Ethan Hawke Thriller The Weight Borrows Movie Trick From Indiana Jones

The day before he filmed The Weight‘s most intense scene, Ethan Hawke gave himself a minor injury.

“For a variety of dumb reasons, I pulled my hamstring,” Hawke tells Polygon.

So there he was, way out alone in the middle of a rickety rope bridge, catching giant fake gold bricks and throwing them to the other side while the camera rolled.

“When you’re falling all over the ropes over a couple days, it really starts to hurt a lot,” Hawke says. “But I loved doing it because I believed in the movie and we had this great group of people around and our director was incredible.”

In director Padraic McKinley’s historical drama The Weight, Hawke plays Samuel Murphy. Murphy is a single father separated from his young daughter and sent to a work camp in 1930s Oregon. He befriends a manipulative warden played by Russell Crowe, who offers him early release if he smuggles gold bars out of a mine before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal associates can seize them.

Murphy is joined by three other inmates, two gold miners, and an Indigenous runaway played by Julia Jones who tags along. The group faces deadly obstacles, but the most difficult challenge is the rope bridge. It can only hold one person at a time, forcing Murphy to stand in the middle while the others toss the gold bars across.

The sequence evokes William Friedkin’s thriller Sorcerer, which also featured a truck crossing a rope bridge. McKinley embraces the comparison.

“We took much more of a cue from the Sorcerers of the world,” he says, noting the parallel bridge scenes and the green vegetation filling the screen in both films.

The Weight was filmed in Germany, mostly in the Bavarian region, where the crew scouted locations to find the right spot for a rope bridge.

“Then we had to figure out how to build it,” the director says. “Our production designer, Cora Pratz, was able to build this bridge that was stable and safe, but really swung, and you could go over, no problem. All the gaps in it were bigger than your foot. So if you didn’t watch your step, you were falling through.”

One side of the bridge was anchored securely into the ground while the other looked natural and dangerous. McKinley could only shoot in one direction away from the anchor, requiring camera tricks.

“We shot one group of people throwing the gold bricks this way, and then we switched out the backgrounds a little and shot the other people,” McKinley says. “Ethan basically just turned around.”

“It wasn’t without its own set of treachery, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it looks — a little bit of movie magic.”

“We were out there”

The bridge scene serves as the centerpiece of The Weight, but the entire movie features tense moments that challenged the cast.

“Pretty much every scene in this movie was stressful and difficult,” Hawke says. “Every day presented some kind of riddle that was much more difficult than I had imagined.”

Walking through the forest also presented physical hurdles.

“As we filmed we’d get banged up,” Jones says. “So the further we got into production, it did feel like we were getting deeper and deeper into the woods, but also, you have a sprained ankle now because of the jump you took yesterday. The irony of it is, that’s helpful as an actor, given the script.”

“It was the constant day after day of a new challenge that got really hard,” Hawke says. “Even if it’s just hiking a mountain. To get a shot where you can’t see anything means we have to be in the middle of nowhere. A lot of that was really fun. I look back so fondly on the talks we all had when we were getting ready to do shoots and walking through the woods. It’s fun in hindsight, but in the moment, there was the fear that something would go terribly wrong.”

Shooting deep in the forest helped the cast immerse themselves in the 1930s setting.

“We were out in the middle of nowhere and away from our own lives and away from cell service,” Hawke says. “It’s very easy to transport your mind back in time.”

“We were out there,” McKinley confirms.

“We borrowed from the best”

For McKinley, the challenge involved turning those locations into a believable stand-in for Oregon. The solution came from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

“We looked at Indiana Jones, where they shot it in three different countries, three different locations,” McKinley says. “We borrowed from the best, and we took some angles that they used in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There’s three VFX shots in it. The rest is all practical.”

The Weight is in theaters now.

Source: Polygon