Though writer – director Rob Savage’s brilliant debut feature ‘Host’ was shot using Zoom it had its fair share of stunts and effects made all the more difficult by a limited budget, the restrictions of Covid and the fact that the director had to direct the sequences over a zoom call. His follow up film Dashcam is not without its fair share of stunts too and he is the first to admit that the stunt elements were another big challenge. Like Host he wanted set pieces that people won’t expect and he goes on to say, ‘I think we achieved this with great deal of ingenuity, but not without a lot of difficulty‘.
With the film featuring car crashes and more (and the film does get more and more insane) there is one scene that sees the lead actress Annie Hardy drenched in water.
‘The underwater sequence towards the end was the hardest stunt in the whole movie. There’s only a few studios where you can shoot underwater and we didn’t have the budget, so… we got creative and built our own underwater tank. We got a big shipping container and scaffolding, had a crane to lower the car in, filled it full of water that we heated (we shot this scene in January 2021), and used firemen’s hoses to simulate surging water. To keep the actors safe, Mike Knights, our SFX supervisor, devised a system to get in and out of the car whereby he cut the roof of the car into a flap, so if the actors felt claustrophobic they could get out immediately‘.
We spoke to director Rob Savage about the making of Dashcam…..
See our interview with Rob Savage about his debut feature ‘Host’ HERE
