Dwayne Johnson Shares a 3,000 Foot View of Skyscraper

Costars Dwayne Johnson and Neve Campbell, along with director Rawson Marshall Thurber, dish on how their upcoming blockbuster Skyscraper is changing the game in this new featurette.

“Will Sawyer is a special character because when we meet him, he’s an amputee, and he’s just trying to put his life back together, and the guy’s struggling,” Johnson says about his upcoming role. The actor has publicly shown how seriously he is taking playing an amputee, as heroic characters are not often depicted missing any limbs. But if this action-packed, crane-jumping, tower-dangling footage has anything to show, Johnson is certainly doing the job right.

“We’re serving up something different with Skyscraper. There’s a feeling that you get because a lot of the action takes place three thousand feet in the sky, upside down. I’m in real jeopardy,” Johnson adds. Action movies have taken place in basically every conceivable setting, but very few have featured most of their runtime within a skyscraper. Tom Cruise scaled part of the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, but Skyscraper one-ups even that by setting up the titular tower for destruction. And, obviously, 1974’s The Towering Inferno comes to mind, but the limited special effects of its time gave that movie only a fraction of the potential Skyscraper has to give us vertigo.

“That’s something I haven’t seen before, and was really excited about. It’s pretty intense,” director Rawson Marshall Thurber mentions about creating the visual experience of action sequences at unthinkable heights. The film is set in Hong Kong, which boasts some exceptionally tall buildings, but most of the shoot actually took place in Vancouver. Presumably, none of the movie’s high-danger scenes were actually shot at the dizzying heights we see in the trailers, but if anything, that’s a credit to Thurber. Shots of Johnson outside the tower look about as real as it gets, and there’s no doubt that the writer/director has more awe-inspiring spectacle in store for the movie’s finale.

Skyscraper explodes into theaters July 13.

Featured Image: Global icon DWAYNE JOHNSON leads the cast of Legendary’s “Skyscraper” as former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader and U.S. war veteran Will Sawyer. Photo Credit: Universal Pictures and Legendary Pictures Productions, LLC.