Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse arrived in theaters over the weekend, and the follow-up to 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past brings back one of that film’s standout characters in Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, a mutant with super speed whose ability makes for some of the franchise’s most impressive action sequences.
After playing a supporting role in Days of Future Past, Quicksilver plays a more prominent part in Apocalypse and steals the show yet again with another fantastic sequence that showcases his incredible speed (and sense of humor). A new video released by 20th Century Fox offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the wild scene that takes everything audiences loved about the “Time in a Bottle” sequence in Days of Future Past and shifts it into an even higher gear.
Of course, if you haven’t seen X-Men: Apocalypse yet and want to avoid spoilers, you’ll probably want to stop here — but if you have seen the film and (like us) are wondering how that Quicksilver scene was made, read on and watch the video.
And now that we’ve got the spoiler warning out of the way …
In the scene featured in the video, Quicksilver finds himself evacuating Charles Xavier’s school full of mutants as an explosion destroys the entire building. Peters’ character goes room to room, floor by floor, removing students from the building as the inferno slowly creeps through the structure. Much like in the Days of Future Past sequence, time has essentially stopped around Quicksilver, who’s able to step on flying debris, run around the walls of the room, and make ever-so-slight adjustments to objects and their trajectories that yield big results when he finally slows down.
To create Quicksilver’s “Extraction” sequence for the film, Singer and his team used special cameras propelled along tracks at almost 90 miles per hour through the mansion set. The cameras filmed at a rate of 3,000 frames per second, allowing the team to add Quicksilver and his acrobatic movements to scenes that took only an instant to occur in the real world, but spanned more than 15 seconds on the screen.
Directed by Singer, X-Men: Apocalypse is in theaters now.
