James Bond movies are jam-packed with action, and Skyfall started with a hell of an opening fight scene which takes place on a moving train. What makes this scene all the more impressive is that they actually filmed it on a real moving train! While there were stunt directors on set and a stuntman took over for some particularly dangerous parts, Daniel Craig was up there fighting away on top of a moving locomotive! 

Perhaps if they’d have been less open to shooting the scene practically, we wouldn’t have got the iconic shirt cuff straighten, that Daniel himself actually improvised!

Christopher Nolan is wedded to practical effects, which is why so many of his films are incredibly immersive and visual (and also why he appears a few times on this list). One of his most iconic scenes is the spinning hallway fight in Inception, something that was done miraculously with a real revolving set! 

Filming the scenes was undoubtedly tricky, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt was keen to do it on his own with no double and it’s safe to say he did an amazing job. On the use of practical effects, he had this to say: 

“There’s no substitute for real human energy and performance.” 

This is perhaps Tom Cruise’s most famous stunt, which is a tall order. Speaking of tall, this ascent up the highest building in the world was no mean feat. The climb was so dangerous that Tom’s insurance company refused to insure it, so he got rid of them and found another. 

They filmed almost all of the scenes on location, 1,700 feet in the air, and it’s still considered one of the best stunts in movie history.

The producers simply had to use some serious machinery to shoot Mad Max: Fury Road, due to the desired aesthetic, the landscape, and the fact that the whole movie is essentially a car chase. The stunt coordinator, Guy Norris, had a job on his hands, but they were committed to making it as real as possible: “We wanted to make it real. Real vehicles, real locations, real movement and real stunts.”

Well, they certainly pulled it off and gave us some truly spectacular sequences. 

Buildings explode in many films, and directors could be forgiven for using CGI when there isn’t a building on hand to demolish. But that just wouldn’t do for Christopher Nolan, who managed to convince the owners of the building we see (who were going to demolish it anyway), to let him do it instead. It meant that the team literally had one shot to get it right, and they did! 

While the “fact” that Heath Ledger improvised the iconic detonator mishap is actually a myth, the explosion itself was very real!  

For the new era of James Bond, the production team wanted to make an instant statement of what Daniel’s Bond would be like, as stunt director, Gary Powell, said: “We can’t sit on the Bond tradition and just do what’s been done before, we have to match what they did and beat it. That meant making it more gritty, more realistic.” 

This meant they were doing real stunts, none more impressive than the infamous opening chase scene. In it, we saw Bond and the man he was chasing, played by free runner Sébastian Foucan, jumping and fighting from crane to crane. 

Obviously, a lot of invisible CGI was used to create the single-shot style of 1917, but in terms of the action, most of what we saw was real. The actors were given proper training on how to fire the rifles (with blanks), and the sets were all physical in order to make the action seem more realistic, as production designer Dennis Gassner said:  “We all wanted to do to show people it’s possible to still make films that aren’t entire green screen fantasies.”

The scene with the flares is particularly spectacular, and it took some serious lighting engineering to pull it off, including some serious rigging: “There were six cranes and each flare had its own track and lasted a certain number of seconds.”

While the actors in Top Gun: Maverick weren’t actually flying these multimillion-dollar planes, they were feeling – and having to deal with – the real g-force. The actors had to do a three-month training camp so they wouldn’t be sick while they were up in the planes as passengers. The team wanted to use real shots or real planes, and needed the actors to be having realistic reactions, as director Joe Kosinski said:

“You can’t fake the g-forces. You can’t fake the vibration. You can’t fake what it looks like to be in one of these fighter jets. So we wanted to capture every bit of that and shooting it for real allowed us to do that.

The famous scene of the aliens blowing up the White House became a topic of debate between the studio and the filmmakers, who wanted to use it as an advert on TV. The shot itself was done by building a small, but still very big, replica of the famous residence and then of course blowing it up. 

The model was tremendously detailed, and so much effort went into it that visual-effects production supervisor, Bob Hurrie, that after making it he said “I don’t know if I really want to blow it up or not.” Well, blow it up they did, and to amazing effect. 

It’s not only, stunts and explosions that can use practical effects really help immerse you in a film, but costume design can too. The use of real costumes can make a huge difference, not least because the actors are actually interacting with something other than a green screen. Pan’s Labyrinth is one example of wonderful costume design, and how can work beautifully. 

Putting on the costumes for the Faun and the Pale Mane took five hours and required meticulous machinery for puppeteering. The long process certainly paid off though!

This scene may be a case and point for the practical effects vs CGI showdown. It’s considered one of the best car chases in film history, with its use of real cars, but also has a completely random bit of CGI that looks terrible in comparison. 

The sketchiness of the whole chase really shows on De Niro’s face and makes for an altogether more realistic chase, especially compared with the awkward CGI. But real stunts are costly, in this case, they destroyed 80 or so cars to make it happen!

Okay here’s another from Christopher Nolan, but we couldn’t omit the stunt he’s most proud of (so far). It’s another scene that pretty much kicks off the movie, and what a start it is! The plane-dropping scene is a perfect introduction to Bane, and it’s made all the more impressive because they legit dropped a real plane out of the sky for this. 

To pull it off, Nolan had to obtain special permission to drop the plane (obviously), and the scene took months of planning and rehearsing of the parachute jumps. Stunt coordinator Tom Struthers spoke about working with Chris, saying: “With Chris Nolan, as much as we can physically do inside of that lens is where he would like to go.”

One way to make your stunt scenes more realistic is to cast a stuntwoman as one of your leads, and that’s exactly what Quentin Tarantino did for Death Proof. After she worked as a stuntwoman on Kill Bill, Quentin cast Zoë Bell in her first major speaking role. It certainly paid off with the incredible chase scene where Zoë’s character is riding on the hood. 

The lack of CGI, and the fact that it’s not a stunt “double” meant the shots that they were getting of the whole scene, not just close-ups of the actor’s face, really made for a tense watch. Talking about the drive, here’s what  Zoë said: 

“There’s no double, there’s no CGI, it’s all practical, and you’re seeing that the person crying is the same one falling off the car. I think, on some deep, subconscious level, it triggers as ‘real’ to the people watching.”

Buster Keaton was known for his audacious stunts, which were all the more dangerous considering how long ago they were. Of course, as it was the late 1920s, there was no CGI available for him to drop the entire facade of a house on top of him without risk – but he probably wouldn’t have used it anyway. 

This stunt was so dangerous that the other cast and crew members had to turn away or leave because they thought they would be seeing their director and lead being squished. But Buster trusted his physics, and (literally) stood firm, even with the house coming as close as two inches from hitting him!

Okay, maybe it’s wrong to preempt things, but it seems Christopher Nolan is continuing to take practical effects to the next level with the upcoming film Oppenheimer. Speaking about the movie, Nolan said, “Recreating the Trinity test without the use of computer graphics was a huge challenge to take on.”

Well yeah, recreating the effect of an atomic bomb seems like a mammoth task, especially without using CGI. So, we can’t wait to see how it looks, and find out how they did it!

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