said.
9. "Salt" was originally supposed to be Tom Cruise. He backed out of the project, however, and the male lead was re-written for a femme fatale.
10. What was behind Ms. Jolie's desire to do all the action scenes herself?
Besides a sense of pride around the authenticity of doing it, she says, "The funny thing about having [six] children is that now I am twice as motivated to do a cool stunt because my kids will like it. I'm very responsible these days not to be self-destructive – because of my kids, but at the same time I have all the more reason to do all the cool things possible because I want to try and make my kids proud." She started filming "Salt" soon after giving birth to twins Knox and Vivienne, and thought the physically demanding stunt work would help her get back into shape.
It worked! Wow!
Jerry Garrett
July 26, 2010
Source: https://jerrygarrett.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/ten-secrets-behind-angelina-jolies-salt/
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