Warning: mild spoilers for X-Men: Apocalypse are below!
One of the most memorable moments from 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past was when Peter Maximoff, a.k.a. Quicksilver, raced around the Pentagon kitchen, everything around him in slow-motion because he was running so fast. Thanks to this, along with his other scene-stealing moments, Quicksilver is back for X-Men: Apocalypse, and this time he’ll be racing through a different kind super speedy sequence. Now you can check out just how this was accomplished behind the scenes.
In the start of this X-Men: Apocalypse video posted by 20th Century Fox, producer Hutch Parker noted how they wanted to differentiate Quicksilver’s big moment from what moviegoers saw in X-Men: Days of Future Past. This led to creating ‘The Extraction," where the speedster saves everyone in the X-Mansion in the seconds before it implodes. As expected, there was a lot of wire and stunt work involved, but they also leaned on "sophisticated" technology, namely the Phantom camera. This camera runs at 3,000 frames per second, making it so good at freezing that, according to utility stunts man Charles William Shults, can make something that occurs in the blink of an eye happen over 15 seconds.
That’s impressive enough on its own, but doing X-Men: Apocalypse’s production, the crew also managed to move the camera at about 90 miles per hour as the explosion happened. They also took especially good care to look out for the actors and stunt doubles’ safety, as in this sequence, they’re being tossed into the air, and Quicksilver has to throw them to a safe spot outside of the Mansion. There were definitely a lot of moving parts to all this (actor Evan Peters mentioned that it took over 20 days to film), but they were successful in putting together one awesome moment.
The X-Men: Apocalypse teaser trailer provided the first look at this new Quicksilver sequence, and while there is still some slow-motion parts to it like last time, the new sequence definitely feels more frantic. After an explosion rips through the X-Mansion basements (no doubt having to do with Apocalypse and the Four Horsemen), Quicksilver will rush through the entire house and save both the mutant heroes and Professor Xavier’s students before they even realize that they were about to die. The X-Men are lucky to have someone this fast on their side rather than as a force for evil.
You can now catch X-Men: Apocalypse in theaters, and click here to read our review of the movie.
