The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
‘Death’-defying act
Dylan O’Brien comes back from a terrible accident to finish the last installment of ‘Maze Runner’
“Maze Runner: The Death Cure” opens this week and, well, it almost didn’t.
The third and final chapter in the young adult sci-fi movie series almost ended three days after it began shooting in Vancouver, British Columbia, when star Dylan O’Brien was severely injured. A harness malfunctioned while he was doing a stunt on a moving truck and yanked O’Brien into the path of a following vehicle. That was in March 2016, and the actor, 24 at the time, suffered a facial fracture and concussion from the accident.
O’Brien’s condition grew more serious in the following weeks, and eventually the production had to be shut down. But he recovered enough later in the year to work on another movie, “American Assassin,” which was released last September.
And on March 6, cameras began rolling again on “Death Cure,” this time in Cape Town and, soon, other parts of South Africa.
“The accident happened when we were filming the opening sequence,” in which O’Brien’s Thomas and other resistors try to rescue captives of the oppressive WCKD organization from a speeding train, the actor recalls. “We did have to finish that scene. It was incredibly difficult. I’d always known that that was going to be a piece of it. I’d always known that that was going to be not fun for me and a challenge.
“Just getting back to the set, putting the clothes back on, getting back to the movie, there was a lot of eeriness to it,” O’Brien, now 26, continues. “But I had a tremendous amount of support through it. My parents were even both there when we finished it off, and Wes [Ball, the director] and our stunt coordinator Glenn Suter . ... It was definitely different. I couldn’t really control it, and I was even a little surprised myself by how viscerally I responded to going back to all of that. But Wes and everyone from the crew, even people who weren’t there the first time around, were very respectful of what an incredibly difficult thing it was to do.”
Ball scheduled the chase sequence’s reshoots well into the South Africa production to give O’Brien time to get more comfortable doing other action scenes, rebuild trust and have plenty of opportunities to discuss any misgivings he might have had. A visual effects expert before he made his feature directing debut with “Maze Runner” in 2014, Ball also employed his skills at movie fakery to ensure all of the new shots with O’Brien could be cheated with camera angles and special effects, or as he puts it:
“Basically, what it came down to was I wasn’t going to put Dylan on more moving vehicles,” the director says. “There’s only one shot that we used from Vancouver where he’s actually on a moving vehicle. The rest of it was done in a parking lot.
“My challenge was how to pull that sequence off without doing it for real,” adds Ball, who shot other aspects of the opening action at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. “It actually worked out better, because it meant we could do things that we just couldn’t do otherwise. And we could move faster.”
But not past a trauma that Ball says will haunt him for the rest of his life.
“I felt terrible when Dylan was hurt,” Ball says, to no surprise. “I’m the director, so it was my set. I can’t help but feel some sense of responsibility. People are looking at me because they trust me and feel things are going to be OK. We didn’t go into it blindly. We thought we were using all of the proper precaution systems. But events unfolded that we just didn’t account for, and it wound up with Dylan getting hurt very severely. It was horrible.”
That isn’t why “Death Cure” has been officially declared the end of the movie trilogy, however.
It is adapted from the last, chronologically, of author James Dashner’s dystopian novels, although two prequels exist. But the decision was made well before any production commenced for the third movie to finish it here, not tease out a fourth or more films from the book trilogy, even if the door is left slightly ajar after a final showdown among WCKD, Thomas’ team, the diseased hordes he might hold the key to saving and yet another group of revolutionaries in a slam-bang third act battle with what Ball calls “a lot of moving parts.”
“It’s been an amazing experience. I just feel like the luckiest person ever,” O’Brien says of making three movies with such castmates as Kaya Scodelario (who had a baby between the Vancouver and Cape Town shoots), Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki Hong Li, Dexter Darden, Patricia Clarkson and many others who returned to “Death Cure” from the first and second films. “It’s really sad to see it go. It’s really sad to end it. But I’ll look back on it with nothing but happy memories.” Um, really? “At the beginning of the week I started off very not myself,” O’Brien says. “I was definitely feeling the effects of re-experiencing the events, but by the end of the week I felt like myself again and so relieved to get through it. It was a big weight off my shoulders that hadn’t lifted before.
“There were a lot of things that we had to put in place before we were all rounded up to come back. It had to be a whole different ballgame, but it was great because, though I’m OK, in a really terrible way, it did wake us up a little bit. It’s unfortunate that things like that have to wake up the industry, but safety should be paramount. These things need to be thought out. I think it’s very easy to be on set and get caught up in the make believe, but it’s very important to remember that people have died on sets before.
“So when I got back, we did everything right, we did everything very meticulously,” O’Brien says. “It was incredibly important to me to come back and finish this. I realized that, after a very foggy half-a-year during recovery, that I never would have wanted to leave it this way. I was just so glad that I came back to finish it. It felt like old times again, and it ended up being one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”