What Was the Hardest Film Stunt¿

Flipping a full-size semi-truck, jumping on top of crocodiles, and the long list of things that Jackie Chan has done. Stunts are one of the most dangerous parts of a film. They involve many people to choreograph, supervise, and perform them safely. There really aren't any easy stunts, so today we want to take a look at the most difficult stunts ever performed in film history. We've grouped them into 9 categories, each containing multiple stunts, but we'll highlight one that truly represents the most difficult of the bunch. We'll be looking at stunts performed by certain actors, stunts involving animals, vehicles, and more. There are plenty of contenders for the hardest stunt performed in a film, but as always, you will decide. Let us know which one you think was the hardest. We'll be starting off with one of the most common, but impressive types of stunts. Vehicular stunts. However, even this category is too vague because there's such a wide variety of vehicular stunts, so we'll split it into two sections. One for stunts that focus on the vehicle itself, usually someone driving it, and the other for stunts on top of or around vehicles. For the former, you have the classic car crash flips like in the first Fast and Furious where they used long steel rods as a ramp, or the crash in Sorcerer that took 3 days to build a ramp to get it right. The James Bond films feature plenty of car flips, but those will have their own section later. And if flipping a car wasn't enough, how about flipping a semi truck like in The Dark Knight where they used hydraulic ramps to initiate the flip in a calculated way to avoid any danger. But vehicular stunts aren't just about crashing. There's the bridge jump scene in Smokey and the Bandit, the bus jump scene in Speed, or even the Michelle Yeoh riding a motorcycle off a ramp onto a train in Police Story 3 without a stunt double. However, our pick for the hardest stunt in this category is Terminator 2's helicopter flying under an overpass stunt. With very little room for error, especially with something as volatile as a helicopter, stunt pilot Mike Tamburo was confident he could pull off the maneuver. The camera crew that would follow the helicopter from behind in a car refused to film it due to how dangerous it was. So director James Cameron did it himself. Even crazier was the maneuver he did soon after when he pulled up just over the next bridge. This guy was a madman. But here at Filmstack, we're always trying to one-up ourselves. And one way we've been able to do that is by using Opera. Opera is a free browser that is packed with features that ensure I have a safe and secure browsing experience while also increasing my productivity. I want to highlight just a few of the features that make me love using Opera. Opera has an amazing browser AI called ARIA that helps us here at Filmstack make our videos better. When doing research for this video, ARIA helped us find stunts that we would have never thought of ourselves. It also helped us fact check the information we included in our script. ARIA is easily accessible from the sidebar and can give you clear answers to your questions instantly. It can help compose content of different types, style, and length and it also allows you to highlight any text to get a brief description, explore the topic more, or provide a translation. Another great feature is Opera's tab islands. As a YouTuber, I have so many tabs open almost all the time because I'm finding clips or images or just doing research in general. And Opera's tab islands help me stay organized by grouping tabs based on their context. And oh my, let's talk about Opera's workspaces feature. I'm not just a YouTuber. I also have a full-time job that requires me to use my browser constantly and sometimes I just want to relax and browse things when I'm at home. Opera's workspaces allow me to stay organized. When I need to focus on YouTube, I switch to my YouTube workspace. When I'm working, I'll switch to my workspace again. And this is just a short list of all the features. They also have a built-in ad blocker, a VPN, and so much more. And the best part is that you can get all these features by downloading Opera for free. Just click the link in the description. Now let's shift gears to stunts that happen around vehicles. These are stunts performed on or near vehicles and might even be more dangerous than piloting them unless the proper safety measures are taken. One of the most iconic examples is the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where This moment of movie magic was actually done by a stuntman and is an homage to a stunt later discussed in this video. Or the chase scene in Death Proof where stuntwoman and actress Zoe Bell lies across the hood of a car driving 85 miles an hour while only attached to a thin wire. Even something that looks simpler yet still dangerous is Keanu Reeve jumping from a moving car onto a bus in Speed and he did it on the first take. But we had to pick Mad Max Fury Road's Polecat stunt as the winner of this category. The stunt involved people swinging on long poles attached to moving vehicles and leaping off them, adding to the chaos that had been unfolding throughout the film. This kind of stunt was so difficult to pull off that they got Cirque du Soleil performers to achieve it. And it wouldn't have been right not to give a nod to a Mad Max vehicular stunt because the franchise is filled with iconic and difficult ones, especially Fury Road where the film is just one crazy stunt after another. After you've seen car flips and motorbikes flying over trucks, the film still manages to one up itself near the end with this pole stunt. We're now taking it to the skies for our next category, Aerial Stunts. These are some visually stunning stunts that are almost always some form of skydiving. A popular one is Iron Man 3's plane rescue scene where they had the Red Bull skydiving team dressed as regular people to perform the skydiving stunt with some wiring help near the end for proper formation. And you can't forget about the wingsuit stunt in Transformers Dark of the Moon where they actually had people flying with