Gal Gadot’s Heart of Stone set a car chase in a 500-year-old location

About 40 minutes into Netflix’s new spy thriller Heart of StoneIn a Portuguese safehouse, the protagonist Rachel Stone’s (Gal Gadot), and her team of mercenaries are attacked. Stone is chased through narrow streets in Lisbon by cars filled with baddies who fire guns. After an exciting fight with spectacular stunt falls, she drives her unwieldy vehicle.

There are explosions, bone-crunching hits, and a large van jumping over an entire staircase before careening into the Praça do Comércio. It’s all a solid showcase for Heart of Stone’s action ethos, which prioritizes more “reality-based” action than many of its modern peers, stunt coordinator Jo McLaren tells Polygon.

“We had a brilliant script, and it was high-octane action,” McLaren says. “Cars, fights, aerial, snow, water, we just covered everything. This is the top of our list as a stunt crew. Our favorite movie we’ve done because the people we work with were just incredible.”

McLaren was a veteran stunt performer, coordinator and doubled Angelina Jolie. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Rachel Weisz in The Mummy In addition to her stunt coordination in the MCU, she has worked on Harry Potter and other MCU films. Her career has taken her to co-ordinate stunts for Paddington 2, Annihilation, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of MadnessAnd the next Marvels The following are some examples of how to get started: Wicked. Heart of Stone clearly takes inspiration from the Bourne, Bond, and Mission: Impossible franchises, and McLaren says she was “very blessed” to be able to work on a film that did so. According to director Tom Harper in Netflix’s press notes, he wanted its hero to feel “human rather than some sort of superhero.”

“We prefer it. It’s so nice,” McLaren says. “I love superhero movies, but I’ve done a lot of them. And so it was very nice for me as a coordinator to do ground-based reality with a female lead.”

Find-in-the world locations of Heart of Stone’s action set-pieces range from those cobbled streets of Lisbon to the snowy Alps. Shooting on the ground presents infrastructure challenges (“We can’t get rigging gear up a ski slope,” McLaren jokes), but they were the kind the team was up for.

McLaren credits second unit director Rob Alonzo (“brilliant”), assistant vehicles coordinator Rob Hunt (“he knows vehicles inside out”), and the “best drivers in the world” for building a sequence atop Lisbon’s slippery cobbled roads, all while keeping the stunt crew and the historic streets safe. To prevent any damage, the team constructed ramps on some of the delicate stairs. They also placed buffer cars in strategic locations in order to keep the stunt vehicles from hitting the walls.

Photo: Robert Viglasky/Netflix

Photo: Robert Viglasky/Netflix

Harper’s wife and he visited Portugal about five years back. This sequence was inspired. Harper wrote that the cobblestone streets of Portugal were so iconic and their textures and reflections made him want to shoot a car chase there every time he could. The car chase scene was filmed in the city when it opened. Heart of Stone When the script was written, this was the ideal opportunity. He says the Portuguese government was “wonderfully accommodating” of his desire to speed cars through 500-year-old streets and that, in return, the film’s production team left Lisbon in one piece. Not everything was untouched. “We did damage things,” he admits. “We damaged cars and we broke a lot of cameras.”

The Lisbon chase sequence is preceded by one of the movie’s best fight scenes, a brawl in a safe house where Stone (and Gadot) shows her martial prowess. McLaren told us it was one her favorite scenes in the movie, because the fights were so technical and Charlie Wood’s set looked like a place that he had found.

“You just had incredible light, incredible kind of fluidity of one room moving into the otherThe following are some examples of how to get started: so many different perspectives that you could see,” McLaren says of the set. “So when we were creating the fight, it was so interesting for us because we were able to use mirrors and shadows and just make it as interesting as we could.”

Photo: Robert Viglasky/Netflix

This was McLaren’s first time working significantly with Gadot; the two worked on Fast & Furious 6 and CriminalsTogether, but not close. She left impressed with how quickly she picked up choreography as well as how willing the actress was to take on difficult stunts including wirework.

“The amount of rehearsal she needed was minimal because she was so quick to pick things up,” McLaren says. “Roll a camera on her. She’ll just nail it.”

The star is making a return after receiving poor reviews. Wonder Woman 1984 The following are some examples of how to get started: Red Warning Gadot nails it. Heart of Stone’s action sequences. The Portugal sequence is one of many impressive set-pieces in the movie, including an aerial sequence that involved real skydivers, the explosion of an Icelandic glass concert hall (“Somehow, they didn’t say no,” Harper says), and a thrilling opening sequence at (and below) Glacier Hotel Grawand in Senales, Italy, the highest-elevation hotel in Europe. The combination of all these elements is breathtaking. Heart of Stone for one of Netflix’s strongest original action offerings yet, where camerawork and craftsmanship are front and center.

“It’s like old moviemaking, doing things for real on location,” McLaren says of the job. “And dealing with those challenges. I just think it shows on camera; it gives you a real tone and a feel to the whole atmosphere of the movie.”

Heart of Stone Netflix now offers the film.