It’s unfortunate that things like that have to wake up the industry, but safety should be paramount. It had to be a whole different ballgame, but it was great because, though I’m OK, in a really terrible way it did wake us up a little bit.
“There were a lot of things that we had to put in place before we were all rounded up to come back. It was a big weight off my shoulders that hadn’t lifted before. “I was definitely feeling the effects of re-experiencing then events, but by the end of the week I felt like myself again and so relieved to get through it. “At the beginning of the week I started off very not myself,” O’Brien reveals. But I’ll look back on it with nothing but happy memories.” “It’s really sad to see it go, it’s really sad to end it. “It’s been an amazing experience, I just feel like the luckiest person ever,” O’Brien says of making three movies with such castmates as Kaya Scodelario (who had a baby between the Vancouver and Cape Town shoots), Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki Hong Li, Dexter Darden, Patricia Clarkson and many others who returned to “Death Cure” from the first and second films.
But the decision was made well before any production commenced for the third movie to finish it here, not tease out a fourth or more films from the book trilogy.Įven if the door is left slightly ajar for more, after a final showdown between WCKD, Thomas’ team, the diseased hordes he might hold the key to saving and yet another group of revolutionaries in a slam-bang third act battle with what Ball calls “a lot of moving parts.” It is adapted from the last, chronologically, of author James Dashner’s dystopian novels, although two prequels exist. That isn’t why, however, “Death Cure” has been officially declared the end of the movie trilogy. It was horrible.” Photo credit: Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox. But events unfolded that we just didn’t account for and it wound up with Dylan getting hurt very severely. We didn’t go into it blindly, we thought we were using all of the proper precaution systems. People are looking at me because they trust me and feel things are going to be OK. “I’m the director, so it was my set, I can’t help but feel some sense of responsibility. “I felt terrible when Dylan was hurt,” Ball affirms to no surprise.
If not past a trauma that Ball says will haunt him for the rest of his life. “It actually worked out better, because it meant we could do things that we just couldn’t do otherwise.
“My challenge was how to pull that sequence off without doing it for real,” adds Ball, who shot other aspects of the opening action at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. The rest of it was done in a parking lot. “There’s only one shot that we used from Vancouver where he’s actually on a moving vehicle. “Basically, what it came down to was I wasn’t going to put Dylan on more moving vehicles,” the director explains. A visual effects expert before he made his feature directing debut with “Maze Runner” in 2014, Ball also employed his skills at movie fakery to ensure all of the new shots with O’Brien could be cheated with camera angles and special effects, or as he puts it: But Wes and everyone from the crew, even people who weren’t there the first time around, were very respectful of what an incredibly difficult thing it was to do.”īall scheduled the chase sequence reshoots well into the South Africa production, to give O’Brien time to get more comfortable doing other action scenes, rebuild trust and have plenty of opportunities to discuss any misgivings he might have had.
I couldn’t really control it, and I was even a little surprised myself by how viscerally I responded to going back to all of that. My parents were even both there when we finished it off, and Wes and our stunt coordinator Glenn Suter. “But I had a tremendous amount of support through it. “Just getting back to the set, putting the clothes back on, getting back to the movie there was a lot of eeriness to it,” O’Brien, now 26, continues. I’d always known that that was going to be a piece of it, I’d always known that that was going to be not fun for me, and a challenge. “The accident happened when we were filming the opening sequence,” in which O’Brien’s Thomas and other resistors try to rescue captives of the oppressive WCKD organization from a speeding train, the actor recalls. Photo credit: Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.