‘The International’s’ Guggenheim gunfight

The conspiracy thriller “The International” features a special attraction for New York’s Guggenheim Museum: an all-out gun battle. But rather than having star Clive Owen pulling off some super-slick Bondian derring-do, the filmmakers wanted him to look . . . bad.

“He’s not a professional; he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” stunt coordinator Glenn Boswell said of Owen’s character, an Interpol detective. “You can tell by the way he fired the weapons, he wasn’t a weapons man.”

The sequence involved 10 combatants and took about four weeks to shoot on two sets in Germany. As to the shot in which Owen fights dirty to toss an assassin from an upper level of the museum to carom off a railing below and crash to his death, visual effects supervisor Viktor Muller called it “a nightmare”: “You can’t get a real reference; it doesn’t exist -- how do you get a reference for a body falling like that?”

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-- Michael Ordona