In 1994, Jan De Bont found himself in something of a quandary.
Its a lot more fun than destroying a paper box.
Along for the ride are Jack and AnnieKeanu Reeves and Sandra Bullocks characters from the first film.
Unfortunately for De Bont, Reeves didnt want to do the sequel.
Or maybe it was because Reeves didnt like the idea of all those action sequences in the water.
In this movie, he needed to do all this stuff underwater, and I think that scared him.
I loved working with Jan de Bont and Sandra, of course.
It was about a cruise ship and I was thinking, a bus, a cruise ship… Willem Dafoe was cast as the boat-obsessed villain.
InTwister, for example, leads Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were temporarily blinded by extremely intense electronic lights.
The actors also had to have injections to avoid getting hepatitis after spending hours in a soggy ditch.
I prefer to see someone struggling.
And struggle they did.
At one point, Bullock reportedly missed being decapitated by the ships rudder by a hairs breadth.
Bullock later said of the stunt, Jason should be dead.
So much came very close to going wrong, Bullock toldThe Nationnewspaper.
Weve all done some amazingly wild stuff that people shouldnt be doing.
…its the day-in and day-out of five months that does you in, Patric concurred.
Things werent much easier aboard the Seabourn Legend.
We were thrown around quite a bit, and there were a lot of sick people, De Bontsaid.
I was so disappointed.
How do you do that and get a ship into the middle of a town?
So in the end we built full scale replicas of parts of the ship.
The rest of the ship would be added in digitally for the sequences long shots.
This is, arguably, one of the biggest practical stunts ever put to film.
By the timeSpeed 2had completed filming, it had gone more than a little over budget.
Some suggested the price tag could have been $165m, an extraordinary figure for the time.
More conservative estimates put it much lower, at $110m.
As the film neared release, Bullock defended De Bonts single-minded approach to gettingSpeed 2made.
He is insane, certifiably, the actress said.
Unfortunately, the recipe that had worked so well inSpeedfailed to come off the second time around.
I thought I was prepared for anything and it was still far worse than I ever imagined.
