- Director Mark Molloy opted to use live-action effects for the action scenes in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.
- Molloy aimed to recreate the authenticity of the original '80s film.
- “I wanted to make this real,” Molloy said. “The danger is real.
In an age where every scene in a movie, from car chases to kisses, can be achieved through computer-generated visual effects, director Mark Molloy tried to buck the trend with Beverly Hills Cop 2 by using live-action effects for all of its action scenes.
Molloy made his position clear from the start, from his first meeting with franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer when he was approached to direct the sequel that was decades in the making.
“I went to Jerry and said, 'I love this, but I want to make an '80s action comedy, and I want to shoot it all in camera,'” Molloy recalled to Business Insider during a recent Zoom conversation.
Axel F marks the feature directorial debut for Molloy, who spent decades working on commercials and directing TV shows in his native Australia, but the filmmaker quickly realized the only way a fourth Beverly Hills Cop would be successful was to stay true to the texture and attitude of the popular first two films, which were box office hits and made Eddie Murphy a superstar in the late 1980s (forget there was a third movie).
“A lot of movies these days are all about VFX and not perfection,” he said. “I wanted it to be down to earth. The danger is real. The risk is real. Like the first and second movies, they were gritty movies.”
Bruckheimer liked the idea, and Molloy was tasked with filming scenes in which Murphy drives a giant snowplow through a line of parked cars in Detroit, as well as an actual car falling off the side of a building in Los Angeles.
“We had to close down part of I-10 to do that,” Molloy said gleefully, referring to one of Los Angeles' busiest freeways.
In the scene, Axel Foley's daughter Jane, played by Taylour Paige (Zola), gets a visit from the movie's bad guys and ends up pulling her car off the side of a parking lot. (While the stunt was fun to pull off in real life, Molloy points out that Paige wasn't in the car when it was filmed. Safety first.)
“The spot we found was the perfect spot, but it was literally right next to I-10, so we had to close part of it off because otherwise people would have an accident if they suddenly saw a car fall off the side of a building,” Molloy said.
But the action scene that kept him up at night was the helicopter scene. Towards the end of the film, Foley and Detective Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) steal a police helicopter to escape corrupt cop Grant (Kevin Bacon). Except for interior shots of Murphy and Gordon-Levitt in the cockpit, the entire scene used a real helicopter, which did everything from free-falling between buildings to flying so low it scraped against the road and sent sparks flying. The scene ends with the chopper making a not-so-graceful landing in front of Beverly Hills City Hall.
Looking back now, Molloy laughs, unable to believe how he managed to tackle such an ambitious scene. “It was very challenging.”
“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” is currently available to watch on Netflix.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a member of the Netflix board of directors.
