Scene Stealer: ‘Eagle Eye’s’ exploding truck
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The makers of ‘Eagle Eye’ wanted to keep the computer-generated imagery in their high-tech action thriller to a minimum; so for a sequence in which a Predator spy plane chases stars Billy Bob Thornton and Shia LaBeouf into a tunnel, shoots a missile at a semi and causes the semi’s trailer to come rolling and bouncing after our heroes’ car, the spy plane was CGI but everything else was real. Special-effects coordinator Peter Chesney had to become skilled in the art of blowing up real 60,000-pound shipping containers and get them to roll properly in just six weeks’ time. ‘You spend all of your time with a broom trying to brush Murphy out of the equation,’ Chesney says. After creating detailed pre-visualized drawings using complicated physics equations and many days of testing, the crew shot the truck explosions on a runway at the former El Toro Marine Base. ‘This was beyond the realm of stuntmen,’ Chesney says. ‘Because we just couldn’t protect them.’ Everything in the shot, from the seven cameras to the cars to the giant rolling sea container, was pulled by cables timed within seconds of each other. Luckily, the results came out just as predicted by the drawing.
-- Patrick Kevin Day
(Photos courtesy Peter Chesney / DreamWorks)
