POINT BREAK
Will the extreme remake be totally rad or bogus?
Twenty-five years after Point Break surfed on-screen, a new crew is updating it, pushing the conceit and stunts to the limit. Total Film climbs on set in search of an adrenaline rush...
Wearing a thick winter coat and gloves, Édgar Ramírez is limping. He takes a seat opposite Total Film in a tent on the side of a mountain and gingerly lifts his left foot onto a small stool. “I twisted my ankle yesterday,” he tells us with a shrug. “I jumped over a motorcycle, landed the wrong way, and twisted it. It’s fine, it’s part of what happens when you shoot an action movie.” And not just any action movie. We’re on set of Point Break, Ericson Core’s global-focused remake of the iconic ’90s flick, which adds extreme sports (proximity flying, off-road motorbiking, snowboarding) to the more recognisable skydiving/surfing sequences created by Keanu Reeves’ FBI mole, Johnny Utah, and Patrick Swayze’s wave-riding robber, Bodhi, in Kathryn Bigelow’s adrenaline-soaked original. And in pursuit of white-knuckle reality, a sprained ankle is the least of Ramírez’s hairy moments during filming.
It’s August 2014 and TF has tasted some small-scale action of its own just to get to set, having clambered up a 22-thousand-foot mountain, high in the Austrian Alps, walking in single file on a tiny path alongside a sheer cliff. Though it’s nominally summer, it’s freezing. We began our journey on a clear morning, with mist and moisture hanging in the air. Clouds covered nearby peaks, obscuring them like a distant fog. Now we’ve reached our destination, heavy rain starts to fall, and the crew breaks out large umbrellas with grim resolution. It’s here, ducked down behind a toppled truck, that will watch a key scene between leads Ramírez (Bodhi) and Luke Bracey (Utah) as they face off after a pivotal car smash. Bracey’s Utah is anguished and desperate as he crawls out from under a flipped 4X4, taking off his helmet and running, screaming “Get out of there!” with raw emotion. Lashed with rain, we move to a makeshift tent, out of the cold, to catch up with the two protagonists. “There’s a point of reflection for Johnny and Bodhi,” Ramírez muses of today’s scene, “It’s very intense.” Bracey, face covered in fake blood, a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other, agrees. “This is a crucial scene we’re filming, it’s a heartbreaking scene for Utah and Bodhi, it’s a culmination of where they’ve come to. Do their paths diverge, or do they come together?”
As fans of the original will recall, FBI hothead Utah (“young, dumb and full of cum” according to Gary Busey’s craggy mentor, Pappas – now played by Ray Winstone) goes undercover as a wannabe surfer in order to infiltrate a board crew he believes to be robbing banks throughout LA. But his investigation is derailed as he grows closer to charismatic leader, Bodhi, and finds himself in too deep. In Bigelow’s beloved version (discussed at length in Hot Fuzz) Utah and Bodhi’s relationship is more brah-mance than bromance, a mystic adrenaline-junkie chasing the big 50year storm vs a straight-shooter learning to relax amid eye-popping action.
In Core’s re-set, the dynamic and tone feels more The Dark Knight than Die Hard – Bodhi is now a focused, kitted-out crusader. As it turns out, the director who earned his action spurs as DoP on the first Fast And The Furious (“It was
‘We’re giving it absolutely everything we’ve got. i wa nt to bring johnny utah to life in a truthful, real and raw manner’ luke bracey
more of a remake of Point Break than this is, frankly. The Fast And The Furious was Point Break in cars,” he says), is a Nolan fan. “He’s one of the great filmmakers of our time. He’s been able to do things on a very large scale and have wonderful visuals, narrative, performances and also have commercial success, which is a rare combination. Doing things in camera is key for him, as it is for us.” Which is why he had Ramírez dangle off the edge of Venezuela’s towering Angel Falls for real...
It had been an aspect the Venezuelan actor had been attracted to when he first read the script – after Gerard Butler pulled out citing scheduling conflicts. “I got a call from my office in LA, telling me that they’re sending me a script and I need to read it right away because it’s moving very fast,” he recalls. “I asked about the part, and they said ‘You’ll see.’ I got the script, and I was like ‘ Point Break? Really? With this accent?’ I read it, and suddenly there’s a smash-cut to Angel Falls in Venezuela, and my jaw dropped. If I needed any sign that I needed to do Point Break, it was that Venezuela was featured. I had coffee with Ericson, then we had dinner... It was like we were in love. It was immediate, I knew I had to do this movie.”
His new co-star was similarly stoked by the last-minute switcheroo. “I was excited to work with Gerry, but that’s movies,” says Bracey of Butler. “I don’t really know what happened, but for me, Edgar is the right fit completely. He’s brought real humanity to it with his down to earth nature.” And the two men matched each other in their drive to go the extra action mile. “We’re giving it absolutely everything we’ve got,” Bracey stresses. “I want to be so truthful to it, and make the best version I can. There’s no-one in the world more than me who wants to bring Johnny Utah to life in a truthful, real and raw manner.”
