Real pedals to the metal

A single image ignited the modern movie car chase as we know it. As film aficionados might expect, it’s from 1968’s “Bullitt,” but it’s not, as they also might assume, Steve McQueen’s Highland green Mustang GT sailing over the crest of a San Francisco hill or maneuvering a hairpin turn or barreling down a coastal freeway.

They’re all memorable shots, but the kicker precedes them: Slowly tailed by McQueen’s eagle-eyed cop, the killers in their black Dodge Charger opt to play hardball. How does director Peter Yates show this decision but also prep the audience for what’s in store? The Charger’s driver buckles his seat belt. Like the moment on a roller coaster when the first hard drop looms, this audacious cutaway says: “Here we go.” Cue the squealing tires.

Yates and company wanted the music-less chase that followed to be exactly what it was: a stand-alone bit of bravura moviemaking whose real locations and real mph would forever make rear-projection, back-lot trickery and artificially jacked-up film speeds a thing of car chases past. Three years later, William Friedkin’s “The French Connection” indirectly suggested that even “Bullitt” had its fake side: pedestrian-free streets? Friedkin upshifted the engine-gunning suspense by sending Gene Hackman’s New York cop in a Pontiac after an elevated train and adding crazy weaving, imperiled bystanders and scarily real collisions to the car-chase vocabulary.

Over the years, hazardous driving has become an action-movie staple, but it’s generally agreed that upon movies haven’t been able to improve upon the scenes of McQueen and Hackman tearing up the pavement. It’s why directors such as Michael Bay, McG and John Singleton -- all with movies out this summer -- cite the legacy of “Bullitt” and “The French Connection” when offering up their raging road set-pieces in the upcoming “Bad Boys II” and “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and the recently released hit “2 Fast 2 Furious,” respectively.

It’s been a vroom-ful movie season: Already we’ve seen “The Matrix Reloaded” throw down a highway chase for the ages -- 14 minutes of the outlandishly real (1.4 miles of freeway built especially for filming) and the dazzlingly fake (loads of clearly computer-generated shots). “The Italian Job” offered up a serpentine Mini Cooper finale that substitutes the urban sprawl of Los Angeles for the ancient gridwork of Turin from the whimsical 1969 original. Toss in the chases in “Hollywood Homicide,” “Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines” and even the British spy spoof “Johnny English,” and it feels as if all the studios saw stunt-driving budgets escalate this past year.

“They’re very difficult to do,” Friedkin says of shooting car chases. “They represent pure cinema. You can’t do a chase in a novel, on a canvas, in a piece of music, on the stage.” With automobiles and cinema announcing themselves at about the same time, it was inevitable a courtship would develop, both being symbols of a burgeoning century’s ingenuity. The high-speed chase would become a silent comedy standby, whether it was Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton or a Keystone Kop.

But the modern car chase -- in the years since Yates and Friedkin rewrote the rules -- has mostly come to signify something wanton, offering sure-fire thrills but laced with an appetite for destruction. “Popeye” Doyle doesn’t want to hit other cars or garbage cans in “The French Connection”: He’s on a mission, and each obstacle, whether slowing him down or bringing him to a temporary halt, only increases the frustration and tension.

“The whole idea of the film was there was a thin line between the policeman and the criminal, that the best cops think like criminals,” says Friedkin, who also filmed chases in “To Live and Die in L.A.” and “Jade.” Doyle’s “drive to get this guy became a kind of game, so [the car chase] became a metaphor. It’s obsession. It’s that the guy doing the chasing is as oblivious to the rest of humanity as the guy he’s chasing.”

The wantonness, though, won out. After the ‘70s, which saw the rev-and-destroy likes of “Freebie and the Bean,” Burt Reynolds’ Trans Am oeuvre (“Smokey and the Bandit,” among others), the pileups in “The Blues Brothers” and, to a more cultish extent, car enthusiast H.B. Halicki’s self-financed crunch-and-run classic “Gone in 60 Seconds,” audiences were conditioned to want to see autos meeting twisted ends rather than achieving exhilarating speeds. (An exception is Walter Hill’s no-nonsense “The Driver,” which featured beautifully deserted, dead-of-night L.A. streets ripe for long existential police chases.)

Since then, memorable car chases have been few and far between. The assault in-transit on Mad Max’s semi in George Miller’s “The Road Warrior” was the first real operatic rubber burner, with stylized close-ups, dizzying stunt work and meticulous choreography that thrillingly evoke the film’s gas-guzzling grandeur. For “Ronin,” John Frankenheimer expertly utilized narrow French motorways for his sleekly treacherous cat-and-mouse race between criminals.

