The vast majority of the film's aerial photography was captured by Tom Sanders and his mentor Ray Cottingham under the direction of second unit director/accomplished skydiver Kevin Donnelly. In an interview with Skydive Perris, Sanders recalls that while Swayze had two stunt doubles for the jumps, "he definitely did some of the jumping that is in the final cut." Much of this, I would imagine, is included in the first skydive sequence, including footage Swayze and Sanders shot on their own after the skydiving scenes had wrapped "to make the scene better." Dave Donnelly (son of Kevin) was only 16 years old when he worked on this film as a parachute packer and gopher. As Donnelly relays in an interview with Skydive Perris, the Mexico-set sequence was actually shot at the Cal City Parachute Center in the Mojave desert. It was early August and well over 100°F (38°C). "For the shot we were working on, the stunt doubles would exit the aircraft with a helicopter flying left trail. A Twin Otter [a kind of plane] had a camera crew shooting out of the side door and zooming in [on] the doubles [as] they fell away from the camera." Donnelly goes on to describe how on the third day of shooting, an accident took place where the helicopter hit the plane, forcing everyone (including crewmembers who just wanted to cool off in the sky who had no skydiving experience) to jump out. The damaged plane landed without incident, but "the helicopter was in much worse shape I was happy to eventually learn that everyone survived." The sequence wraps up with Bodhi and Utah miraculously surviving. I say "miraculously" because, as Katherine Davies points out in a journal article for the University of Leicester, for the pair to land safely after only pulling their parachute 8 seconds before landing, the cross-sectional area would have to be 641.7 square feet, a.k.a. four times larger than a normal skydiving parachute. In actuality, the pair's crash landing was likely achieved with a simple out-of-frame drop and some very hardy stunt performers.

Film

Nessun dato in archivio