The 25 Most Important Stunt Scenes of the 21st Century
From ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ to ‘Mission: Impossible,’ these are the fights, shootouts, car chases, and aerial maneuvers that vaulted action cinema to new heights—as told by the people who made themThe 25 Most Important Stunt Scenes of the 21st Century
From ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ to ‘Mission: Impossible,’ these are the fights, shootouts, car chases, and aerial maneuvers that vaulted action cinema to new heights—as told by the people who made them
A few months ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally did something the stunt community has been waiting decades for: It introduced a new Oscars category, “Achievement in Stunt Design.” The award, set to debut at the 100th Academy Awards in 2028, marks the culmination of a persistent campaign led by director David Leitch—a former stunt performer and coordinator himself—who’s spent years trying to advocate for more recognition for the underappreciated craft. By its nature, stunt work has always avoided the spotlight, but like production or costume or sound design, it’s part of the fabric of every movie. Now, it’ll have its own moment on Hollywood’s biggest stage.
In the spirit of recognizing this load-bearing work, I’ve put together a chronological list of this century’s 25 most important stunt scenes: The fights, shootouts, car chases, and aerial maneuvers that have forged innovation within the stunt world and vaulted action cinema to literal new heights. The choices below—paired with anecdotes told to The Ringer about their creation—reflect 25 years of technological progress, enhanced safety measures, and refined fitness and training routines that have allowed filmmakers to push the limits of what’s possible.
It’s a tribute to the forward thinkers—the actors, stunt doubles, stunt coordinators, cinematographers, production designers, and editors—dedicated to building action that feels fresh and that leaves a mark long after you’ve watched it.
Rooftop Chase and Fight (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000)
When James Schamus co-wrote the screenplay for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he and his co-writers (Wang Hui-ling, Tsai Kuo-jung) didn’t even attempt to describe the action sequences outside of some brief direction: “They fight.” The trio had good reason to be vague—namely, they could rely on the visionary minds of director Ang Lee and legendary action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (who had just worked on The Matrix). “I could guarantee the fight scenes would be the greatest ever filmed,” Schamus says.
Indeed, the martial arts masterpiece—still the highest-grossing foreign film in America—wowed critics and audiences with its breathtaking and high-flying approach to action, which begins with a confrontation between a veteran swordswoman (Michelle Yeoh) and a cloaked figure (Zhang Ziyi) who has stolen the famed Green Destiny Sword. Shot under moonlight and set to a propulsive percussive score by Tan Dun, their hand-to-hand duel morphs into an aerial chase over rooftops, made seamless with Woo-ping’s wirework that allows Yeoh to sprint perpendicular to the ground.
Mike Leeder, a Hong Kong stunt professional who voiced an English dub for the movie, notes the way Woo-ping distinguishes each performer’s fighting style—“Zhang Ziyi has that raw enthusiasm and fury whereas Michelle Yeoh and [fellow star] Chow Yun-fat have that restraint. They've been around the block,” he says. It’s a brief, riveting showdown, made all the more accessible by its rhythmic pacing, editing structure, and Lee’s shot selection that highlights his actors’ abilities through long, extended takes.
Highway Chase (The Matrix Reloaded, 2003)
R.A. Rondell can’t remember every stretch of pavement he scouted for The Matrix Reloaded, but one remains frozen in his memory. Somewhere on a frigid interstate near Akron, Ohio, trailing a police escort as the crew searched for the perfect spot for the movie’s ambitious, second-act chase scene, the stunt coordinator watched the Wachowski siblings lean their torsos out the window of his moving car to determine whether their twin assassins’ dialogue times out with the car’s blistering pace. “They'd come back inside and their faces were frozen—the water was pouring out of their eyes and nose,” Rondell says. “The police officer who was holding traffic for me was looking like, ‘Who are these insane people?’”
The miserable experience left them unsatisfied—until production designer Owen Paterson suggested building their own 1.5-mile highway on top of a runway at San Francisco's Alameda Naval Base. The project was labor-intensive, but it gave Rondell a controlled environment to turn the directors’ storyboards into the most propulsive and visceral sequence of the franchise: a kinetic series of shootouts, motorcycle maneuvers, and big-rig brawls that the Wachowskis and second-unit director David Ellis captured over 40 days. “We never shot anything less than 10 or 15 times,” Rondell says. “I've never been in another film where the directors were such perfectionists.”
The repetition became a guiding principle, and it helped the movie’s precision driving team maintain a strict traffic pattern for Carrie-Anne Moss and Laurence Fishburne, who rode shotgun in a car that Rondell operated from the backseat using a driving system that included a rear steering wheel. Rondell’s ultimate goal? Prevent the two from flinching in the midst of chaos, as their stone-faced characters demanded. “I had the camera inside the car looking at their reactions going through near head-on collisions and shit like that—and they couldn't say a word,” Rondell says. “I've got no. 2 and 3 on the call sheet and I'm doing 65 miles an hour at two intersections with cars sliding out. It’s a lot of responsibility. But everybody was really on their game.”
The Crazy 88 Fight (Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 2003)
If the Crazy 88 fight in the third act of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 isn’t the best action sequence of the quarter century, it certainly qualifies as the most. Shot over the course of a month at the historic Beijing Film Studio, the seven-minute confrontation is the bloodiest spectacle in the auteur’s career—a two-level nightclub that turns into a war zone when the Bride (Uma Thurman) slices her Hattori Hanzo sword through every weapon-wielding martial artist in the Yakuza army. Throughout the carnage, Tarantino infuses a variety of homages, references, color schemes, and needle drops, but the sequence’s lasting images and sounds emerge from the limbless assassins moaning in pools of their own blood.
To pull off a slaughterhouse at this scale, Tarantino enlisted Yuen Woo-ping, who had just finished building out the wirework and action choreography for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The director also brought in New Zealand stunt double Zoë Bell, one of a few women who helped fill in the gaps for some of the Bride’s most technically challenging scenes—like running along banisters while swinging bamboo swords. “A huge amount of that was training Uma, and then figuring out when is the best time to put in a double, which bits can she do convincingly, which bits can she do enough when we're using her face,” Bell says.
