Popular Mechanics - USA (2019-06)

↓ STUNT OF THE MONTH

S

22 June 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com

HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS

Chucky is voiced by Mark Hamill, but his

acting is a combination of robotics, remote

control, and CGI. For a shot in which Chucky

operates the forklift, Chartrand-DelValle’s

team attached wires to the controls, pulling

them from a different angle so it seemed

like the doll’s hand was moving them.

URE, IT’S SCARY to watch

the end of the 2019 reboot

of Child’s Play. Aubrey

Plaza is slowly lifted by the

neck via forklift, her young

son rushing to rescue her

before she’s murdered by a

doll that is par t toy, par t serial killer,

and part...that dancing cheetah

robot that Boston Dynamics would

like us to believe is harmless.

Imagine having to film it, though:

In a horror movie, a stunt like this is

not just a complement to the story,

but the climax, affecting star ratings,

scare factor, and canon-worthiness.

“It’s not only technically difficult, but

also really important for the movie

you’re making,” director Lars Klev-

berg says. You also have to make sure

your leads don’t, you know, actu-

ally die. In the end, the team filmed

the sequence in just five days. And

no one even accidentally hanged

Aubrey Plaza.

THE TIMING

Scenes involving heights look more

real when they’re filmed in the air

than when they’re filmed over a

green-screen floor, so stunt coor-

dinator Lauro Chartrand-DelValle

strapped Plaza or her stunt double,

Kirstyn Konig, into a safety harness

and hooked them to a line connected

to an electric winch. A rigger raised

the main line to roughly 15 feet while

the forklift hoisted the rope that was

ostensibly hanging Plaza. Making

sure the timing matched was “cru-

cial,” Chartrand-DelValle says.

THE NOOSE

“To make it look realistic you have to

have some pressure on the perform-

er’s neck. You can’t just hold them up

with a harness and go, ‘Okay, close

enough,’ ” says Chartrand-DelValle. To

make sure no one was actually hanged,

the noose was cut behind the neck and

held together with magnets that would

separate in case a rig ger slipped or the

forklift moved too quickly.

THE WRIST TIES

If something went wrong, the crew

needed to know immediately, and

that could be difficult when the

actor had been pretending to choke

moments before. “In the scene her

hands were tied behind her back,”

says Chartrand-DelValle. “But I had

magnets on the ties that were around

her wrists so she could easily pull

them apart and grab the rope with her

hands.” If Plaza’s hands came apart

at all, the crew knew to let her down.

THE JUMP

Plaza was a “trooper” and did about 75

percent of the stunt work herself, but

for a scene in which her son, played by

actor Gabriel Bateman, jumps from

a shelving unit to the rope to try to

cut her down, they subbed in Konig.

There was a small chance Bateman

could have kicked Plaza in the face. In

the end, the jump went smoothly and

zero people had their faces kicked.

THE FALL(S)

Without giving too much away, some

people in this scene fall to the floor

at the end. To make that look real-

istic, the cameras were placed low

to the ground and stunt performers

jumped off platforms onto one-inch-

thick dense foam that had been

rolled out over the entire floor. The

performers used “falling arts” such

as judo, aikido, and jujitsu to twist

their bodies and disperse their

weight, while also faking as if they’d

been injured. “You fool a crew or the

director 99 percent of the time,”

says Chartrand-DelValle. “They go,

‘A r e y o u o k a y? ’ and the performer

gets up like, ‘Sure, I’m fine. I was

just acting.’”

How They

Pulled Off the

Forklif t Scene

in Child’s Play

/ BY JACQUELINE DETWILER /