Pulling off a great Steven Spielberg action sequence requires perfect timing
Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor have a tough job in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day. They spend most of the film being chased by agents of the Wardex Corporation, a sinister group that has been hiding the existence of aliens since the ‘40s while profiting off reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology. Cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (O’Connor) is mysteriously connected to TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Blunt), and as they are drawn together, they discover they have the power to change the world.
[Ed. note: This article contains some spoilers for Disclosure Day]
When Wardex captures Daniel, Margaret feels a strange compulsion to drive across the country to rescue him. She uses her newfound empathic powers to dazzle his captors, and the two drive away with the goal of rendezvousing with other Wardex defectors to share the existence of extraterrestrials with the world. However, Wardex head of security Casper Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is horrified by Margaret’s seemingly “unstoppable” power, and takes it upon himself to chase her and Daniel down and kill them both.
Since Margaret would be able to use her powers to stop him if he made eye contact with her, Boyd tries to kill her from a distance by repeatedly rear-ending her car to push it into the path of a freight train. In a dramatic sequence reminiscent of the movie magic Spielberg pulled off in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Blunt and O’Connor jump from the car and grab onto the train. Spielberg tells Polygon that Blunt repeatedly crashed right against the train’s ladder when filming the scene.
“That was really challenging because it’s about timing,” Blunt explains. “We did have a wire on us, but it’s how to do the jump and the catch so it literally looks like we’re hanging on by a thread rather than supported with the harness. It’s about physics and science. A few times Josh missed me and I clattered against the side of the train.”
Thankfully, they managed to nail it eventually, leading to one of the most thrilling sequences in the movie.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.