Throughout the sequence, Woo-ping was cognizant of how believable the fight would look; to make the scene feel more improvised, he designed the action to shift in pace and location and ensured the background actors weren’t just standing around. That’s partly why he choreographed a chase sequence up the banister and used the entire space of the House of Blue Leaves (created to look like the real Gonpachi restaurant in Tokyo). In the midst of filming, Bell sometimes lost track of what section of the fight they were filming because of how much blood had soaked her costume. “There were definitely moments where I was like, ‘Wait, how many people have we killed now? I don't think I had blood on my butt cheek,’” she laughs. “At a certain point, you're just so stained, it kind of doesn't register.”
Foot Chase (Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, 2003)
Midway through Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, Tony Jaa is cornered. A handful of angry men box him in on the street, and Jaa’s only exit is up. So the Thai actor/stuntman takes it. What follows is catlike control—Jaa springboards onto bamboo scaffolding, shoves a thug to the ground, then sails back down two levels with a killer video-game combo: a backward somersault followed by two consecutive front flips. The camera lingers in slow motion, almost in awe of his side-scrolling moves. But the ease of Jaa’s acrobatics belies their true danger. “There was no room for error, as any mistake could have led to serious injury,” says stunt coordinator Seng Kawee. “Tony had to execute this from a great height using only his own body and gymnastic precision.”
This is just one highlight in a breathless, stunt-packed foot chase that barrels through the chaotic back alleys of Bangkok. Over six minutes, the action caper turns into a kinetic and exhilarating obstacle course, with director Prachya Pinkaew transforming every street corner into a different escape hatch. One second, Jaa is sliding under moving cars; the next, he’s soaring through rings of barbed wire.
On set, the motto was clear: “No wires, no stunt doubles,” Kawee says. To pull off that mandate, Jaa prepared for a month, testing his skills around local markets and other congested environments before rehearsing on location near the Hua Lamphong Train Station. “Our main goal was to showcase physical performance: running, jumping, gymnastics—all blended into one cohesive action sequence,” Seng adds. Look no further than the moment Jaa escapes his pursuers by running atop their shoulders. Taking inspiration from traditional lion dance techniques, Jaa provided a brief glimpse at the parkour wave soon to hit Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, Seng recalls, “Tony only needed about two rehearsals before we were able to film the final take.”
The Hallway Fight (Oldboy, 2003)
Oldboy didn’t invent “the oner,” but when director Park Chan-wook dropped a four-minute hallway fight sequence without a single cut, something felt new about it. That’s not because of any specific camera technique, fight move, or stylish weapon, though you can’t deny the thrill of watching Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) take a simple hammer and bludgeon his way through a gang of henchmen as a knife protrudes from his back. Instead, what distinguishes the take is its insistence on imperfection: Park embeds you into the fatigued, desperate physicality of his protagonist, forgoing precise choreography for something realer—mistakes, pauses, and interruptions set against a soundtrack of moaning injured victims. The scene took about 15 takes over two days of filming, but “there isn’t a take where everything is perfect,” Park says. “Because this was a long take with endless moving parts, there was no way it could have been perfect.”
Those small flaws resonated with John Wick director Chad Stahelski, who knows firsthand what it’s like to engage in combat for extended periods of time. “I was a professional full-contact kickboxer. And no matter how much shape I got in, I was sucking wind after every round,” he says. “Imagine if you had to fight 30 guys down a hallway with a hammer and you couldn't stop? You see guys tripping. You see mistakes. And they embraced it, which I thought was ballsy.” Over the last two decades, the scene has remained a foundational text and a source of inspiration for action directors. But Stahelski laments the way some filmmakers have iterated on Park’s visual language. “How many people have tried to do that since, but for all the wrong reasons?” he says. “It's a technical achievement. But you're not learning anything through the character, through the oners, are you?” That, he adds, is the real genius of the hallway scene. “It physically and psychosomatically exhausts you, because the characters are exhausted,” he says. “That's power, man.”
Elevated Train (Spider-Man 2, 2004)
Throughout Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is at odds with himself. Is he meant to be the courageous, anonymous web-slinger, devoting his time and skills to protecting New York City’s millions of residents? Or is he better off tossing his suit in the trash and ignoring his supernatural gifts to be fully present with the family and friends he loves the most? It’s an existential duality that haunts him, and one director Sam Raimi interrogates with one of the most dazzling and kinetic action sequences of any Marvel movie this century.
To pull it off, Raimi first thoroughly storyboarded the set piece before collaborating with the VFX and stunt teams. Most of the wide shots in the sequence—Spider-Man soaring over the tracks, Dr. Octopus swinging punches mid-air—lean on CGI. But the scenes still feel grounded and tactile thanks to live-action plates captured by a second-unit team in Chicago. These static and fly-cam shots of the surrounding city gave the VFX crew something tangible to layer over, making the digital playground feel just a little more lived-in.
The close-quarters action, though, was filmed inside a Sony soundstage, where a train car mounted on a large gimbal rocked against a vast blue screen. That setup gave stunt coordinator Darrin Prescott the flexibility to stage more elaborate choreography, pulling from fight choreographer Dion Lam’s background in wirework and training with action legend Yuen Woo-ping (there he is again). But the sequence doesn’t just flex spectacle. In the second half, it leans into the film’s more emotional themes. When Spidey’s mask catches fire, Peter has to reveal his identity while trying to stop a brakeless train from barreling off the tracks. Second-unit director Dan Bradley, who shot many of the close-ups, used a massive wind machine and tweaked the camera’s shutter speed to simulate high velocity. As Peter fires webs and strains to stop the train, Bradley made sure Maguire was working against real resistance.
According to Prescott, everything about the sequence works because there’s a clear understanding of how the location, situation, and story arc impacts each action and movement—and how Peter can be “just a kid” and play the hero instead of his masked alter ego. “That’s what separates good action design from bad action design,” Prescott says. “It's about being aware of the environment you're in and making sure you're being true to that environment.”