wingsuits in downtown Chicago, something that has never been done before in this kind of environment. And then in non-skydiving aerial stunt territory, we have the Dark Knight Rises plane jacking scene which was a beast of its own to plan and pull off. But our pick for the hardest aerial stunt is the mid-air transfer in Cliffhanger. For this stunt, stuntman Simon Crane was paid $1 million making it the costliest stunt at the time. He crossed between two planes with a wire at 15,000 feet altitude and it took him a few tries to get pulled into the second plane, even getting a close call near the engine. But in the end, the stunt was pulled off. It was much more challenging than it looks with the altitude making it extremely cold up there forcing Crane to wear a special mask to protect his face. And the two planes had to travel at the exact same speed of 150 miles per hour. Any faster and the wind would be too much for Crane to survive and any slower and one of the planes would stall. So the whole thing took a lot of coordination, easily making it the most difficult aerial stunt. Now you may have noticed we forgot about some aerial stunts performed by a certain someone. Well, that's because we wanted to give Tom Cruise his own section. In fact, we're moving into the actor's portion of our video where Tom Cruise, Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton each have their own section and deservingly so. In an era where the industry has become much more regulated for safety and uses more CGI instead of practical effects, Cruise has been consistently putting out jaw-dropping stunts that become a big source of the film's marketing and why people watch the film. You would think he'd chill out as he got older, but it was actually the opposite. He climbed the exterior of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest structure in the world, in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol. In the next Mission Impossible film, Rogue Nation, he held his breath for over 6 minutes in the underwater heist scene and held onto the side of a plane during takeoff. He was secured with a harness and cables, but filming at 5,000 feet at times is a ridiculous feat, especially since it took them 8 tries to capture the perfect shot. Then there's the most recent stunt in Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 where he drove a motorbike off a giant ramp that was on a cliff, with a parachute packed of course. And then there's Mission Impossible Fallout's helicopter stunt in Motorcycle Chase, flying actual jets in Top Gun Maverick and so much more. But our choice for the most difficult stunt is another aerial stunt, Mission Impossible Fallout's Halo Jump. The high-altitude, low-opening jump had Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane at above 25,000 feet and falling at speeds of over 200 miles per hour. He performed the stunt 106 times, and the jumps that were filmed were only given 3 minutes of filming due to filming close to sunset, where there'd be enough light for Cruise's face. And bonus points go to the scene just being filmed so well, one of our favorite filmed stunts. It's surprising he hasn't been injured in the crazier stunts while he broke his ankle in a simpler rooftop gap jump. But not getting injured is not something our next actor could say. Just look at this diagram of injuries. You would think someone with this many injuries was made of glass, but not in this case, because each injury tells a story of some crazy stunt. In fact, Jackie Chan is worthy of having his own video of his most difficult stunts. In Police Story, he gets dragged by and climbs a moving bus, falls from the top of a clock tower in Project A, slides down the side of a skyscraper in Who Am I, and falls onto hot coals in Drunken Master 2. And you can't forget about his famous jumps, whether it's jumping onto a moving hovercraft or between buildings in Rumble in the Bronx, onto a hot air balloon in Armor of God 2, or through a glass window in Police Story 2. The man has done it all, even roller skating through traffic and descending a building in the most complicated way. But our pick for the most difficult Jackie Chan stunt has to be the pole slide from Police Story. In this stunt, Jackie Chan slides down a light covered pole that was a few stories high and dropped through a pane of glass. The lights heated the pole up quite a bit, giving Jackie second degree burns, even causing his hands to peel. On top of this, he dislocated his pelvis and injured his back. What's interesting is that despite his bravery and his long list of stunts, he was genuinely scared of attempting this. And I doubt this fear included the thought that the pole would be hot, but he committed to the stunt and we got three great angles of it included in the film. And for our final section highlighting an actor's stunts, we're going all the way back to the 1920s with Buster Keaton. Now back then, stunts were on a different level, maybe not in complexity, but in safety because they were done with little to no safety measures. One of the best examples of this is Harold Lloyd's clock stunt in Safety Last, a very fitting name. In this stunt, he climbed the side of a building and hung onto a clock with no harness or wires, just a mattress below that wouldn't protect him too much. Yet there was no actor more prominent in this era's stunt scene than Buster Keaton, who did almost all of his own stunts. There are many train stunts in the general, most notably when Keaton sits on the front of a moving train and dislodges a railroad tie just in time using another. There's the failed building jump stunt in Three Ages that was used and turned into its own scene, becoming an instant classic. There's the hanging onto the water spout stunt in Sherlock Jr. where he broke his neck when the water pressure knocked him against a rail. And in that same film, he rode on top of a motorcycle's handlebars. But our pick for the most complicated and dangerous Buster Keaton stunt is in Steamboat Bill Jr.'s Falling House Facade. In this scene, the front of a house falls on top of Keaton, with him narrowly avoiding death by being in the exact position the open