The real and the raw certainly came to fruition when Ramírez found himself filming the scene that had sold him on the project, falling backwards over Angel Falls. “It’s a pretty terrifying thing to be at that height,” admits
Core. “Édgar was on the edge of a balcony overlooking Angel Falls, literally 3200ft off the ground, in a very remote place. Ultimately, Édgar has to completely let go, to go backwards over the waterfall. He had to have that emotional feeling of letting himself go completely. It was a raw moment, it was powerful. After we photographed it, he unroped, came over to me and was sobbing. I held him at the top of the falls for a good five, 10 minutes. That’s the kind of experiences we all went through. Édgar’s fear was real, and it added to the scene in a way you don’t normally find.”
The story contains the sort of male-bonding that the original Point Break made iconic. “Men have a hard time connecting on a deep level,” says Core, warming to his subject. “Bodhi is a serious person with serious convictions and ideologies. Utah is a person who has been broken in his own ways. There is a need for emotional connection between them. Whether you categorise that as a bromance or not, that’s for the individual [ to decide]. But men connecting with each other on a deeper truth is a fantastic thing, and if that comes across on this film, I welcome it.”
Angel Falls wasn’t the only stunt to test Ramírez and Bracey during a gruelling shoot. “We shot in 11 countries, and we probably have 11 of those type of sequences,” smiles Core. “Huge stunts, done in real places with real people, in camera. We have a multitude of stunts done in reality.” The sequences – including riding monster waves, free climbing vertiginous cliffs, dirt biking mountain peaks and wingsuit-flying down narrow Alps gorges (and even underground) – were so daring that Core amassed the world’s most talented extreme sport pros to pull off the stunts. Big wave daredevil Laird Hamilton [ see p88], free climber Chris Sharma and wingsuit flyer Jeb Corliss all came on board to make the action look breathtakingly real.
Limits were pushed, mainly because the cast insisted on doing as many of the pulse-spiking stunts as they could get away with… and even some they couldn’t. “We came as close as was safe for us, and we pushed it a little further than that,” Ramírez says with a rueful grin. “We were in very remote locations, and insurance people and studio people weren’t around. So we got away with a lot because it was very far away. I learned how to surf in one of the biggest swells of the century, the one we got in Teahupo’o in Tahiti. I remember shooting one sequence, praying not to see sharks all around me. It was really incredible to be there. It was a life experience.”
Some life experiences can quickly shift to life endangering, however. Point Break is stuffed with scenes that contained real risk, even for the experts. When it was time to shoot those sequences, the extreme sports athletes didn’t just replace the cast: they became cameramen.
Boardercross world champion (and Luke Bracey stand-in) Xavier De La Rue explains. “We shot a lot on Mont Blanc, which is in the middle of glaciers, and a lot of them are above 4,000 metres on ridges that are super sharp. We had to do a full sequence that was completely scripted, which included us riding together four at the same time, in really challenging conditions, where it would be hard enough to keep it together on your own. We originally had cameramen who were supposed to follow us, but it didn’t work, so we had to adapt. I had to take the camera.”
“Xavier is the top big mountain snowboarder in the world, so trying to keep up with him is nothing short of a miracle, and trying to get a camera to do that – and still be authentic – is impossible,” Core tells TF. “People couldn’t keep up with the steepness of it, and do it in a safe way. Ultimately, Xavier not only did the stunt work for Luke, he ended up grabbing the camera and operating it, because only he could do many of the things that are seen in the film.
‘it’s a huge privilege to try to recreate not only the form, but the state of mind these athletes put themself into to achieve the impossible’
édgar ramírez
It’s an honour. People are going to see the vision of one of the greatest.”
Translating that vision was also a source of pride for Ramírez. “It is a huge privilege to try to recreate not only the form, but the state of mind these athletes put themselves into to achieve the impossible,” Ramírez explains, awe in his eyes. “They’re pushing the boundaries in each field, so they’re poets in my opinion. And they helped us all the time. At the top of Mont Blanc, even if you needed to pee someone needed to go with you, because you could slide at any minute. Just walking on set was dangerous.”
On TF’s set visit, the weather is the only thing that has to be contended with – but it certainly feels pretty real when a gust of wind momentarily brings the rainstorm into our tent. It’s an element that ties to the movie, according to Ramírez. His updated Bodhi is now a Robin Hood-esque vigilante, trying to disrupt corporations, redistribute wealth and highlight ecological issues. “It’s a contemporary subject. The fact that we’re trapped in this tent freezing to death in the middle of summer gives a hint of how intrinsically connected this film is to what we’re living right now. Anyone who thinks global warming is an invention should come to this set and see what’s going on right now; it’s not the first time we’ve found this kind of weather contradiction while making this movie. It was a great creative choice to allocate these characters within the reality of environmental activism. Whether it’s terrorism or not is a matter of perspective. Are you defined by your actions, or your motivations? Ultimately, the audience will have their own answer.”
Perhaps, but isn’t that moving this version too far away from the original, where much of the attraction – for both Utah and audiences – was Bodhi’s freewheeling pursuit of escapism and the ultimate ride? He didn’t have a world view or a specific mission, merely the hunger for his next high and hope of sticking it to The Man. “It’s a movie about free will,” Ramírez insists. “It’s about breaking conventions, about celebrating the possibility of being free, but also about responsibility and the consequences of your choices. How to break out of systems, of restrictions. That was what was appealing about the first one, and hopefully it’ll be the same here. We’re trying to keep the same subversive spirit of the first one, the rebellious spirit, but we’re definitely adapting it to current times.”
Point Break opens on 12 February.