Construction Site Parkour (Casino Royale, 2006)
Before conceiving Casino Royale’s electrifying opening sequence, director Martin Campbell sent out a brief to the entire crew: James Bond has to bleed. Over the previous decade, the franchise had pivoted into self-parody, turning Pierce Brosnan into a kitschy hero who winds up driving invisible cars through ice structures. Campbell knew that if audiences were going to respond to Daniel Craig, he’d have to return the MI6 agent back to earth—to make him “feel pain and get beaten up and marked, cuts and bruises and all that,” says stunt coordinator Gary Powell.
So, Powell and Campbell storyboarded a high-stakes foot chase through a Madagascar construction site, where Bond pursues an elusive bombmaker named Mollaka (Sébastien Foucan). The pair sprint up inclined cranes, climb steel girders, and turn a ground race into an aerial jumping contest that involves dropping down dozens of stories in a single bound. It’s action filmmaking at its finest—ambitious, clever, and sweat-inducing, with a diversity of camera angles—and Bond fittingly ends up with a bloody gash on his forehead.
It took about 10 weeks for Powell to set up a legitimate construction zone in the Bahamas, where he imported towering safety cranes and rehearsed sequences with dozens of local stunt performers. Though Craig participated in some running scenes and crane-scaling (“He was a little bit frightened of heights at first,” Powell says. “He certainly wasn't at the end of it”), stunt doubles attempted the higher jumps and parkour moments. But Powell’s biggest challenge was maintaining safety and scheduling, especially with a tropical storm brewing in the distance and a set infested with rats. “I wouldn’t let the cables we used to run the cranes stay out overnight,” he says. “It would only take some little rodents to sort of nibble through something and that could be someone's life.”
By the end of shooting, only two stuntmen sustained injuries (a rolled ankle and dislocated finger), an impressive feat considering all the variables, heights, and pace of action Campbell captured on camera.
Window Jump and Apartment Fight (The Bourne Ultimatum, 2007)
It’s only a couple seconds, but it feels like time stops. Jason Bourne is racing through Tangier—sprinting across roofs, jumping between balconies, juking around bedrooms—trying to save his partner, Nicky (Julia Stiles), from Blackbriar agent Desh (Joey Ansah), who’s been dispatched to kill her. As Desh closes in on Nicky in the same apartment building, Bourne spots Nicky’s outline through a window across the street. Without thinking, he backs up, sprints towards the open balcony, plants his foot on the railing, and leaps (and then crashes) through the balcony window. For a brief moment, Bourne seems to float, the camera gliding just behind him like a bird swooping to collect its prey. It’s a rare breath in a movie that rarely stops moving.
The impetus for the idea started with second-unit director Dan Bradley, who knew he needed to differentiate this window jump from other leaps he’d collected from other angles. But the idea didn’t crystallize until stunt camera rigger Diz Sharpe surveyed the location and volunteered to perform the jump directly behind stunt performer Kai Martin while carrying the camera. “We just couldn't get the geometry to make it work with a remote camera,” Bradley says. “And so the decision was that we could still have a stunt guy jump holding the handheld camera.” To execute it, stunt coordinator Gary Powell took all the measurements and had his team rehearse the exact distance and width Martin would need to leap through. Then Sharpe, rigged to a cable, trailed a few steps behind Martin before leaping off himself.
Once inside, Bourne engages Desh in an intense close-quarters fight, picking up household objects and turning them into face-smashing weapons. As choreographed by Jeff Imada and David Leitch, the latter of whom helped as a stunt double with various second-unit setups, the sequence feels claustrophobic and highlights Bourne’s quick-thinking combat skills. It also provides a nice callback to his very first fight scene in The Bourne Identity, when he uses a pen. “I'd have him pick stuff up and it was very deliberate. Then three or five seconds later, he'd use it,” Bradley says of Damon. “We were really always looking for things where he would be solving problems by picking stuff up before he saw the problem.”
Car Hood Chase (Death Proof, 2007)
Stuntwoman Zoë Bell couldn’t believe it. On a quick visit to her home, Quentin Tarantino handed her his new script and pointed to the cover. “Mickey Rourke, Zoë Bell. In a juggernaut of a movie. Death Proof,” it read. “I thought it was a joke that he'd put my name on the cover,” she says. Then Tarantino told his Kill Bill stuntwoman to turn to the 88th page, where he’d written a character with her exact description. She was even more puzzled. “I even said something like, ‘She better at least look like me,’” Bell recalls. Then the director clarified things. “No,” he said. “You're playing the character.”
Bell had only ever doubled as movie stars, so she was a little reticent: “I don't want to be the girl who fucks up a Tarantino movie,” she thought. But you only have to watch the movie’s most terrifying scene to know why Tarantino chose her. After all, there’s only a handful of people willing to hang onto the hood of a 1971 Dodge Challenger going close to 80 miles per hour while being tormented by a deviant, reckless driver (Kurt Russell, who replaced Rourke) along a narrow and winding highway outside of Santa Barbara.
To choreograph this dynamic cat-and-mouse game, Bell and stunt coordinator Jeff Dashnaw gathered information in a parking lot, “figuring out where I could sit, where I could lean, what visually worked for Quentin,” she says. Eventually, she began testing the dynamics on the road at high speed, working out non-verbal communication with driver Tracey Toms and getting a feel for her safety harness, which she admits she wore even though her character loses her grip of the belts strapped to the car door. “The reality is, I was not coming off that car, but if that car flipped, I was definitely fucked,” she says. When Bell eventually watched dailies of the full sequence, she had a weird sensation—almost like she’d forgotten she was the real star. “It felt really good to be jealous of myself,” she laughs. “It's the only work of mine that I still repeatedly kind of flinch while watching it.”
