- Director Mark Molloy chose to use practical effects for the action scenes in “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.”
- Molloy aimed to replicate the brutal realism of the original ’80s films.
- “I wanted to take him down,” Molloy said. “The stakes are real, and the danger is real.”
At a time when everything from car chases to kisses in movies can be achieved with computer-generated visual effects, director Mark Molloy wanted to go against the grain with “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” by shooting all the action sequences with practical effects.
Molloy was set on his position from the start, when he had his first meetings with franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer and received the offer to direct the sequel, which had been in the works for decades.
“I went to Jerry and said, ‘I love this, but I want to do an ’80s action comedy, I want to shoot everything on camera,’” Molloy recalled to Business Insider during a recent Zoom conversation.
Although “Axel F” marks Molloy’s feature film directorial debut after decades of commercial work and television directing in his native Australia, the filmmaker knew immediately that the only way a fourth “Beverly Hills Cop” movie would work would be to stay true to the texture and attitude of the beloved first two films, which were box-office smashes and made Eddie Murphy a superstar in the late 1980s (let’s just forget there was a third movie).
“A lot of movies these days are so effects-driven that there’s a certain perfection,” he said. “I wanted it to be realistic. The stakes are real, and the danger is real. Like movies 1 and 2, they were brave movies.”
Bruckheimer loved the idea, which led Molloy to film Murphy driving a massive snowplow through rows of parked cars in Detroit and a scene in which they actually drove a car off the side of a building in Los Angeles.
“We had to shut down part of I-10 to do this,” Molloy said happily, referring to one of Los Angeles’ busiest freeways.
In this scene, Axel Foley’s daughter Jane, played by Taylour Paige (“Zola”), is visited by the film’s bad guys, who end up ripping the car off the side of the parking lot. (While doing this stunt for real was fun, Molloy pointed out that Paige was not in the car when this stunt was filmed. Safety first.)
“It was a perfect location that we found, but it’s literally right next to I-10, so we had to close off part of it, otherwise people were going to have accidents if they suddenly saw a car fall off the side of a building,” Molloy said.
But the helicopter scene is the one that keeps him awake at night. Toward the end of the film, Foley and Detective Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) steal a police helicopter to escape from Grant (Kevin Bacon), the corrupt police captain. Aside from interior shots of Murphy and Gordon-Levitt in the cockpit, the entire sequence uses a real helicopter that does everything from free-falling between buildings to flying so low that sparks fly as it skims the road. The sequence ends with the helicopter landing, not very gracefully, in front of Beverly Hills City Hall.
Looking back now, Molloy laughs in disbelief at how he approached such ambitious scenes. “It was a real challenge.”
“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” is now available on Netflix.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company Axel Springer, is a member of Netflix’s board of directors.
