Unbelievable Movie Stunts That Were Totally Real

In this age of CGI, it's really easy for filmmakers to use digital effects in place of actual stunts, and while the end result might look cool, it doesn't pack the same punch as a person putting him or herself in harm's way. As a result, audiences often suspect over-the-top stunts of being computer-generated illusions. However, sometimes these insane scenes are actually real-life gags, stunts so unbelievable that you would never guess they were totally real.

Most humans prefer to stay far away from crocodiles, but then, James Bond isn't your average human. In "Live and Let Die" — Roger Moore's first outing as 007 — the martini-drinking MI6 agent finds himself stranded on an island surrounded by hungry reptiles. But Bond isn't worried about a few cranky crocodilians, and instead of cowering in fear, he escapes by using the critters as a living bridge, jumping from croc to croc until he reaches the other side.

So how did the filmmakers create this scene of derring do/animal cruelty? Well, they used actual crocodiles. Of course, that's not Roger Moore out there risking his life. Instead, it's Ross Kananga, the man who operated the crocodile farm where director Guy Hamilton was shooting the picture. In order to prevent the reptiles from swimming around, Kananga tied their feet to concrete blocks, but he didn't worry about their mouths or tails. He then attempted to cross the bridge five separate times, and on a couple of occasions, he nearly wound up on the bottom of the food chain.

Once, Kananga slipped midway across the bridge, and for a moment, he was stuck on the back of an angry croc, stranded as animals on both sides tried to take a bite out of him. On another attempt, one of the beasts got a hold of Kananga's shoe, and the farmer found himself in a tug-of-war battle to keep his foot in one piece. But on the sixth try, Kananga finally got the stunt right, managing to keep all of his digits while giving us one of the wildest stunts ever put to celluloid.

When it comes to pushing the envelope of special effects, James Cameron is without a doubt the king of the world. But this VFX revolutionary still believes in using practical effects whenever possible. (We're talking about the guy who built an 800-foot Titanic replica and then sank the thing in a 5 million-gallon water tank.) However, Cameron took his love for real-life stunts to death-defying levels in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," going so far as to jeopardize his own safety to get the perfect shot.

Near the end of the film, our heroes are trying to escape from the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), but unfortunately for John Connor (Edward Furlong), the shapeshifter has commandeered a helicopter. As a result, we get a thrilling chase where the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) attempts to outrun the chopper in a SWAT van. The sequence takes place on a Los Angeles freeway, and while some of the shots involve a mock-helicopter attached to a crane, there are quite a few scene where there's an actual aircraft buzzing down the road.

One of those sequences involves the T-1000 flying beneath an overpass. Cameron wanted to do this stunt for real, and pilot Chuck Tamburro (who cameos as the dude the T-1000 tosses out of the chopper) was totally up for the task. But first, he had to make sure there was enough room, and after wheeling the bird under the overpass, he found he had five feet up top and four on both sides. So yeah, it was going to be a bit of a squeeze.

In fact, the scene was so risky that the camera crew refused to film it. But Cameron is the kind of guy who laughs in the face of danger, so he shot the sequence himself. As Cameron sat in a car with a gutsy driver, Tamburro soared along at 60 knots (nearly 70 mph), pulling off what's got to be one of the riskiest aircraft stunts in cinema history.

Before he was Neo or John Wick, Keanu Reeves was Jack Traven, a policeman who finds himself aboard a bus that's rigged to blow if it drops beneath 50 mph. That's what you call a bad day at work, but things get even worse when Traven realizes the bus is heading up an elevated freeway and straight toward a 50-foot gap in the road. But thanks to the mad driving skills of Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock), the bus clears the gap without a hitch and lands safely on the other side.

Granted, the filmmakers digitally removed that missing chunk of concrete, but as the folks at CineFix point out, director Jan de Bont and stunt coordinator Gary Hymes really got that city bus to fly. Using a vehicle that was stripped down to bare bones, driver Joffrey Brown revved his engines and headed straight for ramp constructed on an LA freeway. He began driving from a mile away and managed to get the bus up to 61 mph before soaring 109 feet in the air. When Brown returned to Earth .49 seconds later, the landing pretty much obliterated the bus, but Brown managed to survive the impact courtesy of a special harness designed by Hymes.