Rotating Hallways (Inception, 2010)
It took production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas a couple of script reads before he mostly understood the concept behind Inception. But things didn’t fully click until he spent a day inside director Christopher Nolan’s garage going over the movie’s most complex and visually spectacular scene—when dream thief Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) fights off a pair of assassins inside a subconscious hotel hallway, in minimal gravity, after the van holding his sleeping body suddenly flips over a highway off-ramp. Over cups of tea, “we just looked at generally any piece of film or video or television where the director and the crew had tried to play with gravity,” Dyas says. That included analyzing a Jamiroquai music video and the airlock sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Stanley Kubrick’s iconic sequence inspired Nolan and Dyas to build two separate hallways—a vertical one that they could shoot from below and make a wired-up Gordon-Levitt look like he was floating, and a horizontal one that they could rotate six revolutions per minute to capture the imbalanced effect. Not to mention a bedroom suite that would sit on a different gimbal. As Nolan’s team of engineers got to work on building the rigs inside airship hangars in Cardington, England, the production designer began outfitting all the interiors with foam rubber. “When you're manufacturing all of that, it does add huge amounts of time because you have to make the molds,” Dyas says. “It's a safety precaution because if you really had those people running down those corridors and falling into a metal light fixture, it would really hurt them.”
Rick English can attest that experimenting with anti-gravity could lead to some bruises and injuries. The stuntman, who was originally supposed to fight in the hallway if not for a bad knee, wore pads and a helmet to test and choreograph the fight with Gordon-Levitt in the suite, where the beds and furniture were fastened to the floor. “Most of the set was soft, but it wasn't that soft to fall 25 feet to your head,” he says. “So you had to really be careful of where you got hung up, because in a couple of seconds' time you'd find yourself on the ceiling with nowhere to go.”
Vault Chase (Fast Five, 2011)
In the planning stages of Fast Five, producer Neal H. Mortiz sat down with stunt coordinators Jack Gill and Spiro Razatos and shared Universal’s vision for the movie’s climactic vault heist. “The vault is going to be completely CGI,” he told them. The pair didn’t like that proposal. This was their first Fast project, but they knew the previous installment had failed to excite and engage because of its reliance on unrealistic digital cars. So Gill made a counter offer. “Give me a week in a parking lot to try and pull a real vault around,” he said.
At first, the 9,000-pound metal box ripped both rear panels off Gill’s Dodge Chargers. But he found it would glide over the road if he applied a thick abrasive plastic to the vault’s bottom. “We started learning how to move it and how to turn it, and we started hitting things,” Gill says. When Moritz saw it smash through a couple of junk cars one day, he knew Gill could pull this off. But to create a more dynamic and fast-paced chase, Gill had to build a more controllable second vault—so he fastened one around a four-wheel pickup truck, enclosing the truck, removed the truck’s bed so the vault could swerve more easily around other cars, and made a small viewing port for its driver, in addition to fashioning a helmet with an oxygen tube to allow for breathing. “You kind of have to think outside the box for every single thing you do,” Gill says. “But there's always problem-solving.”
His innovation paid off. What starts as a cartoonish conceit (two cars dragging a vault through Rio de Janeiro) turns into a visceral, exhilarating set piece that ends with real cars flying off a bridge into water. The practical action (shot in Puerto Rico) helped solidify Fast Five as the best in the franchise, but it required more than just shutting down streets and smashing through numerous vehicles. The unintended consequence of dragging a 4.5-ton vault over medians and boulevards was all the collateral damage—namely, hundreds of yellow magnetic markers, which got dislodged as the stunt unit mowed over them. “We had to replace all of them,” Gill laughs. “The cleanup took a while.”
Scaling the Burj Khalifa (Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, 2011)
On a trip to Dubai in 2009, producers J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk marveled at the Burj Khalifa and immediately had the same thought: This has to be featured in the fourth Mission: Impossible movie. They didn’t know how exactly, so they left the planning to Brad Bird, the longtime animator and director of The Incredibles, who agreed to helm his first live-action movie after an encouraging conversation with Tom Cruise. “It didn’t vex him at all that I was in animation,” Bird says of his action star.
Of course, if your first live-action movie is built around a sequence in which Ethan Hunt climbs up, slides down, and swings around the tallest building in the world, it helps to have a lead actor capable of performing extreme stunts like a cartoon character. After Bird mocked up an animatic and conceived the story beats, stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz got involved. “I had to sit down with the engineers and convince them that we weren’t going to damage their building,” Smrz says. “No matter what they came up with as a negative, we had an answer for it.”
Once they got clearance, Smrz had to make sure Cruise was ready for every variable before attempting to climb the exterior. The crew built a three-story glass wall in a Prague soundstage to simulate the building’s exterior. As Cruise got used to his climbing harness, Smrz also heated the glass panels to 115 degrees to mimic the sun’s effect on the actual building. “We wanted everything to be exactly what we were going to do,” Smrz says. “And so when we arrived in Dubai, we’d already been there.”
To shoot in and around the building (which was still being built at the time), Bird’s team needed to break a few windows. Their request was initially denied, but eventually, the building’s management team relented, and the crew began to carefully hammer out the panes. Originally, the plan was to shoot just one day on the Burj and the rest on a small set, but things went so well that Cruise practically demanded the production keep shooting three more days, thousands of feet in the air. That meant a lot more camera setups, a more complex harness pulley system, and about 10 more broken windows, which could occasionally create powerful wind tunnels that could shut down the elevator system.
The whole enterprise required about 200 hours of rehearsal, and it became a colossal feat of engineering and safety testing. Everything had to be considered, like Cruise’s safety harness that cut off circulation to his legs and the air currents pushing Cruise off his marks while he waited for helicopter cameras to hover into position. “Tom kind of treats it like an Olympic athlete,” Bird says. “He trains that specific group of muscles so that they peak at that moment in time when we’re filming these specific shots.” Adds Smrz: “It’s probably one of the most memorable things I’ve done. I looked at Brad one day and I said, ‘Do you realize what we’re doing?’ And he goes, ‘Well, we’re climbing the building.’ I go, ‘No, this will never be duplicated—ever.’ This was a once-in-a-lifetime iconic shot.”
