‘Extraction 2’ Director Breaks Down That 21-Minute, “One Take” Action Scene, From The 400-Person Prison Fight To Landing A Helicopter on a Train

Extraction 2 director Sam Hargrave knew audiences would expect bigger and better action in the sequel. But how could he top the popular 2020 Netflix action movie, which featured an epic 12-minute chase scene filmed to look like one continuous take? Well, how about an epic 21-minute action sequence filmed to look like one continuous take?

Nearly double the length of the sequence in the first film, the “oner,” as it’s called, in Extraction 2 clocks in at 21 minutes and 7 seconds, to be precise. “The length was not a mathematical decision,” Hargrave told Decider in a recent interview. “It was more about what fits this story, what feels right.”

For Hargrave and writer Joe Russo (who also produced the film with his brother, Anthony, via their production company AGBO) that meant focusing on building up the characters, first and foremost. “We spent the first 25 minutes of the film, trusting the audiences to stick with us, because we didn’t have a lot of action up front,” Hargrave said. “So stick with us, and trust that this is going to pay off once you get to know these people.”

And what a pay-off it is. The oner begins after Chris Hemsworth’s character, Tyler Rake, frees a mother named Ketevan and her two children from a prison in Georgia. Ketevan has hired Rake for his extracting services because her abusive, mob boss husband has been forcing his family to live in prison with him. Tyler successfully frees Ketevan and her kids, but now he has to deal with the mob boss’s ruthless brother—and the entire Georgian mafia—who are in pursuit. Tyler and his team escort Ketevan and her children out of the prison, through a prison riot, through the woods via a high-speed car chase, and onto a moving freight train. Though it was originally meant to be filmed in Australia, renewed COVID protocols forced the production to relocate to Prague. As a result, the sequence was split into three distinct pieces: the prison, the car chase, and the train.

Though the sequence was not actually done in one take—it contains dozens of hidden cuts, or “stitches,”—it was still very, very difficult to pull off. Hargrave spoke to Decider about how, exactly, he executed this jaw-dropping sequence in Extraction 2, which began streaming on Netflix today.

• The Prison Break

  The prison break scene was filmed in two locations. The interior was filmed at Mladá Boleslav Jail in the Czech Republic, a former working prison that is now used exclusively for movie shoots, including Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The exterior courtyard riot—the far more difficult portion of the scene—was filmed at an 18th-century grain storage facility. The prison riot alone took over four months of prep and featured over 400 stunt performers and “special ability action extras,” some of whom were fighting Hemsworth in the foreground, and some of whom were fighting each other in the background.

  “There were 75 stunt performers, and a bunch of specialty backgrounds woven in there,” Hargrave told Decider. “That took three nights to do that exterior, that whole thing. I relied heavily on our amazing stunt team to choreograph all of the background fights. There are layers and layers and layers of stunts and background and extras.”

  It was grueling work, done in freezing temperatures. That snow you see in the scene is not fake. “There were 400 people in that courtyard for three nights. It was really snowing, below zero temperatures.” Though a lot of the oner featured Hargrave himself behind the camera, for the prison riot, Hargrave handed the reins to stunt coordinator Nate Perry. “I gave him a few pointers, and he did an amazing job. You can’t tell where I end and he begins,” Hargrave said.

  The director can’t recall the exact number of hidden cuts that ended up in the courtyard scene, but he estimates the longest take actually lasted about “a minute and a half, so like 90 seconds. When you think about that, fighting for that long on camera—it’s a really difficult thing as a performer, because you want to keep putting your best work on camera, and not fighting necessarily when you’re not being seen, so you’re saving energy. But the cameras are doing these 360 spins. They had to have one eye on their opponent, and one eye straying out of their peripheral, seeing if the camera is on them.”

  Not everyone made it out unscathed: Georgian actress Tinatin Dalakishvili—who plays Ketevan, the woman being rescued by Hemsworth—broke her leg while filming the scene, and didn’t stop filming. “During the course of one of those sequences, she fractured her lower leg,” Hargrave told Decider. “I think she fell down wrong on her leg, or one of the stunt performers might have stepped back and stepped on her. We’re not exactly sure when [the fracture happened]. She kept going. She was like, ‘Oh, my leg is a little bit sore.’ We were like, ‘Are you sure? Are you OK?’ She was like, ‘Yeah.’ She kept going! She kept performing because she was so excited to be there and do it.”

  It was only later, when Dalakishvili had an X-Ray, that she realized she had a hairline fracture in her leg, and was put in the cast. This was early on in production so the special effects team actually constructed a fake leg for Dalakishvili to hide her injury. “Special effects made her, basically a wooden—well, it was made out of aluminum or alloy—but a peg leg, so that she could walk,” Hargrave explained. “We had to then adjust our framing, because we couldn’t look down and see that she’s missing a leg. Her gait was a bit off, so we had change a lot of the blocking, which was very challenging.”

