Black Adam, Wonder Woman and Deadpool walk into a movie… When you have three of the world’s biggest action stars performing together, the pressure to deliver supersonic thrills is on. But for Red Notice’s supervising stunt coordinator, George Cottle, though, exploding cars and helicopter stand-offs are just another day at the office. With nearly three decades of experience, working on everything from the Harry Potter franchise to Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies — not to mention a handful of Marvel rumbles — Cottle knows how to craft fight scenes that leave an audience breathless. Still, even he’ll admit that working with Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds to film everything from a high-speed car chase hundreds of feet underground, to a slick fight atop vertiginous scaffolding, was a new and unexpected challenge.

“The hardest stunt was the scaffold-chase sequence,” Reynolds tells us about the latter. “That thing was rickety and terrifying, and I actually fell off once. There were drones flying all around me as well, which only further complicated the sequence.”

Here’s how Cottle pulled off the impossible.

What was the first thing that stood out to you when you read the script for Red Notice?

The fight in the display room, that was something I was really excited about. Purely because it’s three of the biggest movie stars on the planet fighting in a room together. And not just three movie stars who usually do Shakespearean shows. You’re talking about movie stars who have done huge action movies. That was incredibly exciting but also incredibly nerve-racking to know that we would have to put something forward that would make them all want to turn up that day and actually film it. That was a little bit daunting but incredibly fun.

Walk us through that scene. How does it get from concept to execution?

With a scene like the display room fight, it was something we started working on very early on, because we knew it would take a lot of finessing to get it to the final place. The way I like to work is that I’ll speak with [director] Rawson [Marshall Thurber], and we would shoot a rehearsal of what he wants. Then I would go away with my team, and we would block through what we think the action is. Another blessing that I had is that the three stunt doubles who helped put the fight together have been with these actors for many years. [Dwayne Johnson] has Tanoai [Reed], who’s been with him forever. Gal has Christiaan [Bettridge], who was with her on all the Wonder Woman stuff, and Jonny [James] has been with Ryan for years. We would put our edit together, I would then sit down with Rawson, let him watch it on a laptop. We would go back and forward with this maybe a dozen times. Then, Rawson would present it to the cast. We may have to make a few tweaks here and there, but that was kind of the general process of how we went about that huge sequence.

How much glass did you go through to shoot all those display cases exploding?

So much! We tried to be as diligent as possible because Gal was in bare feet. We can use rubber glass, but no matter how good you are at cleaning the floor, there’s always those tiny little shards. So, we decided very early on that we would kind of reverse engineer that. We would save the smashing of the glass and all that fun stuff until the end, when we’d shot everything else so we would keep Gal as safe as possible.

What was the most challenging stunt to choreograph and pull off?

We did a chase in a mine, and they actually found a real mine. This place is incredible. It’s literally something straight from an Indiana Jones movie. I’ve shot in [the state of] Georgia many, many, many times, and never even knew this place existed. It’s hundreds of feet below the surface, like 20 minutes to get down there. You have to do all of these crazy courses on [what to do] if there’s a collapse. The scary part is that they give you two dog tags, like in the military, and as you go in, you hang up your dog tag. So, if there was ever a problem — when you come out you take it — they know somebody’s still down there. We really did that car chase down in that mine, with the cars banging into each other, guys jumping across, the fighting, all the drone stuff.

What are the logistics of driving cars through a mine? Doesn’t that cause vibrations?

When I say “a mine,” it’s not like it was a small cave. They were driving huge dump trucks through. It’s massive. It already had an incredible ventilation system, and the guys that work in there drive great big construction machinery all over the place. So, to them it’s just another day at work. For us, it’s like, we’re going to go underground for 10 hours. The other blessing was that phones don’t work down there, so you had everyone’s complete attention. But it was an incredible experience, so much fun.

How many versions of that 1930s car did you have on hand?

Oh my god. I want to say we had three Mercedes, two that were stunt versions that we could kind of beat up, and then we had one hero car [the most complete version of the car that appears in the film]. And then we had five or six of the wagons, and we gave those a pretty hard time. They got beaten up pretty badly.

Originally, this was supposed to be an international shoot, but the pandemic restricted what was possible. How did that affect the stunts?

We had to pivot, because the original script had a huge car chase in Rome that would have been incredible. We even scouted Rome twice and it was very exciting. That was kind of a shame. When COVID hit, it was such a huge shock to everybody’s system. It was the first time in 25 years of me working in this industry that the film industry [couldn’t] work a way around this. [The shutdown] was incredibly sad, and it was a crazy time, but coming back, at that point, we were so excited to get back to work. Whatever the pivot had to be to make it work, we were going to make that happen. “We can’t do a car chase? We’re going to do a foot chase through a museum and a fight on a scaffolding.” Everybody did a really fantastic job of ducking left and punching right.

How did your experience on previous projects help you prepare for this one?

I’ve been really fortunate to work on some really great projects. I had just come off Tenet, straight onto Red Notice. You obviously want to bring a very fresh, new approach to everything, because the audiences are so used to seeing so much stuff. There’s so much content out there. What I felt was nice, especially with the cast that we had, is that they could bring so much more to the stunt package. Red Notice felt like a fun, old-school action movie. I said to Rawson very early on, “I don’t read anything in this script that we can’t do for real, in camera.” It just took me back to those great action movies. You’re doing it for real.

Obviously, because of COVID, we had to do a lot of CGI there because of the crowd scenes. But everything in the display room, we shot on camera. Those actors learned every single aspect of that fight. When we flipped the car end over end, we did that for real in the mine.

Last question: Who of those three actors kicks the highest?

Gal. Not even a question! The boys would be the first to admit: Leave the kicks to Gal. One of the first kicks is this combination, and it’s pretty impressive to watch. The strength you need in your body to do that...At that point, the two chaps were like, “Yup, okay, we’ll stick to punching.”