In addition to the spectacular fight scenes, Cradle 2 the Grave rips up the screen with never-before-seen action sequences like Fait’s high-octane indoor/outdoor ATV chase. “X loves ATVs, and I thought it would be great to use them in Cradle because we’ve never really seen them in an urban chase before,” Silver says. “They’re more controllable than an automobile, more interesting than a motorcycle and they can really get airborne. X did a lot of the riding in the movie, even though it was extremely dangerous and we didn’t want him to do it.”
“I did as many of my stunts as they would allow me to do,” says DMX, who counts the exhilarating ATV pursuit as his favorite sequence to film for Cradle 2 the Grave. “I love riding quads. By the end of the movie, I improved my wheelie technique. I can do a whole block now.”
In the frenetic sequence, Fait breaks out of handcuffs, neutralizes two cops and steals a quad bike, blazing down the street as a motorcyclist gives chase. The riders drive through a plate glass window into a factory building, ascend a staircase to a busy sweatshop where they roar through racks of clothes and Fait finally jumps through a window onto a neighboring rooftop. A series of mind-bending rooftop jumps ensue.
Dan Bradley designed the furious ATV chase. “To come up with stunts that haven’t been seen before was a pretty audacious challenge,” admits Bradley, who tapped DMX’s stunt double, Jalil “Jay” Lynch, a licensed pro motocross racer, to handle the more precarious aspects of this bracing ride.
Stunt coordinator Scott Rodgers designed a complicated pulley system that enabled the jumps to be executed with minimal risk to the riders. Lynch pulled off the final soaring ATV jump in one amazing take, which was lensed by using a camera mounted on a cable supported by two huge cranes, and simultaneously photographed by a steadicam mounted on a helicopter.
While the ATV chase sequence depicts Fait’s finesse and poise under pressure, Su’s dramatic descent from the roof of a cliffside high-rise building demonstrates his remarkable agility and timing. Vaulting backwards off the roof, Su free-falls through the air and momentarily grabs a balcony railing below. Letting go, he continues to free-fall, dropping railing-to-railing until he reaches a balcony belonging to Christophe, the buyer who has hired Fait and his crew to steal the much-sought-after cache of black diamonds.
“When we were creating the opening of this film,” Silver recalls, “we sat with the writers and the art department and the stunt guys and discussed what we haven’t seen onscreen before. What haven’t we experienced before? What is something that hasn’t been done?”
In turn, Silver, Bartkowiak and company designed a unique application for the descender, a stunt rig that is used in filming high falls. “This pulley system allows a stunt man to fall in a way that slows his descent at a rate undetectable to the audience, but he never hits the ground, which is safer than doing a high fall and landing on an air bag,” Silver explains. “We were told the descender could be used with a new computer program that rigs it to descend, stop, descend, stop and so on. So we came up with an idea where Jet arrives at the roof of this building he needs to gain access to, and we thought ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if he just walked to the edge of the roof, casually jumped off and dropped from floor to floor until he gets where he needs to go?’ And the scene turned out spectacularly.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
