Filmmaker Sam Hargrave knew he would have to up the ante when it came to filming Netflix’s action sequel “Extraction 2.” The first film, which came out in 2020, contained a 12-minute sequence that included a car chase, gun battles, knife battles and plenty of explosions.
It was during early conversations with producer Joe Russo that the idea of a longer sequence came up. Says Hargrave, “Joe said, ‘It’d be cool if we opened the film with Tyler (Chris Hemsworth) extracting someone from a prison. Joe he wrote this into the script, ‘And thus follows the greatest oner in cinema history.’”
Hargrave devised a plan forward, and the result was a mind-blowing, 21-minute one-take sequence that sees black ops specialist Tyler Rake entering a prison to rescue the family of a violent gang member. As Tyler and the family members escape the prison and jump into armored vehicles, a chase ensues, and when they board a train, it comes under attack by gangsters who land a helicopter on the train.
Hargrave says once it was written down, he had five months to prepare and rehearse. “A lot of our energy was focused on that one shot knowing it was going to be the marquee action set piece of the movie. With the complexities of the train sequence; we had a real train, multiple helicopters, actors on top of the trains, stunt performers, jumping off choppers, it had to be choreographed and meticulously planned so that nothing went wrong.”
Safety was at the forefront for the former Marvel stunt coordinator. The sequence was shot outside Prague, and unlike a fight sequence, this was a much larger scene. “With the trains moving at high speed, it goes from everything’s great to potential death very quickly. So, everything had to be very well planned. We had a safety team in place. We had retired para jumpers, but because we were so remote, the hospitals weren’t close, and we needed people on hand in the event something goes south, we could handle it. Luckily, nothing ever did because of the extensive rehearsal process.”
The train sequence alone took seven days to shoot, but all in, with the courtyard fight and tunnel sequences, Hargrave says, “We had 29 days to shoot the sequence.”
Originally, there was an idea to have two trains, but Hargrave says that would have extended the sequence by another 10 minutes. “It was way bigger in my mind. I remember pitching it to Netflix. There were had these two trains and they’d get derailed, but when we started thinking logistically, we realized that one train was going to be difficult enough, and two might be overstepping our bounds.”
Hargrave knew there would be extremely hard moments to pull off in the sequence, the first was when Tyler is protecting Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) among the hundreds of prisoners.
He notes everything was in-camera which meant “there were 400 people and 75 stunt performers insulating Chris and interacting with him directly. Outside of that, you had special skills background doing their choreographed fights. There was background talent who were running and screaming.”
Hargrave shot that part of the sequence over three nights in subzero temperatures. He adds, “You have to feed these people, you have to keep them warm in between takes, and down to the last person, they have to remember what their last move was because logistically with the different weapons, costume changes, blood and makeup applications, you couldn’t do it all at once. So, we broke it up into a few pieces. “
“The helicopter landing on a moving train was extremely challenging,” Hargrave says. Originally, stunt performers would slide down a rope from above and land on the train, but Fred North, the helicopter pilot, came up with the idea to land a helicopter on the train. He says, “That was a real helicopter with five stunt performers climbing out, landing on a real train in the real environment, and I was the camera operator for that moment.”
In the editing bay, the scene was so perfect, but it looked fake. “We ended up using an earlier take where he was fighting crosswind and looked a little scarier because the one we had where he landed perfectly, looked like there was Velcro on the skids of the train, but it was crazy to make have to make those choices where you have a stunt so dangerous performed so perfectly well, that you had to use an earlier one because it looked too good,” says Hargrave.
Just how many invisible cuts were there? Hargrave had to find moments where that could be seamlessly stitched together without distracting the audience. “It would take longer than the scope of the interview to go through it. I can say, there was an interesting article that came out online where somebody had called out 49 different hidden edits. I can say that person had a very astute eye, and they weren’t wrong on any of the edit points, but they did miss a lot of them, meaning they were more than they had called out. A lot of the reasoning behind where and why I put an edit into something like this is I try to avoid blending too much big stunt action with actor performance. I want everyone’s focus to be on the dangerous thing, that big moment, or the very complicated choreography. I try to do it in manageable chunks.”
Hargrave says the longest single take was three to four minutes.
“There were 50 to 70 moves that Chris had to do, but then there were times when there’d be a single stunt. That would be an edit on the front side and the backside.”
Ultimately, for Hargrave, his goal for the audience is about the experience. “I want it to be an immersive, intense thrill ride. I’m sure there are a lot of people who could do it all in one, and it’s way more impressive. But to me, safety is more important as long as the feeling gets conveyed. As long as we go home safe and get to work the next day. I’m very happy.”
