We’re standing in an alley just east of Downtown L.A. between run-down warehouses. A black helicopter is sitting in the parking lot behind a chain-link fence, engine running. Over the roar of the chopper comes shouting: “Three, two, one, action!” A bright orange Dodge Charger Hellcat Widebody comes screaming down the alley, turns, and nails the throttle—drifting through an open gate and coming to a stop just short of the helo. And …“Cut!”
It’s not the set of Fast 9, the latest movie in the Fast and The Furious mega franchise, but it feels like it, and that’s the point. We’re actually on the set of the SixTwentySix’s music video production for “One Shot” by YoungBoy Never Broke Again featuring Lil Baby—the breakout hit from the official “Road to Fast 9” mixtape. With the song inspired by the series, it only made sense for the video to be, too, but it didn’t start that way.
“When they first approached me for this project,” director AJ Bleyer said, “they wanted it to be very automotive-focused and to have the cars represent the two artists on the track. With the Fast 9 tie-in, they wanted a street race. Two cars, and car racing, is tricky because you have to maintain continuity through the shooting and editing. I also didn’t want one car to beat the other, either, since they embody the artists. But [the concept] doesn’t work if someone doesn’t win.
“I came back with a drag racing idea,” he continued, “illegal street drags like the original movie. Three races: One artist would race a challenger and win, then the other artist would race a different challenger and win. Then the two would race each other for the title, but the video would end without showing you who won the final race.”
No helicopters, no drifting. The studio, Universal, greenlit the plan, and Bleyer began working his contacts for cars. When I first met him years ago, he was getting his start by shooting promotional videos for high-end car dealerships for free, just to build a portfolio and a client list. Now, he’s shooting everything from TV commercials to online ad campaigns for companies like Toyota, Aston Martin, Honda, and Infiniti, as well as non-car projects and music videos. He knows people with cool cars, and before long he’d locked down a Liberty Walk GT-R, a Speedkore Demon Carbon Edition, a nitrous-injected Viper ACR, a twin-turbo Lamborghini, and more.
Then Dodge got involved. An official partner of the Fast franchise for the last several movies, Dodge had two conditions the studio was happy to oblige: only vehicles built by FCA, its parent company, and no street racing. Corporate lawyers get real itchy about condoning or appearing to condone illegal activity. The team had to come up with a new idea on the spot and settled on the hero, YoungBoy, in a car chase with bad guys before making a dramatic helicopter escape, much like in the movies.
Two days later, we’re downtown. Atlantic Records has already released the single, and it’s blowing up YouTube the way only YoungBoy can. He’s only available for one day, so there’s no time to practice the vehicle stunts. Drivers Sergio Peña, a NASCAR Pro Series racer, and Tony Snegoff, a stuntman and stunt coordinator with nearly 450 credits to his name, are being thrown into the fire.
“Having real stunt drivers is super critical,” Bleyer said. “You need people who know exactly what they’re doing. Driving is a lot like sex: All men think they’re good at it. I need the ones who actually are.”
There are a lot of shots to get today, both with YoungBoy and with the stunt drivers. The big one, though, combines both. We’re in that parking lot again, only this time there’s a mix of stock and modified Dodge products parked in a semicircle, some loaned by Dodge and some privately owned.
YoungBoy is in the center of the parking lot, multicolored smoke bombs are going off, and Peña drifts donuts around him with a Challenger Hellcat Widebody while he sings. Peña got one warm-up attempt to learn the car, then it was go time. Bleyer isn’t even facing the action. His face is buried in a portable wireless monitor hanging from his neck, watching what the camera sees.
Twelve hours after the helicopter shot, we’re standing 30 miles away, in the parking lot of an old state mental hospital, now being rented as a studio back lot. Bleyer is seeing the campus for the first time.