window was. Although not a new stunt because he had done something similar before, he kicked it up a notch by using an actual front wall of a house weighing two tons. A slight miscalculation on his part would have meant death, and half the crew walked off the set because they couldn't handle possibly seeing the stunt fail. Apparently he was okay with doing this stunt after being told the day before that his studio was going to shut down, and after Steamboat Bill Jr.'s filming wrapped, it was shut down. And now stepping away from the actor-specific stunt category, let's take a look at stunts involving animals. These kinds of stunts add a bit of unpredictability into the mix, requiring a lot of preparation and training of the animals. The most common type involves jumping off horses onto vehicles, or even onto more horses like in Stagecoach. But what made this stunt insane was when stuntman Yakima Kanat hung on and was dragged below the front two horses, then let go, going underneath a total of six horses and a carriage. The Raiders of the Lost Ark truck scene was an homage to this. Then there's the movie Roar, where the entire making of the film could be considered one giant stunt. Actors worked with 150 big cats and some elephants, most of them untrained, resulting in estimates of over 100 injuries, including broken ankles and shoulders, bitten throats and heads, and even a scalping. But no animal stunt needs as much preparation as the 1959 Ben-Hur chariot race scene. Even though the 1925 version is impressive, over 100 horses lost their lives for it, unlike the 1959 version which was also much grander. This 9 minute race scene plus the ceremony prior required 72 horses to be trained. It took almost a year to plan the scene. The actors took daily lessons on how to drive chariots and the filming of the scene took 5 weeks. After all the preparation, it didn't go too smoothly with the stuntman being tossed into the air off his chariot, with part of it making it into the final cut. You can just see how much coordination was needed to pull all of this off, on top of having thousands of extras in the stands and even having a thousand people take a year to carve the arena out of a rock quarry. One of the most classic types of stunts is parkour and free run stunts. We've covered a few good ones in the Jackie Chan section, but there are still some complicated ones worth going over. You've got the iconic ones like the boulder run from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford along with his stuntman both outran the boulder many times to get the perfect take, and the many rooftop chase scenes in the film, with one of our favorites being the Bourne ultimatums with that jumping through the window stunt near the end. And you can't forget about everything Tony Jaa does, especially in the Ong Bak films. This is best highlighted in the chase scene through Bangkok where he jumps over or through many obstacles in overly complicated ways. He jumps over a rack of tools, through a roll of barbed wire, and side flip between two panes of glass. Over the top? Yep, but nonetheless it's entertaining. But the best has to be District B-13's chase stunt done by none other than the creator of parkour, David Bell. In this chase scene he shows what parkour is at it's best, doing everything you see without wire, padding, or visual effects. Jumping through a narrow window, jumping over a balcony and sliding it down a floor, and the craziest part, jumping out a window and grabbing the rope to then swing around the corner of the apartment and land on another balcony. And he does all of this in such a fluid and energetic way, really making us believe it was a chase scene and not just one stunt set up after another. I can definitely see the appeal this scene had that helped push the parkour movement in the 2000's. And to end the video with a bang, we have a section dedicated to the film franchise with the most iconic stunts, James Bond. The Mission Impossible films have been catching up recently, but in the earlier James Bond films there'd always be some crazy stunt that made our jaws drop. We could have mentioned stunts from these films in almost all the categories discussed because of their variety. There's the tank chase scene in GoldenEye, the motorcycle chase scene in Skyfall on the rooftops in Istanbul, then there's the skydiving fight in Moonraker, the train fight in Skyfall, and the parkour chase scene in Casino Royale. But it seems like the most iconic Bond stunts have been some form of a jump. GoldenEye's bungee jump off a dam set a record for the highest bungee jump off a fixed structure at a height of 720 feet. And in the same film there's the diving after the plane stunt where kerosene from the working aircraft was hitting stuntman B.J. Worth's face. The ski jump off the mountain in The Spy Who Loved Me was also crazy, and the extremely complicated corkscrew jump in The Man with the Golden Gun needed computer calculations to help determine what speed the car should drive and how the ramp should be built. But our pick for the most complicated James Bond stunt has to go to Live and Let Die's crocodile jump. This scene had Bond abandoned by his enemy in the middle of a crocodile farm, and to escape the little island he was on, he jumped on three crocodiles, using them like a bridge. And those were real crocodiles. Ross Kananga, the owner of the crocodile farm, performed the stunt himself because no one from the stunt team was willing to give it a go, and it took many attempts with the outtakes available online. I don't know how much I'd have to be paid to attempt this even once, but this stunt was the perfect balance between skill and danger that makes it a fitting representation of the Bond franchise, even if it only lasts a few seconds. So there you have it, nine film stunts we believe to be the most challenging. Well, I guess we highlighted more than that. Are there any we missed or ones you think should have won their respective category? Share your thoughts below. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like and subscribe, and check out our Patreon for some cool perks. But until next time, have a good one.