When it comes to performing his own stunts, Tom Cruise is just one notch below Jackie Chan but miles above every other actor on the planet. For proof, look no further than the "Mission: Impossible" franchise. There's the Burj Khalifa scene from "Ghost Protocol," the plane ride in "Rogue Nation," and even that scene where he's dangling from the ceiling in the original film is pretty darn impressive. But for this list, we're focusing on "Mission: Impossible II," the embarrassing black sheep of the "Mission: Impossible" family.

The plot ... well ... it's not that important because part two is a lousy movie, even if it was directed by Hong Kong master John Woo. What is important is how Tom Cruise risked his life in the name of entertainment. Take the opening sequence, for example. That's really Tom Cruise dangling from the side of a cliff, and as you probably guessed, he's not using a safety net. So when he flings himself from one rock to another, the only thing keeping the man alive is a thin cable.

Sure, that's impressive, but things got even more insane in the scene where Cruise faces off against a bad guy on the beach. During this fight scene, the villain pulls a blade and tries to stab Ethan Hunt in the eye. And naturally, Tom Cruise wanted to use a real knife because that's the way Tom Cruise rolls. To make sure he wouldn't lose a pupil, Cruise had a steel cable attached to the weapon and then positioned himself so the knife would stop about a quarter of an inch away from his eye. It's that kind of dedication that proves Tom Cruise is totally worth every cent he makes for each of his movies ... and that he's totally nuts.

The "Raid" duology consists of two of the best action films of the modern age, and the showstopping car chase from "The Raid 2: Berandal" became one of the finest vehicular action scenes in recent memory. The most unbelievable part of the stuntwork in this sequence is actually how it's shot. Director Gareth Evans and cinematographers Dimas Imam Subhono and Matt Flannery honed a visceral visual style for the "Raid" films that perfectly walks the line between utmost clarity and frenetic, dynamic camerawork. This visual style is best exemplified by the stunning long shot moves through multiple vehicles engaged in a car chase in a single fluid movement.

It took creativity and ingenuity, but they pulled the shot off for real and without any hidden cuts. The camera begins on a custom camera car that progresses the shot from the interior of the SUV where Rama (Iko Uwais) is fighting multiple foes, down the road to the car driven by Eka (Oka Antara). Once the camera moves through the window, a second camera operator — camouflaged as the passenger seat — springs into action and takes hold of the camera, but the shot still isn't over. To complete the shot, the cam-op dressed as a car seat then had to lean into the back and push the camera out the opposite window, where it was then grabbed by a third cam-op laying supine on a narrow metal rig bolted onto the outside of the car.

The 007 franchise is jam-packed with amazing stunts, but it's pretty hard to beat the motorcycle chase from "Skyfall." It would've been incredibly easy for director Sam Mendes and stunt coordinator Gary Powell to do this sequence from the safety of a sound stage with the aid of CGI but they decided to put actual motorbikes on actual rooftops in Istanbul, Turkey.

Some green screens were set up on location but only to have greater control over the environment. The use of greenscreen in this particular instance in no way diminishes the dangerous stunt work performed by world-class dirt bike riders. The riders were tasked with maneuvering their bikes down precarious concrete strips that were only about a meter wide. "A lot of the rooftops have old air conditioning units with metal stakes coming up," explained Bond stunt double Robbie Maddison in an interview with Redbull, "things that can stab yourself if you were to fall on them. It definitely was not a place you'd want to ride with no helmet."

But ride without a helmet he did, and after one stunt went wrong, Maddison said that if he'd "rolled a few feet further, I would've impaled myself into some rickety, old metal stuff." Fortunately, all of the stuntmen made it out of Istanbul in one piece ... but you can't say the same thing about Istanbul. Stuntman Lee Morrison lost control of his motorcycle at one point and crashed into a jewelry store, shattering its historic 350-year-old glass window.

While it's one of the more divisive Marvel movies, we can all agree that Iron Man 3 features one of the MCU's best action sequences. We're talking about the "Barrel of Monkeys" scene, when everyone aboard Air Force One is sucked out into the wild blue yonder. Thinking fast, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) saves the freefalling crewmembers by having everyone form a human chain, allowing Iron Man to safely deposit them in the ocean.

