You may not be familiar with Sam Hargrave by name, but if you’ve ever watched a Marvel movie, you’re familiar with his work. For much of his career, Hargrave has been an integral part of the MCU, going from Chris Evans’ stunt double in the Captain America movies, to serving as the stunt coordinator on Avengers: Infinity War and second unit director on Avengers: Endgame.
Hargrave has been the man responsible for making all those incredible stunts and fight scenes look totally real. Remember the elevator scene from Captain America: The Winter Solider? Yeah, that’s him putting in the work. After building his Hollywood resume as a stunt coordinator, Hargrave is now behind the camera as a director with his first feature film Extraction, which debuts April 24th on Netflix.
The movie, which stars Chris Hemsworth as a mercenary trying to save a young kid, is a thriller that puts Hargrave’s comfort with intense action at the forefront. At the heart of the film is an incredible, 12-minute action sequence that includes fights, car chases and explosions and takes place a long tracking shot.
Hargrave spoke to For The Win about how that epic piece of filmmaking went down.
FTW: First of all, why did you want to be so ambitious with that specific action sequence? A lot of action movies just focus on the explosions, and not the filmmaking technique.
Sam Hargrave: Yeah, the drive to do something different, I don’t want to say that it’s never been done before, but to do it differently comes from wanting to show a different perspective. A lot of people have been doing the long takes, but my reasoning was that I wanted to grab the audience and drag them into the sequence and take them real time through an extraction, because that kind of pays off on the promise of the title.
Another part of it was that, truthfully, the sequence was so big on the page that I wanted to keep the actors in the sequence more, and I wanted to be able to shoot some of the fun stuff.
FTW: So, it sounds like Chris Hemsworth really had to be there to do all that fighting?
Hargrave: We’re so lucky to have an actor in Chris Hemsworth, who is so physically capable and dedicated to training and rehearsal. He was such a collaborative filmmaker. After a 10, 12 hour shooting day, he would go back to the hotel and rehearse with the stunt team for another two hours. It was his commitment and his physical ability to do these long pieces of choreography that made this sequence possible.
Otherwise, you have to cut it up to hide things, but when you have a guy like Chris, you don’t have to and you can sit back and watch him do these amazing things.
FTW: This is a broad question but what was the most challenging part of getting this sequence?
Hargrave:Yeah, there’s a lot but one of the biggest challenges was how do you get a camera into these spaces safely. I wanted to capture the action in a way that is different, but also visceral and exciting. I decided that I wanted to do it all hand held so it feels a bit like a documentary, but it was about being safe and in the end I decided that I would probably be the best person to do this. For 10 days, I put the camera in my hands and shot the sequence.
FTW: Wait, so there’s a scene where Chris jumps off a building and the camera follows him. Was that you?
Hargrave:It was, yeah it was me.
So it was a lot of running up and down stairs, and strapping myself to the hoods of cars. I was diving through the windows of cars, I was jumping off buildings. It was things I wanted the camera to do, but I didn’t want to put other people at risk to do it. I felt confident enough in my ability as a stunt performer to safely execute these camera stunts.
FTW: Frankly, that sounds kind of nuts.
Hargrave: (Laughs) Actually, the harder part of the sequence was right after that, when they’re running through a building. I had to run backward down a flight of narrow concrete stairs, run backward while filming forward. That was actually harder than jumping off a building.
Extraction will be available to stream on Netflix on April 24th.
[vertical-gallery id=907651]
