From Vancouver to San Francisco to New Westminster. Alcatraz’s reenactment of the famous car chase from the 1968 movie Bullitt started in downtown Vancouver in an alley near Belkin House where the star of the chase, a Deep Blue Impact 2013 Mustang GT, sat ready for Sarah Jones’s Detective Madsen. Then onto to San Francisco for Det. Madsen in her borrowed ’13 Mustang GT to chase her Alcatraz convict grandfather Tommy Madsen on many of the same streets and with many of the same camera angles originally used in Bullitt. And back to New Westminster where Tommy Madsen’s car overturns and explodes in flames.
I’m kicking myself for missing the start of the chase at Belkin House on a Sunday in late February. I was focused on the action in front on Homer Street and not in the alley where the ’13 Mustang GT sat waiting for Sarah Jones. And while I heard about Alcatraz filming explosions in New Westminster the following weekend, I didn’t know they would be part of an epic car chase.
I didn’t get an inkling that Alcatraz was doing this Bullitt-style chase until a few days after the New Westminster shoot when I heard of filming in San Francisco and tweeted back and forth with some locals like Terrance Dunnigan (@tjdunnigan) about what they were seeing. Photographer Christiano Valli (@Cristi4novlli) uploaded some great shots on his *[C]*’s Flickr Photostream of the camera car and of the ’13 Mustang GT coming down a San Francisco hill. Sarah Jones did fly down to do some scenes but a blonde stunt double was the one driving the chase car for the sequence which took only three days to film instead of the ten needed to film the original Bullitt chase scene.
I wished they’d used the Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback that Sarah Jones’s character has been driving in Vancouver — the exact colour, make and model of the Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt — but its days of stunt driving are in the past where the ’63 Alcatraz convicts should be.
Here is a photo reenactment I put together using FOX’s Behind-the-Scenes Alcatraz photos (none of these photos are mine).
To New Westminster
Madsen vs Madsen in New Westminster
