Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [92]
On the set, Steve was all business, working with a seriousness and an edge that those who had been with him on other shoots quickly recognized as new and different. There were no moody, insecure Method-acting walk-offs, no driving Yates to distraction with endless questions. No all-night card games, motorcycle races, or drinking with the boys during the making of Bullitt. Some thought it was because Steve’s company had such a significant financial stake in the film. Others thought it was the character of Bullitt itself that had taken hold of Steve. Still others attributed some of the tension to the fact that San Francisco was where his mother was buried.
About a month into filming, Steve, Relyea, and Yates were deep into preparing the three big chase scenes that hold the film together. The first takes place in a hospital, where an assassin has come to finish the job of killing the witness now being guarded by Bullitt (the assassin doesn’t know that the witness is already dead—yet another turn in the film’s twisty plot). What begins as the assassin’s pursuit of the victim soon turns into something else, as Bullitt becomes aware that the killer is in the hospital. The pursuer becomes the pursued. Up and down staircases, through basements, around corners, and out windows, the chase builds to a suspenseful climax, when the killer finally eludes Bullitt and gets away.
The second chase scene, the one that the film is rightly remembered for and the reason Yates had been hired to direct, continues the pursuit/pursued theme, once again involving Bullitt and the assassin. For reasons not made clear by the script, although there is some hint that Chalmers may be behind it, Bullitt has been marked for death. Not long after the first chase, as he gets into his souped-up green Mustang GT 390, Bullitt notices he is being followed by the assassin’s Dodge 440 Magnum. After letting the killer come up behind him, Bullitt slips away and comes up behind his pursuer—and the chase is on through the hilly streets of San Francisco, with cars flying off corners and dropping around bends.
To help coordinate the stunt, Steve brought in Carey Loftin, another friend from the old TV days, considered by many at the time to be the best stunt planner in the business. After Steve crashed and nearly broke his neck during one of the first shots of the sequence, Yates told Steve he wasn’t going to be able to drive, except for close-up pickup shots. Loftin then hired Steve’s old friend Bud Ekins, who had doubled for Steve in the motorcycle sequence in The Great Escape, to finish the chase.
Shooting began every day at 7:30 a.m. and went on until dark. Each move was carefully rehearsed several times at slow speeds until everyone felt they knew what they were doing, and then the cars shot up to, at times, 110 miles per hour. They sometimes become airborne, taking off only to slam down on the next hill and bounce off again, just as Steve had conceived it. As the chase continues, the two cars take on the character of their operators, at times reckless, daring, and single-minded in their relative missions of capture and escape. This merging of the personalities of the actors with their vehicles elevates the film to a level of unexpected kinetic beauty and is what the film is really about. It is the difference between being a good film with a complicated plot and a great film