An argument could be made that The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment of the tire-shredding, car-flying Fast series, jumps the shark — that is, if by “shark” the arguer means a submarine, and by “jumps the” he or she is literally describing the movie’s audacious, improbable climax. In one of the final beats of the movie, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto jumps his snow charger over an ice-slicing nuclear submarine to avoid a heat-seeking missile, which ignites and destroys the enemy vessel.
The fiery conclusion caps, even by Fast and Furious proportions, an epic action sequence staged across Russia’s arctic plains. How’d they pull it off? We talked with three of the movie’s primary stunt coordinators — Jack Gill, Andy Gill, and Spiro Razatos — to learn how they shot one of the biggest stunt sequences in the franchise’s history. Surprise: It was mostly real.