Sam Brown on Burst Tyres & Big Moments for Range Rover

Sam Brown, director

What was your initial reaction on receiving the brief? Had you ever done anything like this before? 

My first thought on reading it was that I really wanted to see something this nuts and dangerous happen in the flesh. To be actually standing there when the engine was gunned, and the front wheels were hitting that first step. The other appeal was an area of filmmaking, both documentary and live event, that I’d never really been involved with before. I love a challenge and an experience, and this felt like a big one. To be honest, I completely underestimated how hard it was going to be. 

This was obviously an incredibly challenging shoot from a technical point of view. Can you talk us through some of the major production hurdles and how you overcame them? 

The landscape is very extreme, and I’m not too great with heights, so there was the personal aspect of dealing with that fear. Fortunately the vertigo there is so dramatic that after a day in the mountains the capacitor in your brain that deals with that sort of thing just kind of burns out for good. The fear just gets numbed, like blanking a VHS tape. The Land Rover team were tackling the event from a technical point of view, so our job was to figure out how capture the ludicrous difficulty of the challenge, in what was a fairly chaotic, unsafe and unforgiving environment in which to make a film. 

It’s odd, but perhaps the biggest challenge from our point was articulating the steepness of everything, because it’s a notoriously hard thing to describe on film. The 99 steps seen by the naked eye are gut-churningly steep - I actually laughed out loud when I saw them for the first time - but gradient is a really perceptory and first-person thing. Lenses tend to flatten and average everything out. There are very few places you can set a camera that actually capture the vertiginousness of it. So we found that Tom (Barbor Might’s) documentary half of the film had to do much of this describing. We needed people to express and articulate the difficulty of it for us through words or gesture.

How much were you able to test/plan in advance versus winging it on the day?

The planning, even from just a life-preserving point of view, was exhaustive and meticulous. But of course weather (near constant mist - the event itself was shot in a minute-long window between the clouds), shattering safety ratchets, writing off your hero vehicles and random events like the wheel of your tracking vehicle falling off can’t be planned for. As somebody who’s consistently tried to do difficult things in film making, it’s always amazing to me how good planning can disintegrate when the big moment finally arrives. Under great duress, people tend to forget everything they’ve been told and come up with new plans of their own. So while you’re trying to greatly discourage winging, it’s tough to stamp it out completely. 

How long did the shoot take? 

The 999 steps challenge was a one day, one-take experience (though in the end we squeezed two runs). We filmed for a few more days on the 99 turns. 

The shots of the final ascent to Heaven’s Door alongside the driver are truly nail-biting, how were they achieved?

That was all done with mounted cameras. I sure as hell wasn’t getting in there. 

Was there any point during the shoot where you were genuinely worried the stunt might not come off?

Yes, practically every waking hour and most of my sleeping ones were plagued with the thought that it wouldn’t work at all. My anxiety really began when I was shown test footage of the Range Rover trying to drive up 24 steps in a field in England somewhere, only to slip and skew sickeningly and crunch onto its arse. I’d say it peaked when Ho Pin (our challenge driver) blew all his tyres out by getting too much air off the first set of steps, and then driving the remaining 800 or so on his rims. The rumbling sound was genuinely haunting. I can’t get it out of my head. But the Land Rover technical team were incredible. My admiration for their skill and bravery just grew and grew over the weeks we spent together.