Plane Hijack (The Dark Knight Rises, 2012)
Most stunts don’t faze David Garrick. After all, the London-born stunt performer spent 14 years in the British Armed Forces, serving with the Parachute Regiment and then the Special Air Service reserve. But he admits he felt some nerves midway through shooting Bane’s plane hijack sequence at the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises. The uncertainty occurred between takes, when stunt coordinator Tom Struthers tried to reel all four of his stuntmen dangling from a flying plane back into the cabin.
As they flew over Scotland’s Cairngorms mountains, the plane needed to make a sharp U-turn. “I thought, ‘Oh, here we go. This is not going to be fun,’” Garrick says. “You’re in a slipstream, and you can feel the speed, and you can feel the air pushing against you, but you’ve got this great view looking down—white, puffy clouds; blue skies; and a big C-130 [transport plane] just in front of us. It was quite an amazing buzz.” Garrick and the stunt team repeated the process multiple times—jumping out the back of a plane and shimmying toward the smaller jet with the aid of wires; then they’d cut their lines and parachute into the rocky terrain.
The goal for Christopher Nolan was to capture these wide-shot, high-altitude moments as practically as possible. Though they took safety precautions, Garrick notes every stunt was dangerous—but the project fulfilled his lifelong dream of pulling off a midair stunt like the one Simon Crane executed in Cliffhanger. “The slightest movement or change in something could really clear us off behind the aircraft,” he says. “Somehow, we survived.”
Car Chase (The Raid 2, 2014)
Gareth Evans assumed he’d have to use CGI. The director had been planning a violent car chase through the streets of Jakarta and wanted to float his camera from one speeding car into another in one fluid shot. But stunt coordinator Bruce Law had other ideas. Instead of visually stitching the shot together in post, he suggested they try it practically, which meant taking off one car’s side door, disguising a camera operator as a leather front seat, and strapping multiple camera operators to the sides of each car. “You would have thought we were making the worst Roger Corman movie of all time,” says Mike Leeder, a stunt specialist on the film. “That was awesome.”
That low-budget creativity and commitment are evident throughout the six-minute, bullet-spraying chase, which maintains a strong sense of geography and kineticism despite the numerous hiccups Evans’s team faced. Though the stunt team got permits to block traffic throughout the Indonesian capital, they couldn’t prevent every citizen from driving into shots or bottlenecking areas where the crew wanted to reset. “We found out that the Indonesian version of a locked-off street isn’t the same as a locked-off street that we would expect,” Leeder jokes. As a result, Law and his 16-person team (which included eight drivers and eight mechanics) didn’t have any rehearsal time—instead, the stunt unit worked out the choreography in Evans’s office with toy cars, “and then, on the location, we would pretty much just go for it,” Leeder says.
Despite such a small operation and loads of restrictions, Evans learned to embrace the adversity—and even added a dose of humor: In one moment, two men haphazardly attempt to reload their guns while their vehicles race down the road. “That’s when you know you’ve got a director who sees the big picture, who understands that even in an action sequence, ‘Let’s have these little moments that are quiet. Let’s have these moments that are human that can make it pop,’” Leeder says.
Overpass Fight Scene (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2014)
At times in the MCU, action feels weightless and without stakes, the result of blue-screen dependence and implausible, predictable fight scenes. Which is why the highway showdown in Captain America: The Winter Soldier feels like such an outlier. It’s raw and tactile, steeped in the film’s ’70s political thriller vibe, and built around stunts and sound design that feel immediate and bruising. Every gunshot echoes with consequence, every highly technical blow lands with purpose, and the fight’s momentum—anchored by Cap, Bucky, Black Widow, and the Falcon—feels driven by character, not just choreography.
According to Sam Hargrave, Chris Evans’s stunt double, all of that was intentional. As he and fight coordinator James Young began brainstorming the shoot-outs and hand-to-hand combat, Hargrave leaned into traditional martial arts, like karate and judo, which saw increased military application during World War II, to stay consistent with Cap’s narrative arc. “In the Marvel canon, it would have only been a couple years from the time he would have thawed out to this point,” Hargrave says. “We wanted to make that shine through in his movements and the choreography style to contrast that to Bucky Barnes, who would have probably been taught more Russian Systema.”
The sense of authenticity was also boosted by the Russo brothers’ choice to film the sequence on location in Cleveland, despite alternating rain and sunshine across the three-day shoot. “One of the pluses of shooting things on stage is you control things much more,” Hargrave says. “But you don’t get that same visceral, tangible, subjective, experiential feeling [without] shooting on location like this.”
Church Brawl (Kingsman: The Secret Service, 2014)
The only time Colin Firth fought someone on-screen before this, he awkwardly fell into a fountain with Hugh Grant. So it was a bit jarring to see him enter a small Kentucky church house in the middle of Kingsman: The Secret Service and go full Rambo on a bunch of SIM-card-carrying parishioners hell-bent on killing him. It’s also a lot of fun: Firth stabs eye sockets, blowtorches heads, and body-slams his marks between pews as “Free Bird” soundtracks the chaos. Not to mention Firth commits these atrocities (read: shoving a processional crucifix up someone’s throat) while wearing a tailored suit.
When Rick English, Firth’s stunt double, joined the production, he had just a couple of days to learn the choreography before the team put together a “stunt-viz” video—effectively a dry run of the actual fight, which was originally set to Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.” Using director Matthew Vaughn’s storyboards, second-unit director Brad Allen created a fluid road map for how all the different stunts and elements would get cut together. Then English and Firth spent the next month training and fine-tuning. The goal was to have Firth perform the majority of the fight and then use face-replacement technology on English (who wore dots on his face) when he was needed for the more challenging maneuvers. “We’d try and get a good, usable take with each of us,” English says. “At any point, if they wanted to use my movement and caught a glimpse of my face, they could stitch Colin into that pretty seamlessly. … Colin and I were like, ‘Was that me, or was that you?’”
