“One Battle After Another” production designer Florencia Martin was driving near the California-Arizona border with director Paul Thomas Anderson on a location scout when they came across a unique stretch of road.
After miles and miles of flat roadway cut through the middle of the desert, the topography was suddenly rocky, and the road’s dips became so dramatic that they looked like big concrete waves stretching as far as the eye could see.
“Paul took out his phone and started recording out the car window,” Martin told Business Insider.
No one in the car knew it yet, but they’d just found the thrilling ending to their movie.
Anderson’s latest epic, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as an ex-revolutionary who is forced back into the cause to save his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) from a deranged military officer (Sean Penn), ends with a tense car-chase scene in which the contours of the road play a key role.
That only happened because of a stroke of luck. The movie’s location manager, Michael Glaser, had taken Martin and Anderson on a three-hour drive from Los Angeles to Blythe, California, to scout a spot for the revolutionaries’ camp. On the ride back to LA, they took a different route — one that sent them through a stretch of road outside Borrego Springs, California, that locals call “The Texas Dip” for the enormity of its drops.
Soon after that trip, Martin received a new version of the script from Anderson in which the car chase scene ended on “The Texas Dip.”
The thrilling sequence, in which Infiniti’s Willa outsmarts an assassin using the road’s hills and the angle of the sun, wasn’t easy to shoot. The team had scouted the location in the winter, but shot the scene in the summer, so they had to adjust their shooting schedule based on the sun’s direction on the road at that time of year. And then there was the unforgiving environment.
“It was 110 degrees, people had heat exhaustion, there was wind, the dirt would get into the camera and jam it,” said Martin, whose credits include 2022’s “Babylon” and Anderson’s 2021 movie “Licorice Pizza.” “It was the harshest conditions you could imagine.”
It was all worth it once Martin saw the car chase sequence for the first time with an audience.
“People actually gasped when watching it,” she said. “What’s special about the way Paul works and being in these locations is you feel it on screen, the dirt on Willa’s face, feeling the heat come off the road.”
Martin still can’t believe the sequence is being compared to classic car-chase scenes in movie history.
“The fact that our movie is compared to movies we’ve watched like “The French Connection” and “Vanishing Point,” that are iconic, it’s a huge honor,” she said.
“One Battle After Another” is now playing in theaters.
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