Originally, Marvel executives wanted to do this entire scene with green screen, but luckily, they later decided to give their movie wings by hiring the Red Bull stunt team. In total, this diehard bunch of adrenaline junkies made approximately 600 jumps over the course of eight days, with each dive lasting about a minute. Every leap provided about 1.5 seconds of footage, but all that hard work definitely paid off.

Of course, there is a bit of CGI trickery here. Obviously, Iron Man isn't real, and since Marvel couldn't borrow Air Force One, they were forced to insert the plane digitally. The VFX crew also had to erase the team's parachute gear (although the Red Bull group did make about 480 dives with their equipment hidden inside their costumes), and since the stunt was filmed in North Carolina, the tech wizards used their computers to transform the scenery below into the Florida coast. In other words, it was the perfect marriage between CG and practical stunts, and even if you were bummed out by the big Mandarin reveal, the skydiving shenanigans more than made up for it.

This won't come as a surprise to "Fast and Furious" fans, but if you're new to the franchise, then you might be surprised to learn that a lot of the stunts you see on-screen are legit, even the super crazy ones. Like that scene where Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family parachute from a C-130 transport plane? Believe it or not, that wasn't cooked up on some computer. Instead, that was the work of stuntmen Jack Gill and Spiro Razatos, who spent months figuring out how to drop a bunch of automobiles from 12,000 feet in the air.

So here's how it all went down. After prepping for the big day — including a two-week period where they were experimenting by just tossing cars out of planes — the filmmakers rigged up four vehicles with parachutes and dropped them from the sky, two at a time. Each car was equipped with three cameras, but to really get that intense "Fast and Furious" feel, three skydivers strapped on helmet cameras and jumped out with the cars. These freefalling cinematographers had to watch out for debris that would occasionally fly off the vehicles, all while listening to spotters who were making sure they didn't get too close to these two-ton missiles.

Of course, there weren't any actors in the cars when they were pushed out of the planes — those shots were added later — but those parachutes were real, those planes were real, and that $1.5 billion that the film earned at the box office was definitely real too.

"The Villainess" is a South Korean action film about an assassin going out for revenge against the organization that developed her skills. The movie is directed and co-written by Byung-gil Jung, who began his career with the documentary "Action Boys" about South Korean stuntmen, which surely helped lay the foundation for all of the incredible stunt work in "The Villainess." The film has many impressive action sequences that are elevated through creative cinematography choices, such as showcasing the impressive opening set piece from the first-person perspective of the protagonist.

The clear standout action scene is the swordfight that takes place atop speeding motorcycles, which inspired the extremely similar motorcycle swordfight found in "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum" two years later. As great as the "John Wick" scene is, "The Villainess" does it even better. Throughout the scene, the camera is in constant motion and pulling off angles and movements that seem physically impossible. The camera gets right in the middle of the action and even passes through the tiny gap under the motorcycle chassis between its speeding tires. In truth, the camerawork would have been completely impossible if not for the use of new, cutting-edge camera technology. Smaller cameras than usual, hidden cuts, and a whole cavalcade of clever, groundbreaking techniques were all used in conjunction to make this action sequence something special.

Directed by Edgar Wright, "Baby Driver" is basically "Heat," "The Driver," and "Singin' in the Rain" all mashed up into one glorious movie. This 2017 heist flick follows a music-loving getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who tries to leave his life of crime after falling head-over-heels for a waitress who resembles Cinderella (Lily James). Of course, his plans don't exactly pan out, and Baby is forced to do all sorts of crazy driving to evade a band of cutthroat bank robbers. And as it turns out, almost every stunt Baby pulls is the real deal.

"We tried to do everything in camera," said Darrin Prescott, the film's stunt coordinator and second-unit director, "99 percent was practical." That includes the jaw-dropping "180 in, 180 out" gag from the movie's opening scene. While trying to escape the long arm of the law, Baby turns into a crowded alleyway full of moving vehicles. Never once losing his cool, our hero throws his Subaru into a forward 180, spinning around one truck, before throwing the car into a reverse 180, successfully dodging another automobile. 

Naturally, while Ansel Elgort did a lot of his own driving, this particular stunt was performed by Jeremy Fry. After rehearsing the move about six times on a parking lot, the crew set up in an actual alley, and Fry got up to 70 mph before sending his car into a tailspin, avoiding every obstacle in his path. "A different movie would have just done that ... on green screen," Prescott told Entertainment Weekly, but the "Baby Driver" stunt doubles wanted to capture that realistic feel, even if it meant putting their lives on the line.