Allen used what English describes as a “hyper-cam,” which helped stitch together abbreviated sections that needed wire setups into one cohesive piece. That required stunt coordinator Adam Kirley to make sure each reset inside the church maintained perfect continuity and the same hectic energy—especially with a limited stunt team that played different victims on the fly. “Adam kept this list and diagram of where every performer was and which costume they were wearing,” English says. “We had to keep recycling guys, and it worked flawlessly.”
Pole Cats Canyon Attack (Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015)
It’s hard to pick out any one action sequence in Mad Max: Fury Road because the entire movie feels like one big car chase. But the movie’s stunt coordinator, Guy Norris, helps break things down a bit. “The best way to explain Fury Road is that the first half of it is a chase, and the second half of the film is a race,” he says. But within that duality, he says, director George Miller always made sure that each segment kept building to something bigger and more exciting so it didn’t all feel like repetitive noise.
Look no further than the final race to the Citadel through a narrow canyon, where Miller introduces the Pole Cats, members of the Gastown settlement who assault their targets by swinging on massive poles fixed to moving vehicles. Originally, when Miller started this long-gestating project in 2000, he assumed he’d have to depict the Pole Cats with visual effects, but Norris was determined to make it practical. After figuring out the right material to use for the poles, Norris tapped a friend who had performed in Cirque du Soleil to help train a group of stunt performers in an eight-week Chinese pole course. Eventually, Norris tested ways to balance the poles with counterweights, which allowed them to sway back and forth. “I would send George videos each night of what we had done that day,” Norris says. “And he rang immediately [after] he saw it, and it really nearly brought a tear to his eye.”
Shooting the rest of the attack in Namibia became a taxing endeavor, but Norris got to have a little fun during the sequence’s final beat, when he crashed the Doof Wagon into a War Boy’s rolled truck. To pull off slamming a 15-ton vehicle into a heap of metal at 60 miles per hour, Norris sat inside a driving pod attached directly to the Wagon’s side, which had a deceleration device to mitigate the extreme whiplash of the head-on collision. As the vehicle crashed, Norris experienced only a third of the g-force from the crash inside his pod, and he got to see the crash unfold in front of him. “What was amazing was you never have that view normally,” he says. “You’re ducked or you’re covered or you’re spinning. To actually watch yourself drive straight into a truck in front of you—that was a really interesting visual.”
Stairwell Fight (Atomic Blonde, 2017)
After months of watching Charlize Theron grind through bruising martial arts sessions for Atomic Blonde, director David Leitch started thinking bigger. Specifically: designing a second-act stairwell brawl and capturing it as one uninterrupted shot. On a relatively small budget and with the support of producer and wife Kelly McCormick, Leitch wanted to “punch above our weight class and make something that was super compelling and that was sticky,” he says. But stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave wasn’t sold. He didn’t want to turn the movie into a tracking-shot competition. “What’s the best thing for the story?” he asked the director. Leitch had his answer—and a good one. “I want people to feel what it’s like to go through a fight in real time.”
Leitch achieves just that midway through the movie, when CIA agent Lorraine Broughton (Theron) starts delivering and sustaining blows the second she steps out of a government building elevator. Over a 10-minute sequence, she fights off two determined hit men down a large marble staircase, punching, stabbing, and shooting her marks in between groans and pauses to catch her breath. Inspired by the Oldboy hallway fight, Leitch captures all of it—including a showdown with a third assassin inside another room—without any music, leaning into the physical soundtrack of a woman barely able to stand yet still ready to kick some ass.
The biggest decision Leitch and Hargrave had to make was determining where to stitch the fight segments together to make the scene appear like a real oner. “We talked about doing it continuously, but we had to break it up and apply the blood or apply the wounds because Lorraine gets beaten up quite handily,” Hargrave says. As he mapped out the fight, Leitch would spot optimal places for blends—door frames or moments after Lorraine sustained nasty contact and needed black-eye makeup—to make the extensive choreography flow better. “It’s like a science project, and you try and make the pieces as long as possible,” he says. “But then you also have to reverse engineer things for practical reasons and then find visually organic justifications for that.”
None of it matters without Theron’s intensive training and commitment to every shot—her hand-to-hand combat, gunplay, and vocal distress. “There were times that we would do 21 takes of a certain three-minute section, and we’d point out all the reasons we love it,” Hargrave says. “She’s like, ‘I dropped my hand there, we’ve got to go again.’ She was a perfectionist in the best of ways.”
Car Getaway (Baby Driver, 2017)
When stunt coordinator Darrin Prescott got the script for Baby Driver, he noticed director Edgar Wright had included a specific song to play over the opening scene. Wright had envisioned a bank heist and getaway set to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms,” a rock-heavy banger for the titular driver to listen to as he burns rubber and evades police across Atlanta. The director had even created an animatic with the song, diagramming a string of flashy car maneuvers set to beat drops. The only problem for Prescott? “If a car going around a corner is three seconds in your animatic, it’s actually 12 seconds in real life,” he says. “So now we’ve got to find those other eight seconds and make that up somewhere.”
The planning stages were full of these scenarios. As they scouted pockets of Atlanta, Prescott and his team would settle on corners and streets they wanted to use, measure out the intersections, and then re-create those measurements in a large parking lot beside the Atlanta Motor Speedway. Then they’d rehearse and see how tight they could get the action to fit Wright’s animation. “We’d do the camera move, shoot it, edit it into the animatic so that it’s hitting on the beat, and then go, ‘Oh, crap, we’re much longer—now we’ve got to get from that place to this place, and now Edgar wants to be inside the car for this dialogue.”
Even after Wright and Prescott had shored up most of the shots with stunt driver Jeremy Fry, the pair would still make alterations. That included the slick tracking shot of a 270-degree turn that revs the sequence into motion. Originally, the animatic had Fry attempting a 180-degree turn with his Subaru WRX, but when they got to the location, both he and Prescott realized they could pull off a larger turn that flowed into an adjoining street and capture it with more dynamic camerawork.
