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The Rockford Files Pontiac FirebirdBehind the Scenes of Hollywood Movie Cars
We all love car movies, but how do filmmakers get those cars on screen? From pre-production to post, we explain Hollywood movie cars.
Hollywood Heroes Need Hero Cars
If you’re a car obsessive, you may find it hard to watch movies without paying an inordinate amount of attention to the cars on screen, constantly injecting with tidbits like, “Honey, look that’s a 1963 Jeep Gladiator pickup! So cool!” or “That’s a ’73 Super Beetle in 1969!? C’mon Quentin!” * To which you are brutally and quite dismissively shushed.
Cars in movies can be as critical to the story of non-car movies as they are to movies called Cars. Cars can be key characters, plot devices, and/or automotive extras. Some movie cars are high-end rarities, like those in Gone in 60 Seconds, others are stripped down stunt cars destined for the scrap heap, like all those cop cars in The Blues Brothers.
To fully appreciate these automotive silver screen spectacles, you need to know a bit about how Hollywood producers get those cars on screen.
Casting Movie Star Cars
Getting cars into movies begins in pre-production when the production designer and their team identify, per the script, what kinds of vehicles they’ll need. Those needs can vary wildly based on the film. Something like Ghostbusters, Batman, or Back to the Future call for fabricating their principal vehicles in addition to acquiring background cars.
The post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road saw production designers fabricating builds for every vehicle on screen, making it among the most elaborate automotive productions ever. Such production design work can take weeks to months, depending on the scale of the film, as artists and builders conceptualize, refine, and finally bring their visions to fruition.
A critical step in the process is acquiring the vehicles themselves. Companies like Cinema Vehicles, Port City Picture Cars, and Auto Film Club specialize in supplying cars to film productions. These companies keep large filled with every manner of car. Legions of police cars, TV vans, ambulances, station wagons, jalopies, trucks, and sports cars all spanning the last 100-plus years of automotive history.
Some cars for movies are rented while others are purchased. Productions will rent high-end vehicles from owners when they want something specific on screen, say a Ferrari F40 for a jet-setting stock-broker character. Rates for such rentals can run into the thousands of dollars per day for shooting. If production designers are heavily modifying the vehicles or using them for stunt work, they’re often purchased.
Ferrari Replicas Beware
For some productions it makes more sense to use replicas rather than real cars. Two different cases of film Ferraris famously involved replicas. The hyper-rare Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was not in fact real. That might not surprise you that the car we see sailing out of a window isn’t real, but actually none of the Ferraris in the movie were. The cars used in filming were done by Modena Design & Development, after which they were sued out of business by Ferrari for building unauthorized replicas.
Ferrari was also not thrilled when Michael Mann used a Ferrari 365/GT4 Daytona Spider in the first two seasons of his hit 1980s cop show Miami Vice. Though the series opener features a real one, the Ferrari 365s seen throughout those seasons were replicas built from C3 Corvettes. Ferrari again sued, but this time a deal was struck, albeit an odd one. Ferrari agreed to supply the show with cars for production (white Testarossa!) with the stipulation that the replicas be destroyed, on screen. The opening to season three features Sonny Crockett’s 365 getting blown up with a missile launcher.
Dressing Hero Cars
Part of the vehicle production design process is called “dressing” the cars, that is modifying them for filming. Again, this can be extremely elaborate like the case of the Mad Max series or other science fiction epics, or as simple as a paint job like in Christine. Other modifications can include those for camera and other filming equipment (rigging) to be mounted to the car, sometimes body panels or even whole sections are removed as part of the process.
For about any movie where a car is featured prominently, producers acquire multiple versions. The “hero car” is used for wide shots, typically involving the main actors. Secondary vehicles are used for interior shots and stunt work.
Stunt cars are their own breed. Not only are stunt cars modified to look like their hero car counterparts, but they often are also given different motors, stripped and lightened for jumps, and/or reinforced with roll cages and otherwise modified to protect stunt drivers. In productions involving a lot of stunts, many cars, sometimes dozens or more, are dummied up to look like the hero car. When The Dukes of Hazard’s producers began to run out of ’69 Dodge Chargers to wreck, they turned to modifying AMC Ambassador for stunt work.
Post-Production
When filming ends, the cars are either returned to the rental company/private owners, stored by the film studio, salvaged if they’re stunt wrecks, and sometimes sold. In rare cases, the movies themselves become hits and the cars featured in them become indelible parts of popular culture. Those few cars that go onto be iconic can end up in car museums like the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, or the Volo Automotive Museum in Volo, Illinois. Cars like the Back to the Future DeLorean, the 1989 Batmobile, and the Lincoln Continental from The Matrix have all thankfully been preserved for film fans and car lovers alike.
*Tremors and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in case you were wondering.
