Every now and then I’m reminded of an action movie released in 2001 that really bombed at the box office and only gets mentioned again when it airs on television. The movie in question is Swordfish, and there are several details that make it worth remembering, from the crazy action scene that cost $15 million to Halle Berry’s nude scene, which the actress herself has admitted was completely gratuitous.
It has what is possibly the most difficult scene to make in the history of cinema. It lasts only 30 seconds and contains a single word from the script written by Skip Woods, but it cost US$ 5 million, took a year to execute and required the simultaneous use of 135 cameras. All this so that the most talked about was how much it resembled The Matrix, released two years earlier and also produced by Joel Silver.
The script for Swordfish reached a point where the word “Kaboom” made it clear that a big explosion was going to happen in the film, but what no one expected was how big it would mean. To achieve this, the team took inspiration from the techniques used by the Wachowskis in The Matrix and director Dominic Sena summarized his plans in the production notes for the film starring Hugh Jackman and John Travolta:
“During that scene, police cars are exploding, guys are flying through the air, and it had to be timed so that when we got to camera number 125, this guy was flying into the frame. I’ve never seen a scene that was so difficult to set up. It was just all the layers and passes. A layer for the explosion, a layer for the car being thrown into the air, a layer for the people who were supposed to be next to the car. That was a separate pass so nobody got hurt. So it was just layers upon layers. To get a 30-second scene took days.”
Specifically, the filming itself lasted 3 days, but 3 months were spent planning the scene beforehand. The reason was to see what material could be recorded and what should be added later by computer. At that time, technology did not allow for the use of only visual effects to carry out the filming, which made it even more complicated.
For example, for these 3 days of filming, it was necessary to create a multi-camera system with a platform capable of housing 135 fixed cameras. All this because it was necessary to achieve millisecond precision to go as planned. And the fact is that 85% of the scene was done physically, later adding some excessively dangerous elements through CGI and carrying out a series of retouches on request.
It was also not an easy task, as Frantic Films took 8 months to prepare the scene. One of the biggest challenges was the need to slow down the image, also following a different model depending on what was being seen on the screen at that moment, as Chris Bond, co-founder of Frantic Films, commented:
“For all the exterior shots in the scene, we had to slow down 134 frames to 400 frames per second, and for everything shot inside the cafe, we had to add in-between frames to convert a 45 frames per second shot to 102 frames per second.”
“There were approximately two new frames that needed to be generated between each camera shot; however, due to the way the cameras were curved in the scene, some cases required the creation of up to seven synthetic in-between frames,” he explains.
As such, the company had to create several frames from scratch through the magic of visual effects, with the added challenge of making them convincing enough to make them believable in the eyes of viewers.
The result is a truly impressive 30 seconds that take place right after the beginning of the film – before that there is a curious monologue from the villain played by Travolta – and which undoubtedly caught the audience’s attention.
Unfortunately, all of this wasn’t enough to make Swordfish a box office success.