Ever since Tom Cruise scaled the Burj Khalifa in "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," the big draw to this blockbuster action series has been for audiences to see what insane new stunts Cruise is going to attempt each time around. For "Fallout," it was his incredibly dangerous helicopter stunts and, of course, the HALO jump that arrives near the beginning of the film.

Unsurprisingly, the lightning storm was zhushed up in post, but everything else was completely real. Pulling off this stunt, and doing it all in one shot no less, required months of preparation and incredible precision from both Cruise and the camera operator who had to complete the same dive while framing the shot and pulling focus. In a breakdown for Hollywood.com, Cruise explained how tight the margin of error on the shot was, "I have to be within 3 feet of him. Three feet, not 2 and a half, not 3 and a half, it has to be 3 feet because of the depth of field and the light and the lens that we were using." They were only able to attempt one take each night.

As tough as the stunt would be on its own, Cruise was also required to perform a great deal of dramatic acting and carry out complex actions while in freefall. To make the shot even more difficult, there was also a second character involved in the dive who gets knocked unconscious and a second camera operator in the sky recording behind-the-scenes footage of the first camera operator getting the actual shot.

While there is no official title given for this sort of thing, "John Wick: Chapter 4" almost certainly set the record for the longest stair fall ever committed to screen. Near the end of Mr. Wick's (Keanu Reeves) fourth outing, he makes the arduous trek up the long staircase to the top of La Basilique du Sacré Cœur de Montmartre, only to be knocked back down to the very bottom after reaching the summit. In a drawn-out fall that is emotional, painful, and funny all at once, John tumbles down all 222 steps.

Capturing this extended fall meant breaking the stunt into pieces but crashing down all of the stairs for real. Serving as star Reeves' stunt double for this massive set piece was Vincent Bouillon, who repeated the entire fall from top to bottom four times over the course of two days.

When speaking to Vulture, director Chad Stahelski revealed that the whole idea for the stair fall from the top and the subsequent re-ascension with Caine (Donnie Yen) at John's side was inspired by the likes of Buster Keaton and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." They decided early on, "We're going to use it as a metaphor. We're going to take the whole movie and wrap it into one set piece!" The climb, fall, and second climb perfectly encapsulate John Wick's force of will and refusal to give up no matter how stacked the odds are against him.

"Hardcore Henry" is a Russian-American-Chinese co-production with the novel gimmick of depicting everything through the first-person perspective of its silent protagonist. The film is basically non-stop action, and the numerous fight scenes and shootouts are stunning to watch, but they were also extremely dangerous to film. One of the film's many jaw-dropping set pieces finds Henry chasing a target across the top of a tall, metal bridge. Since the production couldn't set up any safety precautions at that location, the stuntmen agreed to just accept the possibility of taking a deadly fall if they slipped. Stuntman Andrey Dementyev said in a behind-the-scenes video, "That was one of the easiest scenes," owing to both his background in parkour. "Doing such things is like a cup of morning coffee to us," he said — but it says less about the ease of that scene and more about the level of difficulty and danger of the other stunts in the film.

Later in the very same chase sequence, a random woman in the crowd is flung down an escalator and takes a nasty spill on the metal stairs. This "stunt" was a total accident, and the woman taking that hard fall was only meant to be a background extra before she wound up getting caught in the tangle of limbs that sent her flying. Pretty much everything in "Hardcore Henry" was done for real, which, when coupled with their lax approach to safety, made for one of the most dangerous action movie sets in modern cinema.

Way back in 1939, a stunt was pulled off for John Ford's "Stagecoach" that still has the power to make modern audiences gasp. This Oscar-winning western adventure pushed the envelope in terms of action and stunt work. The film's biggest stunts were all handled by Yakima Canutt, a pro rodeo rider whose expertise with horses was invaluable to the production.

