"It looked like a 'Mad Max' vehicle," laughs Picerni who piloted the rammer. "It was like a tank, totally caged. We were trying to create the illusion that the rammer was the Ferrari. When we see a car flip and hit me or go over me, that's what the Ferrari is trying to avoid."
"Michael wants to get really low, shaky, fast angles, right up to the moment of impact," says Gill, "so that the audience experiences the punch of every turn and every car hitting, as though they're actually in the Ferrari with Martin and Will. I think the video rammer achieved that."
Another extravaganza for stunt and special effects departments was the demolition of a beachfront mansion in Del Ray Beach. Purchased by three businessmen from one of the Coca Cola heirs, the unfinished home was going to be demolished and then rezoned to its original condition as three separate properties. To offset the expense of demolition, one of the owners decided to advertise in the Hollywood Reporter looking for a production interested in using the property. When Bay read the ad, he knew he’d found Tapia’s mansion.
"I was working on a movie in Hawaii when I got a call from Michael’s assistant, Carolyn, telling me she was sending photos of a house," recalls special effects supervisor John Frazier. "I thought Michael was looking to buy a home in Florida, and I told Carolyn that I thought it was too big for Michael. But Carolyn said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to live in it, he wants to blow it up!’" he laughs.
A veteran effects expert, Frazier admits that blowing up Tapia’s mansion was not necessarily the most challenging assignment, but it was certainly one of the most enjoyable.
"The first thing you have to realize about Michael is that the word ‘small’ is not in his vocabulary," explains Frazier. "And because Will and Martin just want to keep going and doing more and more, they dream up a lot of situations, which makes for a better work day. With the three of them you never have to read the script. You just show up with all the toys."
As with the stunt team, Frazier is a stickler for safety. The 50,000-square-foot mansion was constructed of solid concrete. Prior to the company moving in to begin preparation for filming, the owners had already started to strip away the building’s costly and irreplaceable details. They had dismantled and sold the ornate woodwork cornices and moldings, as well as the tinted, double-paned floor-to-ceiling windows along with other interior adornments.
Months of planning and preparation by the production company, the city and state, wildlife groups, as well as the local film commission guaranteed the safe execution of the sequence as well as the well being of every person and animal in the area.
"We started pre-rigging early on," Frazier says. "You have to do a lot of cutting and drilling in advance. We changed out the terracotta tiles on the roof that weighed about 30 pounds each and replaced them with cardboard shingles that cut the weight down to ounces. We also rigged hundreds of charges throughout the interior and around the exterior of the house. But we don’t place the dynamite until just before the sequence because too many people come walking in, thinking it’s safe because they can’t readily see what we’ve rigged. The fact that this house was on the beach was in our favor since we directed the explosion towards the ocean."
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