The Art of Movie Stunt Driving

Movie stunt drivers are also known as precision drivers because they work in synch with the movie camera vehicles that occasionally travel as close as one or two feet away from their stunt car's bumper. While top notch stunt drivers make six figure incomes, their job is among the world's most dangerous.

Because filmed car stunts always appear slower on screen, this means that precision stunts have to occur at a much higher rate of speed in real time.

Famous Film Car Stunts

The most famous precision driving stunts on film include:

• :The car chase in the classic Steve McQueen action film "Bullitt" is considered by many to be the greatest car stunt scene ever filmed. Four cars were actually used for this scene: two 1968 black Dodge Challengers and two green V8 Ford Mustangs.

  Another classic is Steven Spielberg's low-budget debut film "Duel" where star Dennis Weaver plays a motorist being chased by a maniac in a Peterbilt 281 tanker truck on a long desert highway.

  William Friedkin's "The French Connection" has a car chase scene that many also consider to be the best. Star Gene Hackman's cop character chases an elevated train through the streets of New York. Hackman did many of the car stunts, one stunt leading to a real-life head-on collision.

  While not a great film in and of itself, H.B. Halicki's original "Gone in Sixty Seconds" includes one of the best and longest car chases ever filmed, lasting 40 minutes on screen and totaling nearly 100 cars. Halicki the director, also a chief stunt driver, died in a car crash while filming the 1989 sequel.

  "Smokey and the Bandit" was another classic car chase movie directed by a veteran stunt driver, in this case Hal Needham.

  One of the most famous of all film car stunts was in "Man with the Golden Gun", one of the lesser known James Bond films. The first corkscrew jump occurred in the scene where an AMC Hornet went airborne from a ramp for 40 feet, twisting and flipping 360 degrees mid-air. The stunt was also one of the first to be planned and calculated using computers.

Car Stunt Technology

Typical precision car stunt moves include 180 or 360 degree slides, hard braking with a target stop point, locked front or back wheel slides, and Box 90s, a 90-degree slide into a parking space.

Some of today's most advanced film stunt technology was used for "Dukes of Hazzard" the movie. Go Mobile is a camera platform built into a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado. This innovation was used to shoot actor reactions inside the vehicle during stunt action. Also in the film, a Mitsubishi Evolution VIII was a chasing camera car with a camera mounted on its nose.

Besides the stunt drivers, participants in a film car chase sequence will typically include the second unit director and stunt coordinator.