Since his genre breakout with The Transporter in 2002, Jason Statham has more than proven his bona fides as an action star – a guy you can rely on to do cool things and look like a badass when cameras are rolling. In the making of his latest movie, Meg 2: The Trench, this well-established reputation quickly earned him the trust of director Ben Wheatley, and it led to one of the movie’s coolest scenes being filmed in an awesome and practical way.
As previewed in the trailers for Meg 2: The Trench, there is a sequence in the film’s third act where Jason Statham’s Jonas Taylor races around on a Jet Ski hunting Megalodons with explosive harpoons, and it turns out that it was shot in a fashion that only enhances Statham’s action legend status. Instead of the Jet Ski being rigged up to a larger boat and towed or using blue screen, the go-to method during production was to strap a camera to Statham’s watercraft and let the actor go out and have some fun on the water. According to Ben Wheatley,
Yeah, he just went off. I've got footage of me on one of the follow boats, just going like this [waves his arms]. And he's just in the distance jumping over the [waves]. So yeah, that, and that's why that stuff looks real, you know? It could have been on a gimbal like Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. But no, it was it was all done for real, all that stuff – except for the bit where he jumps on that massive wave .
When a Jet Ski or a boat or even a car isn’t filmed with actors operating the vehicle, there are almost always signs or indications, and they can be distracting and/or take you out of the cinematic experience. As Tom Cruise is constantly proving with new Mission: Impossible sequels, real is always better, and it does add an extra quality to the action in Meg 2: The Trench – even though the whole “harpooning giant prehistoric sharks” thing is obviously ridiculous.
I interviewed Ben Wheatley virtually earlier this week, and during our conversation we spoke specifically about his experience working with Jason Statham. The actor left an impression on the filmmaker, as Wheatley not only admired what could be called Statham’s professional awareness, but simply had fun using him like a child plays with an action figure:
With Jason, he knows action inside out, and he's got decades of experience doing it, and he understands what his own image is and how he looks. But also the idea of how an action style works within a movie or how a hero works with an audience and all that kind of stuff. So he's a very present kind of collaborator within all that stuff. But then on the other side of it, you are being given access to like a kind of a screen icon in a way, and you get to use him in all these things. It's great fun. I mean, he's as exciting to use as the Meg in many ways.
Official action figures don’t presently exist for The Meg franchise, but fans can get as close as possible to the experience of playing with some by checking out Meg 2: The Trench, which arrives in theaters today.