There were plenty of other fun driving stunts, including the climactic highway escape, which required Atlanta police to slow down traffic and create pockets of open lanes for a precision driving team. “We take off, and then we do our thing. And then we get off at the next off-ramp and reset,” Fry says. “It probably took us 30 to 45 minutes to do one take and reset and be ready for the next one.” Looking back, Prescott considers the musical sequence to be the most challenging job of his career—and the most gratifying. As Fry notes, “There’s stuff in there that’s cool, it’s neat, but you’ve seen it a thousand times. The way [Edgar] shot it and the energy he brought to it is what really gives it its life.”
Dog Fight (John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, 2019)
There’s no John Wick without a puppy—or, more specifically, an act of senseless cruelty against one, lighting the fuse for a blood-soaked revenge saga. But after that inciting home invasion in the first movie, animals mostly lurked in the periphery of the franchise. That is, until Parabellum, when director Chad Stahelski decided to let them off the leash. What follows is a full-blown, dog-powered demolition derby, complete with tactical crotch takedowns and vertical wall jumps that feel less like action choreography and more like a canine Olympics.
Before turning this gun shoot-out into a feral ambush, Stahelski wanted to enlist Jumpy, a border collie–blue heeler mix and well-trained YouTube and Disney star. But when the good boy wasn’t available, Stahelski began looking into the Belgian Malinois breed, which had the kind of temperament and athleticism required. The search took some time. Every Malinois owner told him he wouldn’t be able to teach the dogs how to attack—that’s just not how they operate. But Stahelski, whose mother bred Irish wolfhounds, remembered the way his own two pups went after tennis balls that he’d hide around his body and concocted a plan. “What if, because we have CGI, I got the chew toy and I Velcroed it onto [someone’s] arm?” he remembers thinking.
As a last-ditch effort, Stahelski visited Andrew Simpson, the wolf trainer on Game of Thrones, and asked him about the theory. “We haven’t done it before, but it sounds like it’ll work,” Simpson told the director. It wasn’t long before Stahelski released a Malinois, running 30 miles per hour, onto a stunt performer wearing a stuffed, bright green Velcro pad. “Wherever we put the pad—whether it was in the crotch, the thigh, the ankle, the back—the dog knew to get that because it knows it’s a play toy,” Stahelski says. Within three months, the production had five Malinois dogs training for specific stunts, biting green patches, and playing with costar Halle Berry off set. “We only used maybe a third of what we had rehearsed,” Stahelski says. “If I did a whole Belgian Malinois movie, I could have filled it with stuff you’ve never seen.”
Motorcycle Jump (Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, 2023)
You know an action sequence in Mission: Impossible will have a strong legacy when every behind-the-scenes angle of its climactic, showstopping stunt—in this case, Tom Cruise jumping his motorcycle off a towering cliff before parachuting into a moving train—is used to market the movie, and it still provokes wonder and awe when you see it on the big screen.
Cruise had always wanted to perform a base jump in the action franchise, so Dead Reckoning Part One stunt coordinator and second-unit director Wade Eastwood began thinking up a way to achieve it. After many meetings with Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, Eastwood built out the sequence that took into account numerous risk factors and cinematic ideas. “It evolved from base jump to motorbike base jump, and then to crashing into a train rather than landing on a road or a truck or a train,” he says. “But there are underlying reasons for a lot of the things that we’re adding to get an end result that is visually stimulating, suits the story, but is also as safe as can be.”
And, yes, Eastwood had plenty of dangers and variables to consider with a stunt like this. Cruise spent weeks developing his motocross skills, acclimating himself to various jumps and the midair positioning of the bike. Then he had to practice the base jump once off the bike, which he did by leaping from a helicopter. “You’re hitting turbulent air under the helicopter—you have to be able to control that track perfectly in order to clear the rock wall, have your correct delay before opening the parachute, and when under the canopy, make sure you can steer around it,” Eastwood says. Oh, and he had to do it all while staying in character as Ethan Hunt. “Obviously we worked a lot together, and we have that responsibility and trust,” Eastwood says. “But seeing him fly off and then disappearing to the blue yonder—it was definitely the first time I've been emotionally overwhelmed in my 33 years in the business.”
Top-Down Shoot-Out (John Wick: Chapter 4, 2023)
A few weeks before he began development on John Wick: Chapter 4, Chad Stahelski went down a YouTube rabbit hole. The director and self-proclaimed video game nerd was watching highlights of Assassin’s Creed and Ghosts of Tsushima until a random clip of the top-down shooter The Hong Kong Massacre popped into his queue. The video’s intro captured his attention, but when it showed the game’s overhead perspective, Stahelski felt a pang of inspiration. He’d been trying to find a unique way to capture an apartment shoot-out for his movie’s third act, and the “Etch A Sketch” aesthetic (as Stahelski describes it) mixed with an idea he’d had to use “dragon’s breath”—shotgun ammunition that produces a large, fiery spray—crystallized his vision. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how I make it interesting,’” he says. “I thought that was a fresh way to do a gunfight.”
By the time production moved to Berlin, Stahelski had only a few weeks to build out the 20-foot-tall set walls and obtain a camera lens wide enough to capture Keanu Reeves tactically moving between rooms and blazing bad guys. The goal was to capture the sequence in three separate oners—a technique he generally avoids but felt would keep the audience on edge. But on the first day of a two-day shoot, his remote camera system glitched. “I’m freaking out,” Stahelski remembers. “I got one day left to do the whole sequence. And Keanu, remember, he’s got to do the whole thing. If any one stunt guy fucks up, we got to go back—and there’s only so many times you can do that long of a take.”
When they started filming the next day, stunt coordinators had taped down a series of floor marks and were using megaphones to count out the sequence so every actor could time their choreography. Like Stahelski envisioned, the top-down perspective produced a jolting effect—it feels like you’re playing a video game. “The good thing about John Wick is that I have control over tone,” Stahelski says. “I can have something that feels very emotionally grounded or violent, like a quick little knife fight. … I can do fun stuff like the top shot and break the fourth wall.”
