The Bourne Supremacy Revs Up the Go Mobile

One of the most eyeball-widening moments this summer was the last car chase in director Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy. Greengrass was actually shooting in Berlin while stunt coordinator/second unit director Dan Bradley (Spider-Man 2, Seabiscuit) shot the sequence on location in Moscow. Bradley dug into his bag of tricks and pulled out one of his custom inventions — the Go Mobile (pictured above).

"Anytime you’re trying to shoot actors in a traffic situation, you’re either towing, you’re in a trailer and the car’s intact, or there’s another vehicle with a partial shell, but it’s not the entire shell and you can’t really shoot the interior of the car," says Bradley. "I wanted to be able to tie exterior action with interior action— shots on the floor and the seats where I had to be able to tilt up to [actor] Matt Damon, and then see outside."

So Bradley and his partners took the shell of a taxi and mounted it onto a shooting platform. The shell was then cut from the taxi’s firewall forward so that the camera could shoot through the windshield or from inside the dashboard behind the steering wheel. "We’d use two cameras handheld on Matt while the Go Mobile was going 60 mph through traffic."

The Go Mobile, controlled by an externally mounted stunt driver and built by Bradley and his partners, was designed to accept the chassis of the vehicle and keep it at factory ride-height, although the height, width and length is adjustable to accommodate any vehicle.