How ‘American Primeval,' ‘Daredevil' and ‘The Last of Us' Pulled Off Some of the Year's Biggest Stunt-Filled Action Set Pieces
The year is 1857. A woman is sitting in a meadow in southern Utah Territory, casually explaining her plans to settle in the Salt Lake Valley, when she's cut off mid-sentence by a pointed object that bursts from her forehead with a bone-cracking crunch. She remains upright for a moment — silent, eyes open and blood oozing from her wound — then falls over dead, revealing the long shaft of an arrow lodged in the back of her skull.
The next two-plus-minutes of Netflix's 'American Primeval' are a dizzying display of nonstop mayhem. The sky is instantly filled with flying arrows, falling victims right and left, as attackers on horseback and on foot zoom in and out frame, shooting, stabbing, scalping and engaging in hand-to-hand combat. The camera snakes through the action, capturing a succession of brutal deaths (including the shooting of a minor character played by director Peter Berg), always circling back to Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin) and her pre-teen son Devin's (Preston Mota) desperate efforts to stay alive.
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'The script read for 100 people on each side, and we got 15 [stunt people] on each side,' says second unit director and stunt coordinator J.J. Dashnaw, who worked on the show alongside his father, fellow stunt coordinator Jeff Dashnaw. 'We had guys running around dying, and when the camera tilted one way, [they'd] get up and play other people.'
There were several other Dashnaws on the stunt team, including J.J.'s son Jaxon, who plays a boy taken down by a bullet to the head, causing his guilt-wracked killer to vomit.
'I actually walked away, because I got emotional as a proud father,' says J.J. 'It was a cool moment for me.'
'American Primeval' is one of many examples of Emmy-eligible shows that have upped TV's action game, from Amazon's 'The Boys' and 'Reacher' to HBO Max's 'House of the Dragon' and 'The Penguin,' putting themselves in contention in the stunt coordination and stunt performer categories.
The raid in 'American Primeval,' based on a real-life incident known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, was done as a 'oner,' a term used to describe a scene shot — or seemingly shot — in a single take. In recent years, it has become an increasingly common attention-grabbing aesthetic device employed across genres.
The raid scene was filmed in New Mexico at dusk over the course of three days, then seamlessly stitched together digitally in post. Aside from CG flying arrows and a CG charging bull, everything else was done practically, from the fires burning the wagons to the gunshots, the bullet hits and the fake blood.
In the first episode of Disney+'s 'Daredevil: Born Again,' the big 'oner' starts with the stunt doubles for the titular blind superhero (Charlie Cox) and the villain Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) smashing through the front window of Josie's Bar. As patrons scatter, Daredevil and Bullseye trade punches and kicks, eventually moving out of frame. The camera travels outside, where Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) lays on the ground, mortally wounded, then back into the bar, following Daredevil and Bullseye's fight up the back staircase and on to the roof.
'[Showrunner] Dario Scardapane really knows how to flesh out and write a sequence that leaves it open for you to creatively jump into it and design characters, but he's also very specific at the same time,' says second unit director and stunt coordinator Philip Silvera. And directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead 'had a very specific camera language to which they wanted to shoot the sequence. So it's my job to kind of figure out how to make that flow within the camera language and the character design.'
The 'oner' was assembled from several shots taken over the course of two and a half days. The bar and the staircase were filmed on location at the Capri Social Club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, while the rooftop portion was done on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios East in Long Island City, N.Y.
The shots bookending the sequence are equally spectacular. For the lead-in, which has Daredevil doing a rope swing from a rooftop, Silvera and Daredevil stunt double Jason Mello were raised on a lift three-and-a-half stories in the air outside the bar. Mello was flown down on a winch line using a device called a descender, and Silvera followed on a separate line, holding a camera to capture the shot from a subjective perspective. In the scene's climax, Bullseye stunt double Brian Jansa falls from the rooftop on a descender and is blended into a CG version of the character that hits the concrete below with a wet smack.
When they shot the attack of the zombie-like fungus-infected humans on the town of Jackson Hole in the second episode of HBO's 'The Last of Us' Season 2, the stunt falls from rooftops weren't done on wires or into airbags, but on to stacks of cardboard boxes.
'The problem with an air bag, when there's a two-person entry into it, if one hits first, the other one potentially doesn't get any air,' explains stunt coordinator Marny Eng.
Cardboard boxes notwithstanding, the sequence was a highly complex, high-tech undertaking. Shot over the course of four weeks on a set built in a gravel pit in Minaty Bay, British Columbia, it mixes practical effects (including fire and snow), makeups and stunts (both human and canine) with an array of CG elements, which, unlike in 'American Primeval,' included digitally animated characters.
'The plan that I had with Marny is that if we have 50 stunt performers that day, where do we put them that is most advantageous for visual effects, understanding that we had to add more to that number?' says visual effects supervisor Alex Wang. 'Fifty had to turn into 200, for example, for some shots.'
When the infected horde is running down Main Street to attack the town, the first unit (under the direction of Mark Mylod) and the second unit team worked in tandem, with the former on the rooftops with lead actors and the latter on the ground with the 'infected' stunt performers.
'That really happened in real time with everybody, where you see Maria [Rutina Wesley] up on the roof and Tommy [Gabriel Luna] down below, and the guys with the flamethrowers,' says cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt.
Camera operator Robin A. Smith got into the act as a stunt performer of sorts to capture the subjective perspective of a seven-foot-tall 'bloater' — a human with a late-stage fungal infection that has turned them into a mushroom-scaled monstrosity — in a one-on-one showdown with a flamethrower-wielding Tommy. Wearing the fire suit he uses for his off-hours Formula Vee auto racing hobby, Smith was placed inside an enclosure described as a 'fireproof rickshaw' and pushed into a stream of real fire shot at him by Luna.
'It was extremely, extremely hot,' laughs Smith. 'Luckily, the day outside wasn't so hot,so between setups, I could just peel back the curtain [of the enclosure], take my mask off and get some fresh air.'
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