21-Minute Oner Escape (Extraction 2, 2023)
The first oner in the Extraction franchise was born of necessity. In the midst of filming the first movie, director Sam Hargrave had come up against what he calls an “impossible schedule.” In order to get the proper coverage of Tyler Rake (his protagonist) rescuing Ovi (a drug lord’s teenage son) through a Bangladeshi urban center, Hargrave needed at least a few weeks. But the director had only 10 days, so he pivoted and used his rehearsal time to rechoreograph the titular extraction as a oner. “Instead of covering it with 10 different cameras, it’s one camera, and it just follows our hero,” Hargrave says. “And it would just obviously take less time.”
The sequence ended up being the movie’s most intriguing moment, so much so that when it came time to develop Extraction 2, cowriter and coproducer Joe Russo wrote an even longer and larger one-shot set piece, in which Rake transports a mother and two children out of a prison. After “a lot of back and forth, a lot of restructuring,” Hargrave agreed to try it—but like last time, he couldn’t shoot it chronologically thanks to a variety of schedule and location issues. Still, the task of stitching a 21-minute series of visceral and chaotic scenes into one continuous shot was full of new challenges—starting with the fact that Hargrave began shooting with the scene’s climactic helicopter skirmish. After months of rehearsing it, he didn’t want to break up any of the crew’s momentum and focus. “We just went from those rehearsals right into shooting,” he says.
As a general rule, Hargrave implemented VFX edits around the physical stunts, “and then you’d find a way to put a cut or a blend or a stitch in there and then move into the acting beats,” he says. But he still had to visually align “hundreds of elements,” featuring both the foreground stunt players and the background actors. Pulling off something like this required even more commitment from the actors, who sometimes shot two ends of the same scene months apart. Hargrave did his best to provide monitors so they could watch a playback and remember their previous emotions. “You’ve been away from that moment and that thought process for three months and then pick right back up where you left off,” he says. As a result, one thought crept into Hargrave’s mind during shooting: “Why did I decide to do this?”
The Mortiflyers (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, 2024)
Hayley Wright needed all her abdominal muscles to hold on. As Anya Taylor-Joy’s stunt double, the former gymnast spent her very first day filming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga climbing the undercarriage of a war rig speeding 50 miles per hour, just a foot above the ground, all while “the wheels [were] spinning just inches from my head,” she says. She had the core strength to carry out the task, but throughout multiple takes, she didn’t anticipate her neck cramping. “The strength that you need to have to hold your neck up for so long is something that you just don’t train,” she adds.
The stunt was just a seconds-long piece of the postapocalyptic prequel’s most extensive and gobsmacking vehicle chase, which features an improbable aerial assault by the Mortiflyers, a nomadic motorcycle gang that uses paramotors and hang gliders to dive-bomb a chrome rig driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). Spread out over the length of the production, it took 78 days to shoot.
Much like the Pole Cats, the idea behind the Mortiflyers emerged from a desire to make the action three-dimensional. As second-unit director Guy Norris and director George Miller conceived the racing spectacle, they asked themselves a bunch of questions: “How would you attack this tanker? How would you defend this tanker? … It was always a thought of, well, how could you do it? You could maybe get in the air.” They soon developed a clan of warriors capable of skiing behind motorbikes and using parachutes to lift off the ground before firebombing their targets. But it wasn’t enough to build out the flyers and their assault combinations. Norris wanted this introduction to occur in a single shot. “That was always the idea—we pull out from the guys throwing a thunderstick down to that vehicle, and then he gets off and he skis and he goes up and throws a thunderstick back onto the guys on top,” he says. “That was a lot of R&D and a lot of homework.”
Miller aimed to do as much of it practically as possible. Using a 3D software that Norris and his son had developed, the pair mapped out every camera placement, camera rig movement, and vehicle maneuver, leaning on the precision of speeding trucks with cranes to lift the Mortiflyers up as their VFX parachutes opened. “It all had to be perfect because you had the tanker moving, you had the Tik-Tok [an extra-large Pole Cat] moving, you had the motorbike moving, and then in the middle of all that, you had the edge arm, which was a camera moving,” Norris says. “It was literally fine-tuning not only in a back-and-forth environment but also in an up-and-down environment.” The Mad Max veteran appeared out of breath just running through it all.
Submarine Extraction (Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, 2025)
The last time he submerged himself in water for cinema, Tom Cruise held his breath for over six minutes. It was an astounding feat and a thrilling addition to Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, but looking back, director Christopher McQuarrie was frustrated by the production’s overreliance on visual effects. He made a promise to himself. If they were going to attempt another ambitious aquatic set piece together, they would do it better—more dramatic, more practical. Enter: a second-act heist sequence in The Final Reckoning, in which Ethan Hunt dives deep under the Bering Sea ice caps, swims inside a Russian submarine, and retrieves the “Podkova” to gain control over the AI villain the Entity.
That required a lot, beginning with the special effects team building a huge tank filled with 8.5 million liters of chilled, filtered water in London’s Longcross Studios, then a gimbal that would rotate the submarine underwater and flood different chambers of the rig as necessary. The construction and testing took over two years and presented all kinds of challenges and safety concerns for both Cruise and the camera team, which needed to capture viable imagery in the submarine’s whirlpool-ish room full of lifelike torpedoes. “It's moving like it would do if a submarine was actually rolling and sinking—all that vacuum of water moving around,” stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood says. “There’s a lot of bodies and things to watch and a lot of parameters that we had to set, because if someone had surfaced at the wrong time, you’re going to have a full weight of torpedo drop on top of you.”
McQuarrie and Eastwood both scuba dived to direct dozens of setups each day, developing hand signals with Cruise so he could more easily communicate whether he needed more oxygen—a direct result of the mask he developed that lit his face for acting purposes but often struggled to expel his carbon dioxide at a fast enough rate. “This would poison you to a degree, so you would get extremely fatigued,” Eastwood says. “But it was the only way we could do the shot to capture the look that he wanted.” The sometimes 12-hour days took a massive toll on Cruise’s body, but the entire group remained committed to making it real. “It was a mammoth task by the special effects department,” Eastwood says. “I mean, it’s breathtaking.”