One of the most exciting sequences in
Ant-Man and the Wasp is a car chase that plays out on the streets of San Francisco, California. In what is one of Marvel's most creative chase scenes to date, Scott, Hope and Luis speed, shrink and enlarge across the city as they try to protect the miniaturized lab from falling into the hands of Sonny Burch or Ghost.
Speaking with
ComicBook.com, director Peyton Reed provided some insight into how the chase was filmed and how it came to life in post-production through a combination of VFX and practical effects:
We filmed a lot in San Francisco. The SUV flip is an all-practical SUV that we flipped down that hill. If you go online, somewhere early on where we were still shooting, there's all this sort of people hanging out their apartment windows, watching us catapult that thing down there. So it is a combination of CG cars and real cars, but the bulk of it was built on doing real car stuff. Any time when Hank Pym's van, when Hope is driving it through the city, we were really doing that.
While San Francisco did allow Marvel to film parts of the car chase on the actual streets of the city, Reed initially had reservations about it as he was concerned with whether the city would allow them to shoot what they needed for the movie.
Because there had been bad blood, I think, ever since Bogdanovich's movie What's Up Doc, where they were doing that crazy chase, and that was 1972. But the people in the San Francisco Film Commission, they'll go and they'll point to these concrete stairs and say, 'Okay, see those chips where the concrete is chipped away? That's from the Volkswagen in What's Up Doc,' and they've never repaired it since. They're very cautious about it.
Reed also spoke about how they filmed the sequence that tookplace on Lombard Street, a popular tourist attraction that is famously referred to as the crookedest street in the world. Due to the popularity of the street, Reed and crew were not able to flip vehicles there but did film as much as possible on location:
You know, we shot all that stuff down at the actual piers, and we shot on Lombard Street. Obviously we did not flip a car down Lombard Street, but we shot all the place and the action and stuff of the van coming down Lombard Street. So it is a combination of live action and CG.
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Ant-man and the Wasp? Be sure to share your thoughts below!