POINT BREAK’S SKYDIVING SCENE
Shit… whoa,” cries Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) as he tumbles out of a plane with his new BFF Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) and the rest of the Dead Presidents, a gang of surf dudes who rob banks for kicks. Johnny is an undercover FBI agent, and it’s by first riding waves and now somersaulting through the clear blue sky that he’s cosying up to his prey. “Whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah!”
We share his glee, for this sequence – along with the still-unmatched footchase – stands as the high point of Kathryn Bigelow’s adrenalinepumping ’90s action movie. A few years before, Top Gun had boosted applications to the Navy by 500 per cent; Point Break saw a surge of skydivers. “It was long before GoPros, long before the Internet and Facebook, so exposure to skydiving was pretty limited,” says Tom Sanders, who shot the wind-in-your-hair footage.
For the closeups, some movie magic was employed to allow for clear line readings, with a crane rig boasting a telescopic arm used to shoot the actors from below; a sense of floating was achieved. But everything else is real, shot at the California City Parachute Center and Lake Powell. OK, so doubles were used for insurance purposes – a chopper picked the stuntmen up when they landed, only to whizz them back to the airport, ready to go up in a plane again, and again, and again – but Swayze wanted some air in his lungs. With principal photography wrapped, he did 55 jumps at 14,000 feet to maximise authenticity. “With his dancing and athletic background, his skydiving skills were awesome,” said Sanders, who captured the footage.
“Once I saw skydiving as ballet in the air, or as gymnastics, it all became pretty easy to me,” said Swayze. “But surfing’s a pretty humbling experience. It’s a sport that would take your whole life to master.” He spoke from experience, having broken four ribs while filming in the ocean. A jet ski was needed to tow his board in many of the shots. For the foot chase, meanwhile, it is stuntman Scott Wilder under the Ronald Reagan mask. But the skydiving sequence showcases one of cinema’s greatest action men in one of the era’s defining action movies. You might say it took the genre to new heights. JG