Shooting the new Point Break at 165 miles per hour

For a lot of movies, the answer to the question “How did they get that shot?” can be summed up in a single word: computers. But for Point Break — a globe-trotting remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 cult classic — the answer is a lot less boring. “We shot it entirely in- camera,” says director-cinematographer Ericson Core (Invincible) of this seminal BASE-jump set piece, “with cameras mounted on the helmets of the wingsuiters themselves that were flying at up to 165 miles per hour.”

They were falling that fast because they had just jumped off a towering rock formation in the Swiss Alps. Production had armed itself with many of the sport’s most experienced emissaries. (Sadly, one such emissary, Jhonathan Florez, died after production while in preparation for an upcoming contest.)

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The filmmakers shot in 10 countries on four continents, capturing a plethora of death-defying activities. “We took extreme sports beyond surfing and skydiving,” says Core. Edgar Ramirez (Zero Dark Thirty) plays Bodhi, the character originated by Patrick Swayze, and the leader of the film’s antiheroic thieves, while Luke Bracey (The Best of Me) is Johnny Utah, the agent tasked with taking them down. At one point, Core had his two stars perched over Angel Falls in Venezuela, more than 3,200 feet above the ground. “When you’re standing up that high over the world, you realize this isn’t just like making any other movie,” says Ramirez. The actor was also in Switzerland when they filmed some of the wingsuit shots. “These stunts were performed by real people and many of them performed for the very first time,” Ramirez says. “A lot of people put their lives on the line for this film.”

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