‘The Amateur’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“I’m James Hawes. I’m the director of “The Amateur.” Our hero, Charlie Heller, played by Rami Malek, is on a mission to kill the people who took his wife’s life. And we meet him arriving in Madrid with number two on the list. And he has a plan to try and take this guy out without getting too close. And we get the face to face between the hero and the bad guy Tell me where to find Tell me where to find Horst Schiller. In his hand, he has a remote, which he explains now, and this is the first time we’ve heard it, he’s used to pump all the air out from the cavity between the glass layers of the swimming pool. And at the flick of a trigger, he can now detonate that, and the pool will shatter and drop anybody in it 16 stories to their death. There are not that many pools in the world that straddle between two buildings. We were lucky enough to find a location in London that gave us that, but they weren’t going to let us blow it up. So we did some of the work on location. Then we built a life size section of the pool in the studio, which allowed us to fill it with water, explode it so it looks like great shards of glass over the side of the pool are tumbling away. And to put a stuntman in the water and see him sucked back, as it were, over the edge of the waterfall. So a lot of the work is done in camera, and only then does VFX start to take over with the whole drop.