"That take that's in the movie is her first take," John Krasinski says.
The opening set piece of “A Quiet Place Part II” includes Emily Blunt’s most terrifying stunt in the movie. The stunt in question finds the actress driving a car in reverse to avoid a collision with a speeding bus right in the middle of a full-blown monster attack. It turns out that really is Blunt behind the wheel, and that really is a bus moving 40mph coming right at her.
“Emily’s [stunt] is so real, I think I put my marriage on the line when I put her in the car,” director John Krasinski recently told the “ReelBlend” podcast about crafting the moment. “That’s true. When I was explaining to her onset all of the things that were going to happen, and I said, ‘You’re going to hit this stuntman. That car’s going to come three feet from you. And then this bus is actually going to clock at 40 miles an hour,’ her face fell and she went, ‘But not really.’ And I went, ‘No, no, the bus is coming at you at 40 miles. That’s a real bus. And that bus hits that car, and all that is totally real.'”
Krasinski intended for Blunt and the team to run through the stunt at least once given all the moving parts, but Blunt rejected the chance.
“I said to Emily, ‘Do you want to run it once?’ And she’s awesome. She said, ‘No.’ She’s like, ‘Just put me in it,’” Krasinski said. “And so that take that’s in the movie is her first take. So that’s her really saying ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ Because she had no idea. It’s like going on the best rollercoaster ride of your life. That was the first take that we did.”
While Blunt was game to jump right into the stunt on camera, Krasinski still had to ensure the safety of the younger actors in the car. Blunt shares the scene with Noah Jupe. As Krasinski said, “Emily, God love her, she still got in the car, but there are [kids] in the car…there’s no switch. There’s no nothing. And to go to those parents and say, ‘I promise you the stunt, Paramount safety, and the stunt guys, they have all [approved] this. This is all possible.’ We had that bus within a hair’s breadth of being able to stop. It had all these special brakes so that we could stop real quick.”