The big showstopper stunt sequence begins with Canutt leaping from horseback into the middle of the six-horse team pulling the stagecoach, but that isn't even the hard part. After his character is shot, Canutt then falls between the legs of the charging horses and drags along the rough terrain before releasing his grip and letting 24 thundering horse hooves and four stagecoach wheels pass directly over and beside him. The stunt appears so dangerous on screen that it almost looks like a terrifying accident caught on camera, but it was all intentional, and Canutt made sure to put some minor safety precautions in place before attempting the stunt. Even after making it as safe as possible, the tiniest slip-up still could have killed him, especially because of the unpredictable animals involved. With nerves of steel, Canutt pulled it off and went on to do plenty of other death-defying stunts for "Stagecoach" and hundreds of other Hollywood films.

"The Blues Brothers" is beloved for two reasons: its excellent music and its insane car stunts. From the demolition derby-esque mall chase to the gargantuan ending car chase that sees dozens of vehicles destroyed and goes on for over eight straight minutes, the Bluesmobile has really been a part of some of the best car chases in the history of cinema. The one gag that seems too crazy to be real is the car freefall scene in which a red station wagon driven by a pair of Illinois Nazis (Henry Gibson and Eugene J. Anthony) flies off the end of a partially constructed bridge before plummeting to the Earth.

After watching this jaw-dropping stunt, you might think to yourself, surely they used miniatures or trick photography, right? The only miniature in the sequence was used for the Bluesmobile doing a backflip over the station wagon. The freefall that follows, on the other hand, was done for real. A helicopter was used to lift the vehicle 1,000 feet in the air and then dropped it on an empty patch of land beside the Chicago River where it could smash into the ground without causing any injuries. The drop site had previously been used for road salt storage. For the actual impact of the station wagon into the street, and the Bluesmobile's subsequent jump over the pit it leaves in the road, the car was dropped from a lower height on a set at Universal Studios.

"The Protector" was the second collaboration between star Tony Jaa and director Prachya Pinkaew after "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," which launched Jaa to international stardom. Action movies made within the Thai film industry often have fight scenes that look far more brutal and painful than the average martial arts flick. The reason for this is because Thai stuntmen routinely take full-contact hits from the stars, including hard elbows and knees to the head showcased in wince-inducing slow motion. Jaa himself explained the practice to the Los Angeles Times, "You should be able to see the actual hit, and if you can't, then do it over and over until we get it right. ... But if you get it wrong, you're a goner."

This ethos of doing everything for real and accepting the inherent danger extends to the stunt sequences. One stunt in "The Protector" required Jaa to outrun a speeding ATV, run straight up a wall of glass, and do a backflip over the ATV right as it crashes through the glass beneath him. If he slipped, he would have been run over, rammed through the glass, and fallen down the steep drop-off on the other side. If his timing was off by the slightest degree, the wall would have shattered underfoot and sent him crashing down in a rain of glass shards. Jaa's margin of error was as small as could be with only about half a second passing between when his foot left the glass and when it shattered.

Nobody in the world is more closely linked with the spectacle of doing their own death-defying stunts than Jackie Chan, though Tom Cruise is certainly staking a claim for himself in that arena. This entire list could be populated with Chan's biggest stunts, like the electrified pole slide from "Police Story," the clocktower drop from "Project A," or the skydive onto a hot air balloon from "Armour of God." Instead, let's highlight a smaller stunt from his 1994 masterpiece "The Legend of the Drunken Master."

In the first half of the film's big finale, Chan is kicked onto a bed of hot coals. He then scrambles on his butt, bare hands, and knees across the bed of coals until he can climb out of the other side. To make the stunt even crazier, his opponent in the fight, John (Ken Lo, Chan's real-life bodyguard), chases Chan down and begins kicking at him again before he's even out of the danger zone. Though certainly smaller than some of Chan's biggest stunts, this one stands out as especially unbelievable because there was no real reason to use actual flaming-hot coals for the scene. Nobody would have faulted Chan for not wanting to burn his hands, face, and body for the stunt, but he did anyway. In the outtake reel that plays during the credits, Chan can be seen in extreme pain after the stunt as he is doused by a pair of fire extinguishers.

"The Road Warrior" made great strides in improving the foundation laid by its predecessor, "Mad Max." Not only was the post-apocalyptic world more fleshed-out and believable, but all of the action was bigger and more impressive too. With bigger action came bigger and more dangerous stunts, the vast majority of which involved dangerous vehicular combat. One crash in particular involving a motorcycle seems too dangerous to have possibly been real, but it was.

