Another one by popular demand

After the car chase videos of the past two days, another one frequently mentioned by commenters as being among the 'best of the best' was 'the' car chase from Ronin. Since that movie had more than one car chase, it was difficult to choose between them: but I selected the final one as being, in my humble opinion, the pick of the litter. Here it is.

Wikipedia notes about the film's car chases:

Ronin is notable for a number of car chases, the last being a particularly lengthy one through the streets and tunnels of Paris; some scenes used up to 300 stunt drivers according to the DVD director commentary. Car work has been a specialty of Frankenheimer, a former amateur racing driver, ever since his 1966 film, Grand Prix. Although action sequences are often shot by a second unit director, Frankenheimer did all these himself, and sometimes rode along. While he was aware of the many innovations in digital special effects since then, he elected to film all these sequences live, to obtain the maximum level of authenticity. To further this, many of the high-speed shots have the actual actors in the cars. Skipp Sudduth did nearly all of his own driving, while other cars were right hand drive models with stunt drivers driving - crashes were handled by a stuntman. To lend additional authenticity, the sound recordist re-recorded many of the vehicles in the chases to ensure that during the editing, the right sounds were dubbed in for each vehicle.

There's more at the link.

I can certainly believe that hundreds of stunt drivers were used - and they must have been pretty good ones, too. The scenes where the cars drive into oncoming traffic are about as 'edge-of-your-seat' as anything I've ever seen!





Peter