One of the things that the marketing for Netflix’s upcoming Heart of Stone has been leaning into is the team’s insistence on keeping its premise and stunts grounded. To that end, both director Tom Harper and star Gal Gadot have emphasized the importance of keeping things as realistic and believable as possible, at least as much as a franchise of this nature permits (yes, Heart of Stone is intended to be a franchise). In this piece, I wanted to lay out the approaches taken by the filmmaking team to achieve this level of groundedness as well as creating a world where things felt tangibly real.
Let’s start with Gadot. In an exclusive for Empire featuring a new, explosive still, the magazine dived into the specifics of the stunt. Gadot then revealed that the sequence in question was a lot crazier, until they dialed it down by several notches to bring it to a state where it felt believable and something that a skilled human could possibly do, without resorting to superhero levels of action.
That could be done by people. The scene was even crazier, at a higher altitude, and we got into the science of it and dialled it down so that a human could do it. That was something I wanted to really make sure we nailed.
With the unbelievability of such stunts, the question arises of who’s actually performing them. Comparisons to other franchise stars such as Tom Cruise are inevitable, more so given that the marketing has been comparing their movie to heavyweight franchises in this genre such as Mission: Impossible, the Bourne series or the James Bond series of films. Gadot was naturally quizzed about how much of the stunt does she perform herself, and how far does the stunt team let her go before taking over. The answer is balancing a bit of both.
What I can do as an actor, I’ll always go for it and do that. To fight with intention and really perform that. But the crazy, crazy stuff, I can’t, they won’t let me. I worked with very familiar stunt teams, though. They became like family to me.
In another feature with EW, Harper similarly talked about their emphasis on making this film as grounded as possible. He brought up Gadot’s previous films, suggesting that there’s a heightened level of groundedness here compared to those other entries that went all in on the action.
She’s obviously worked in the more heightened films, be that Wonder Woman, or Fast & Furious, or even Red Notice to a degree. She and I really wanted to make this a more grounded character that is very much rooted to this world so that she was relatable, that she was human, that she bleeds. She has emotions, she finds things difficult. It’s not straightforward. The relationships were real and there was always a sort of emotional reality all the way through. We do some extreme things within the movie, but we’ve tried to keep it as close to reality as possible while still maintaining that elevated action feel.
While all this talk of keeping things grounded is exciting, the first look behind the scenes featurette that Netflix had dropped told a different story altogether. With its high-octane chases, bike stunts, and halo jumps, it felt far from the “grounded” narrative that the marketing seems to be pushing. In fact, the featurette felt like a bizarre cacophony of sequences that were edited by two separate teams. Let’s hope the first Heart of Stone trailer that, I’m guessing should be due any time now given the movie’s impending release date, does a much better job of convincing us of the movie’s grounded intentions.
Heart of Stone is slated to premiere on Netflix on August 11, 2023. Directed by Tom Harper, the movie stars Gal Gadot as Rachel Stone with Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, Matthias Schweighöfer, Jing Lusi, Paul Ready, Jon Kortajarena, Matteo Cicconi, and Angela Esposito.