“Once we got on location, I had maybe an hour and a half to come up with a shot list,” Bleyer said. “A lot of it was influenced by what we had to work with. Driving around the back lot gave me ideas about specific shots we could get. We had a map on an iPad, I made some notes about what we could shoot where, and we kind of made up a lap of the place with the least amount of gutters and speed bumps.
“I came up with five shots I wanted to get to make the car chase work: under the bridge, blowing past the bus stop, drifting some corners, losing the bad guys with a J-turn, and hiding the car behind a stack of pallets.”
The first few shots were easy. Bleyer started with the bus stop, where the cars—that orange Charger and the baddies in a blacked-out Challenger Hellcat Widebody—would drift nose to tail past a bewildered onlooker. Come down the street, make a 90-degree left, and hang the back end out until you’re past the bus stop and out of the camera’s view. They got it in two takes.
Next, a chase down a divided road, with the Arm Car, a second-gen Porsche Cayenne V-8 with a Russian Arm moving camera rig mounted to the roof, running parallel before diving in behind the stunt cars, which would continue under a railroad bridge and then drift around a corner and out of sight.
“There’s a huge amount of communication required when shooting with a camera car,” Bleyer said. “Every vehicle needs to know where they’re going to start and where they’re going to end. The first stunt car needs to know where to start and end, the second stunt car needs to know where to start and end, and the camera car needs to know where to start and end, and they can all be in different places. Plus, the boom operator in the camera car needs to know where to start and end his motion, and so does the camera operator. A lot of people and equipment have to move in just the right way at the right time to get the shot.”
Getting a sense of Peña and Snegoff’s abilities, the stunts started getting harder. Next it was the same stunt, but with the camera car driving straight at the stunt cars just before they drift the corner, missing them by mere feet. Then it was a 180-degree turn around a stack of pallets and ending with the car tight against a brick wall. There was no replacement car if it went wrong. Finally, Bleyer had them race into a roundabout less than two lanes wide, drift three-quarters of the way around the circle, then whip the cars out an exit and down the street.
“The stunts I asked of them in the morning were a lot tamer and safer than the stunts I was asking of them by the end of the day, once I saw what they were capable of,” Bleyer said.
“Because we couldn’t get the artist for both shoot days,” he said, “I didn’t want to focus too much on the inside of the car even though that can be what puts the audience in the action. I had to focus on making the action of the chase really punchy so you don’t notice that we’re not seeing the artist behind the wheel.”
Even with the truncated timeline, even with the change in creative direction at the last minute and even without time to practice most of the stunts, the team got what they needed.
“Directing these kinds of projects above all is an art of being nimble and adapting on the fly,” Bleyer said. “I just need to make executive decisions along the way to tackle the shoot so the editor had enough to work with. You have to make time for all the little shots. You can’t forget to get the regular driving and the shifting and the tach and all those little shots. But you also need those specialty shots that make it more cinematic and engaging to watch. Those take time, so you have to budget your time so you can get those on top of all the must-haves.”
Even though this was a big-budget shoot by music video standards, it still felt like the complete opposite of a TV, movie, or commercial shoot where there would’ve been hours of planning and practicing each stunt. Still, the guerilla style has its appeal.
“What’s fun about music videos compared to shooting a car commercial is the freedom,” Bleyer said. “The car companies and studios are all about safety. Not just hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Like, you have to signal before making turns in a car chase because that’s the law. So on the one hand, you get to really go over every shot and make a more polished product, but music videos are a lot more run and gun, and it makes it more fun.”
The cars are what really makes the project for Bleyer, though. Not just because he’s a passionate car guy who himself used to daily-drive a Lotus Elise before trading it on an X5 diesel that could haul gear but also because shooting cars is his true passion.
“The surrealness of being 16 and making little toy car movies with my camcorder,” he remembered, “then spending one day assisting on the set of the fourth movie (Fast & Furious 4)—there’s so many trucks and so much equipment—and thinking, ‘How could it take this much stuff to make a movie?’ Then to show up on this set, for this project, years later, and be the director just blows my mind.”
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