Keanu Reeves and his co-star Sandra Bullock caused a major traffic jam while filming the 1994 action film, Speed.
The now-iconic action thriller follows a bus that’s been rigged to explode if the speed drops below 55 MPH. Reeves stars as a LAPD officer trying to diffuse the high-stakes situation. Bullock costars as a passenger who takes the wheel after the bus driver is killed.
During a panel interview at Beyond Fest 2024 celebrating the 30th anniversary of Jan de Bont’s blockbuster, the costars reflected on how maneuvering one of the buses in the film led to car accidents in real life.
“Don’t you remember that day on the bus, though?” Reeves asks Bullock onstage. “When we were crashing through all the cars on the street? I remember we were a little under-informed. We were all on the bus and then we were driving down by San Diego or something. We were set by the ocean, and all of a sudden, we’re actually hitting cars. Boom! Boom!”
Luckily, no one was hurt during the filming. The film had paramedics, fire extinguishers, a stunt safety team, and fire suits on set.
“If I see any problem that there’s any problem whatsoever, if for any reason I see a wheel drop off the bus or whatever, I’m just going to yell ‘LEAVE! LEAVE! Leave!” the film’s director Jan de Bont tells the crew through a bullhorn in behind-the-scenes footage.
Speed used 12 differnt buses for the production of the film. Some of them were rigged with nearly 24 cameras to capture all the chaos happening inside and outside of the bus. However, none of the real-life accidents seem to have made it into the final cut of the film.
Did the Production of the Film Cause the Car Accidents?
While Bullock was behind the wheel in the film, she was not really driving the buses on camera for the safety of the cast and crew. Still, not everything went according to plan.
“The fun part was that I was at the helm of the bus, but in the back, there was someone driving along the roof. Someone was driving, and I was being careened into whatever [director] Jan [de Bont] felt I needed to smash into,” Bullock said in the Beyond Fest 2024 panel. “But never, never [was I actually driving]. I did get my Santa Monica bus driver’s license. I did! It’s not an easy vehicle to maneuver.”
In one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, the bus has to jump a 50-foot gap in the freeway. The scene was filmed by actually jumping a bus on the intersections of Interstate-105 and Interstate-110 in Los Angeles. In the film’s director’s commentary, Jan de Bont says he had noticed a portion of the freeway was still under construction, promoting him to add the famed bus jump scene to the script.
In order to shoot the scene, production crew designed an intricate harness system for the actors so that they would be suspended in the air during the impact to prevent injury. The scene took weeks of preparation.
Will the Cast Return for Speed 3?
When asked if the they would consider returning to the franchise for a third installment, the actors said it “would require a lot from everybody.”
“I don’t know if we’re in an industry anymore that’s willing to tolerate it and be brave enough to do it. Maybe I could be wrong. … If [Jan de Bont] can’t make [what’s in his brain] for the audience, then he’s failed… I don’t know what we could do that would be good enough for the audience.”
Apparently it was. Film critic Robert Ebert calls the movie an “ingenious, wind-up machine” and a “smart, inventive thriller.”
In an interview naming his top 20 all-time favorite films, Director Quentin Tarantino said “there’s really been few exhilaration movies quite like it.”
Twenty years later, Speed rocks a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
