Author: Anthony Breznican / Source: EW.com
Steven Spielberg is having fun.
Standing on the dystopian set of Ready Player One, the filmmaker has an unlit cigar in his mouth and a spark in his eye.
“You’re here for stunt day!” he calls out to me as his crew hustles around him, prepping a bit of carnage for the final act of the film (which is new in theaters this weekend).
Towering above the filmmaker is the impoverished high-rise of The Stacks, a vertical slum of old trailers welded together haphazardly. At one end of the gravel street, a futuristic black SUV from the IOI Corporation sits with the motor humming, like a predator about to pounce.
Perpendicular to it, about a football field away, an old mail truck is trundling toward The Stacks. The rusting vehicle is “old” in the year 2045, when the movie is set, but it would be state-of-the-art today. There’s a metallic iris on one side, which can open to release a drone that will hover out to deliver the mail.
Within the movie, this mail truck’s cargo is a group of kids in virtual-reality suits dangling in the back like puppets while plugged into the digital world of the OASIS.
This is the big finale, and the good guys are so close … close to solving the mystery at the heart of the sci-fi adventure, and close to being killed in real life by the villains of the story.
Tye Sheridan’s Wade Watts and his “High Five” group of friends are scrambling to solve the last riddle that will determine ownership of this otherworldly playground, and they have to stay mobile because they’re being personally hunted by IOI’s ruthless chief executive Nolan Sorrento (Rogue One’s Ben Mendelsohn), who has been racing up beside them in a chase through the streets. They think they’ve lost him and escaped. But they’re wrong.
Sorrento is supposed to be inside the black SUV, and Lena Waithe’s character Aech is behind the wheel of the mail truck, but for the purposes of this stunt, both are elsewhere — safely killing time in their trailers, awaiting the aftermath close-ups that will come later.
The cars are empty, steered by remote control, for reasons that will become obvious. This isn’t something you want to put an actual human body through.
Watching the crew set up the collision, Spielberg is like a big kid who is eager to crash his toy cars together. But there is a science and strategy at work, too.
The SUV must hit the mail truck at precisely the right spot. And there’s a dump truck full of gravel, a crane unspooling a metal cable, and a few other tricks hidden within The Stacks that the camera will never see, but they will help ensure the wreckage lands facing directly into Spielberg’s lens.
Make that lenses, plural. In addition to multiple camera setups, Spielberg plans to capture the action with several quad-rotor drones armed with cameras, hovering over the action like giant wasps.
When his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski joins him to consult about the positioning, Spielberg recites the order of shots he intends to use. He has already edited this sequence in his head.
That’s what the crane, the cable, and the dump truck are all about. When the SUV hits, the cable — which is attached to the mail truck’s frame — will whipsaw the vehicle around approximately 180 degrees.
But the mail truck…
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