Here’s why Marvel’s ‘Thunderbolts*’ wanted Utah as the backdrop for a major car chase stunt

What does it take to wreck three Humvees and flip a limousine end-to-end on a stretch of Utah highway?

A great deal of planning and an experienced crew of stunt performers and coordinators, says director Jake Schreier, who oversaw the stunt sequence 10 months ago on a closed road near Green River — all for a sequence in the newest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, “Thunderbolts*.”

The bulk of the Marvel movie, which debuted worldwide on May 2, was shot on soundstages in Georgia, but three weeks of production took place in Utah — specifically in Emery and Grand counties.

The movie, which made $76 million last weekend to top the U.S. box office chart, depicts some of Marvel’s anti-heroes — bad guys and morally ambiguous figures such as Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the Red Guardian (David Harbour) and others — joining forces to take down a more dangerous threat to the world, and possibly finding some redemption for past sins.

The scenes shot in Utah show Belova, the Red Guardian and two others — John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a defrocked former Captain America, and Ava Starr, the phase-shifting Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) — escaping a secret black ops site in the mountains, then having to dodge heavily armored Humvees. Stan’s Bucky also factors into the car chase.

Schreier, in an interview, said he loves the landscapes of the southwestern United States, and wanted to film the sequence somewhere desolate.

Brian Chapek, one of the film’s executive producers, told the Utah Film Commission last year that “the Utah locations we scouted felt untouched by the larger world.”

Chapek also suggested the production’s working title, designed to keep the curious from knowing which Marvel characters might be nearby. The working title was “Oops, All Berries,” a reference to a Cap’n Crunch spinoff that only has berry-flavored pieces. The production kept the joke going during filming; “We had boxes of cereal on the set,” Schreier said.

Usually, Schreier said, a studio would want to shoot redrock scenes in New Mexico, which has a more generous tax incentive for movie productions. But Schreier pushed for Utah.

The film’s production designer, Schreier said, really liked the color palette of the rock formations around Green River, “where the red goes into the gray, and even a little bit of blue or cyan.” He added that he felt lucky that Marvel’s bosses would let that kind of esthetic consideration factor into the choice of a location.

Filming “Thunderbolts*” wasn’t Schreier’s first visit to Utah. His near-future comedy-drama “Robot & Frank” premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and Schreier said he has fond memories of the first screening in the Park City Library and later taking the movie up to a festival audience in Ogden.

It’s also not Schreier’s first time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of his college roommates is Jon Watts, who directed all three of the Tom Holland-starring “Spider-Man” movies. And Schreier said he helped with some second-unit work on Watts’ “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

The production of “Thunderbolts*” spent three weeks in Utah, two of them filming the stunt sequence, Schreier said. Marvel closed off an area with what looks in the finished film like a pretty beat-up stretch of road.

In fact, Schreier said, the road was too beat-up to safely execute the car stunts. “We had to repave about a third of a mile of it, then paint it to look like it was unpaved,” he said.

Schreier praised the stunt crew, and name-dropped a little about them. One stunt coordinator, he said, has also been Scarlett Johansson’s stunt double for years. (Pugh’s Yelena is the adopted sister of Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow.) Another major figure on the stunt team has worked for years with director Christopher Nolan, he said.

The sequence was planned out carefully, he said, with storyboards to visualize every part of the stunt. The goal was to capture as much of the stunt work in camera, as it was happening, and keep the computer graphics to a minimum.

The actors were on hand, and shot some dialogue in the limousine as the unmarked Humvees are chasing and shooting at them. Their challenge was to deliver their lines without mistakes, because time is money on a film set.

“The road was only long enough that we could get three takes before we had to turn around,” Schreier said. But the actors relished the challenge and performed their scenes flawlessly.

The cast loved being in Utah, Schreier added, especially after months cooped up on Georgia soundstages. Pugh went zip-lining in Moab on one of her days off, he said, and the cast got to attend a rodeo.

Schreier took an editing team to Green River, “so we could edit as we went,” he said. If the editors saw they needed another shot to fill in a gap, the production crew could shoot it before leaving town.

“By the time we left,” Schreier said, “we had the whole sequence pretty much edited.”