• The Car Chase

  The car chase through the forest used many of the same techniques Hargrave used for the car chase in the first movie, only this time, there were a lot more cars. The production rented over 150 vehicles and purchased 116 more which were modified to use for shooting, including SUVs that were modified to drive from the top, and SUVs that were modified to drive from the rear. Co-stunt coordinator Noon Orsatti operated the SUV “driven” by Chris Hemsworth in the movie, while in reality, she was driving the car from the backseat.

  In an interview for the Extraction 2 press notes, Orsatti called the stunt “the most dangerous work I’ve ever had in my career.” She recalled filming the scene, saying, “The road was narrow, maybe 13 or 14 feet wide, but we had to be almost three cars abreast, and there was a ditch that I was dealing with on one side that I couldn’t see. On top of it, Sam is hanging off the back of a Polaris ready to accept the camera from Shane [Habberstad, co-stunt coordinator], and I am driving 40 mph literally wheel to wheel to the car next to me.”

  Hargrave also wanted up the stakes from the first film by bringing the camera in and out of the cars more often, and by getting even closer to the actors during the chase.

  “We worked closely with Greg Baldy, our cinematographer, and the team, to come up with a thing that we started terming the ‘magic scepter,'” Hargrave told Decider. “It was a small camera—a Red Komodo camera on a gimbal, a stabilized head, attached to a carbon fiber pole, so we could have different lengths. We had a five-foot, a seven-foot, a nine-foot, so I could be strapped to the front of a UTV, driving through the woods, and I could get the camera right up inside the window, pull it back out, and get around the front. It was just this wildly intricate choreographed dance between all the vehicles so that we would move in sync and be crossing at the right time.  I don’t think we would have been able to achieve those shots with other filmmaking techniques, like the U-Crane, or other camera arms on a vehicle. It was something unique that we came up with.”

• The Train and Helicopter

  Though some of the interiors were filmed on a soundstage, you better believe that train was real, with seven compartments, going 50 miles per hour, down a 36-mile-long stretch of track in the Czech Republic. So yes, Chris Hemsworth really was fighting on top of a train—in freezing weather, no less. Even more unbelievably, Extraction 2 landed a real helicopter on top of that real, moving train—a stunt that has never before been pulled off. (Well, it doesn’t quite land—but it does hover mere feet from the train, and allow the men on board to hop off.)

  “I gotta give credit to Fred North,” Hargrave told Decider, referring to the aerial pilot who pulled off the stunt. “That was his idea.” Originally, Hargrave said, the script called for stunt performers to repel from the helicopter using rope, onto the roof of the moving train. “Fred was like, ‘You know, I’ve seen that before. What if we land the helicopter on the train and the guys just step off?’  My eyes got bigger saucers. I said, ‘You can do that?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know, but I’d like to try.'”

  The team rehearsed the stunt by first landing the helicopter on a flatbed truck. “We started stationary with a semi-truck, and then the truck moving in a large open parking lot, and got to the speed we wanted to show that he could consistently do it. It took a couple of days,” Hargrave said. But beyond North learning the stunt, Hargrave had to figure out how to film it. “I was up on the top of the train, handheld, and as [the helicopter] came in my biggest concern was not getting in the way of those moving blades,” the director said with a laugh. “I had to wait for just the right moment, as he flares out, and then I run towards. It kind of felt like running into a hurricane, because the downdraft of that helicopter is very strong. So I have to run through that. I was as close as three feet, maybe four feet— I could reach out and touch Fred if I wanted to.”

  On the day of filming, North performed the stunt a total of five times, and, Hargrave said, did such a great job on the fifth and final take, the edit team felt it looked fake. “Fred did such a great job landing it, that we ended up using tape three, because it was a little messier and it looked real. Because we looked at take five when we got back in edit and it was so perfect that it looked fake. The last thing I want is people to go, ‘Oh, it’s fake, it’s all blue screen.'”

  Overall, it’s safe to say that this 21-minute oner raised the bar for all future action movies to come. And that includes Extraction 3, which is not yet greenlit, but Hargrave says will likely happen if the sequel is as popular as the first movie. If it does happen, can fans expect an even longer “one take” action set-piece than this one?

  “We’ve set the bar pretty high with these last two films,” Hargrave replied. “If that one gets the green light, we’d have to gather around and say, ‘What’s going to be the best version of an action set piece that will blow people away?’ Maybe it’s a 44-minute oner, or maybe it’s a start-to-finish one-shot. Or maybe there’s not one at all—because the last thing I want to do is just keep using it because it’s a gimmick, or because we feel like we have to. It needs to be organic to the storytelling.”