After a dune buggy spins out and flips over, a motorcycle rider crashes straight into it and goes flying off a cliff. The way the stuntman flips head over heels through the air and the extreme distance he covers in the crash both make the stunt look impossibly dangerous. Given the seemingly inhuman way he moves through the air, some viewers may have assumed the crash was pulled off with a dummy, but the crash was pulled off for real by a stuntman named Guy Norris. The reason why the stunt looks so dangerous is because it went horribly wrong but was used in the final cut anyway. The crash was planned, but at the moment of execution, Norris' leg clipped the overturned vehicle, shattering the bone and causing him to flip uncontrollably through the air in that unnatural way. Norris recovered and returned to work on the film before production was over and has continued to collaborate with director George Miller over the years, including on "Mad Max: Fury Road."

"Chocolate" is a Thai martial arts movie from Prachya Pinkaew, the same director as "Ong-Bak" and "The Protector." The film was the debut of star JeeJa Yanin, whose incredible acrobatics and fighting ability immediately put her on the map as one of the top martial artists in the game. Like plenty of other Thai action movies, the fighting in "Chocolate" involved countless full-contact hits, which led to numerous injuries on set.

The film's climax is a massive building-side stunt sequence as Yen (Yanin) fights against the main villain dubbed No. 8 (Pongpat Wachirabunjong) and his many henchmen all while leaping around on narrow concrete ledges three or four stories up, dangling from metal signs, and even clinging to the side of an elevated train platform. Several stuntmen take gnarly falls from the building side, either falling straight to the pavement below or slamming off of metal and concrete obstacles on their way down. These stunts look incredibly dangerous, and that's because they were. As can be seen in the film's outtake reel, a stuntman — or multiple — seemed to get grievously injured during almost every shot. Some of the stuntmen were on wires, but the wires didn't seem to do anything to slow their falls or lessen their impacts and even seem to be completely slack, outright failing to provide any sense of safety. The sacrifices made by these stunt performers made for a stunning climactic stunt set piece, but the physical toll it took on them was incredibly high.

One of the late, great William Friedkin's lesser-discussed masterpieces is his 1977 adventure epic "Sorcerer." The film was considered a complete failure upon its initial release but has, luckily, been reevaluated over the years for the true achievement that it is. As a remake of the 1953 French film "The Wages of Fear," the plot of "Sorcerer" tells the story of desperate men driving a pair of trucks full of explosives across jungle terrain. The slightest bump has the potential to set off the explosives, which makes every set piece unbearably tense, none more so than the central bridge sequence; a brand new addition made by the remake.

Take the explosives out of the equation, and the rest of the stunt was just about as dangerous to film as it looks on screen. Friedkin was known for employing a pseudo-documentary approach to filmmaking while striving for utmost realism, and "Sorcerer" was no different. There were no miniatures or trick photography used to pull off the sequence. Real two-and-a-half-ton military trucks were driven across a swaying, narrow bridge over a wide river while being pelted with rain and debris from the simulated monsoon conditions.

Friedkin insisted on the actors doing the vast majority of the driving, and he sometimes operated the camera himself from inside the trucks. Up to eight times, the stunt went wrong and the trucks fell from the bridge into the river, which nearly killed the actors, stunt drivers, and Friedkin himself.

"Supercop," also known as "Police Story 3," was the one and only live-action starring collaboration between Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh. Each gave a cameo in one of the other's starring vehicles, and they joined together in animated form for "Kung Fu Panda 2," but these two legends of the Hong Kong action industry otherwise stayed apart.

Yeoh is a part of numerous great action sequences throughout the film, but her biggest stunt by far involves her jumping a motorbike off a cliffside onto the top of a moving train. In the final edit, she just barely makes it onto the train and nearly rolls right off the edge. In reality, she actually did miss the train completely on the first couple of attempts. As can be seen in the film's outtake reel, the dirt bike bounced as it hit the train and sent Yeoh flying off the far side at least twice. The only safety measure in place was a pile of cardboard boxes and a thin mattress positioned alongside the train, but Yeoh is flung so far, that she seems to overshoot this minuscule safety net altogether. In a retrospective interview with IMDb, Yeoh said of the film, "I really was fearless at that moment in time." She recalled telling director Stanley Tong, "I don't really know how to ride a motorcycle. But I learned!"