Slightly troubling, though, has been the trend in making danger digital. It seemed a cheat when “The Fast and the Furious” augmented a street-racing scene with computer-generated cars, while appreciation for the daredevil lead-footing in “The Matrix Reloaded” is diminished when it’s obvious no camera ever zigzagged under real 18-wheelers to follow Carrie-Anne Moss’s motorcycle. Fast-cut editing has also supplanted the splendor of what should be unbroken tableaux of cars at door-rattling velocities.

Michael Bay may cut quick, but he likes to keep computer-generated imagery, or CGI, in car chases to a minimum. “My philosophy is to shoot 90% real, 10% effects,” Bay says. “You can feel real compared to CGI. You just can. There’s nothing like the visceral.”

Bay, who did his part to wreak fender-mangling havoc on San Francisco streets in “The Rock,” knew he had to top himself for next month’s mega-buck sequel “Bad Boys II.” His approach could be seen as a three-pronged one: location, obstacle and camera placement.

First, secure a one-of-a-kind playground for speed, namely Miami’s busy MacArthur Causeway, with a gleaming cityscape in the background. Next, ratchet up the hairy-obstacle quotient, so the pursuees are in an ungainly car carrier sending autos into the path of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Ferrari. The cars aren’t just rolled out -- they’re flipped into traffic like coins, becoming four-wheel versions of the asteroids hurling toward Earth in Bay’s “Armageddon.” Bay: Normally, “a car would flatten like a pancake. We had to make roll cages so they wouldn’t crumple, so they would have a lot of spinning time.”

Last, give the audience a one-of-a-kind viewpoint that suggests impending death. That entailed creating a triangle-shaped truck -- dubbed the “Bay Buster” -- rigged with low-angle cameras that would drive straight toward the flipped cars and hit them directly.

This is where Bay attempts CGI sleight-of-hand: With real projectile autos spitting up actual concrete dust and glass, a computer-generated Ferrari can be slipped in. Bay: “If the threat is real, you won’t notice the car you’ve been seeing the whole time.”

No second unit for him

Nothing was done illegally on “Bad Boys II.” Friedkin, on the other hand, made one decision on “French Connection” for the sake of his chase that could have landed him in a world of trouble.

Deciding after all the choreographed, city-permitted shooting that the “straight speed” element wasn’t there, he and stunt driver Bill Hickman (who drove the Charger in “Bullitt”) got in their camera-mounted car and sped for 26 straight blocks at between 80 and 90 mph, Friedkin says, “without any control over traffic.” Their acquiescence to pedestrian safety: a police gumball (unseen on film) that they hoped would read as an unmarked cop car. Edited in, those shots are indispensably nail-biting, but Friedkin says he’d never attempt a stunt like that today.

Friedkin has never used a second-unit director for his chases. “I’ve always shot it all because I love doing it,” he says. He recalls an offer from producer Albert Broccoli years ago to direct a James Bond film. “He said, ‘If you want it, it’s yours. I have several units out already, shooting the chase. You would shoot the first unit, which is Bond and the star.’ I said, ‘What? The only reason I would want to do a Bond is to do all those chases! Let me be the second-unit director!’ ”

With action filmmaking now second nature in Hollywood, what “Bullitt” and “The French Connection” delivered are thrills long since expected from jaded moviegoers. Those films even won their editors Academy Awards, an acknowledgment of the chases’ rollicking novelty.

But “Bullitt” and “The French Connection” shook us up in other ways -- as police procedurals, city odes, mood pieces, character dramas -- so that the chases felt like the characters’ dilemmas writ large, pumped up but still following the film’s logic. In this respect, Friedkin’s intuition has reigned supreme.

If Doyle is a brutish, streetwise cop and the drug smugglers are cultured Europeans, having Doyle chase someone who is literally above him makes sense. If the sleazy cops in “To Live and Die in L.A.” are stealing money to catch the bad guys, having them zoom the wrong way down a highway perfectly visualizes renegade behavior. If the attorney’s investigation in “Jade” reaches a standstill, a chase that becomes maddeningly stuck in Chinese New Year parade foot traffic is both literal and fantastic, and David Caruso’s uncorked exasperation is palpable. What does it say, after all, that “Jade,” in all other respects an unremarkable thriller, only comes alive as a story, as drama, when its people get behind the wheel?