$15 million: This is one of the most expensive scenes in cinema, but everyone forgot about the movie!

With the first film noticed in 1993, California took the stage, which unfortunately did not achieve the expected success with the cast of Brad Pitt, Juliet Lewis and David Duchovny, directed by Dominic Cena, perhaps 74 years old. He didn’t have the career he had hoped for. Clocking in at just six films, his last already dates back to 2011 with the unforgettable Last Templar, in which Nicolas Cage plays crusaders who have returned disillusioned from the Holy Land.

After 60 seconds of Chrono and his supercharged cars in 2000, the filmmaker returned the following year and recruited John Travolta to play the big bad guys in Operation Espadon. A heist movie where the former Vincent Vega lends his features to a man named Gabriel Shear, the head of a group of mercenaries determined to steal $9.5 million from the government.

But he lacked a hacking genius on his team. He then connects with Stanley, a recently released hacker played by Hugh Jackman, who appeared a year earlier as Wolverine in X-Men.

If some people remember Operation Swordfish, it’s mainly for actress Halle Berry’s gratuitous breasts in the scene, less the action scene, which is simply one of the most expensive in the history of cinema. its price $15 million!

The scene in question is one where the bus is completely blown away in the middle of Los Angeles while being chased by an armada of police cars.

Here again, quite spectacular…

Wanting to minimize the use of computer graphics, Dominic Senna wanted to shoot the series as hard as possible. But asking the authorities for permission to fly a container helicopter over a bus on the streets of Los Angeles was a hurdle, given the risks.

Therefore, part of the series is shot in the studio when we see the actors on the bus. But much of it was shot on location, as shown in the pictures of this little one Making of of time.

So dangerous to fly, in fact, that a helicopter pilot was paid $25,000 an hour to carry a load so heavy that strong winds could cause it to crash into a building.

He refused to film where the bus crashes into the window of the skyscraper: it is too dangerous. So it was filmed in a studio and with CGI reinforcement, as well as the bus landing on the roof of a skyscraper; No building is adapted to receive such a load on the roof.

$15 million for a sequence of less than five minutes is a lot considering the film’s production budget was $102 million. Not to mention the $5 million the explosion sequence cost. Not enough to give the box office a holy fire, as the film would be a pretty sore failure with barely $147 million.