Prague’s cobblestone streets and old buildings do indeed evoke the spirit of The Third Man in the series of shots that open XXX. "First, there’s a really low, long-lens tracking close-up of feet walking along at night, followed by a shot of this same spy heading toward a cathedral, where we crane up to reveal the whole square," Semler details. "We shot at about 4 a.m. and I underlit those fabulous buildings with Open-Eye 10Ks and 5Ks; I then sent Richard Merryman and Fred McLane up 120 feet in a Condor, way up in the freezing cold. They got a wonderful wide shot of the square as this tiny, ant-like figure walks across it; all I had on him were a couple of 20Ks placed way across the square at ground level, plus a bit of ambience from the [practical] sodium lights, and I shot it wide open on the Primos."

After stealing a chip from an unlucky fellow in an alley, the spy ducks into a cathedral to escape the foes trailing him and finds himself in a Gothic nightclub filled with enemy agents. "We shot that sequence in a 600-year-old, desanctified church just outside of Prague," Semler recalls. "It had a massive, 70-foot ceiling. The whole place was lit with fire; special-effects supervisor John Frazier and his crew put huge flame bars along the walls 20 feet up, and on stage was a German industrial band called Rammstein, which was performing with its own, full-on pyrotechnics — including strap-on trumpets that blow fire about 20 feet in the air! The band’s crew lit the stage with their rock ’n’ roll package, and I checked the levels. The rest of the cathedral was lit by firelight and a dozen or so Very Narrow Par lights that [rigging gaffer] Johnny Martens and [best boy] Joey Martens had rigged with the great Czech electricians.

"Our spy makes his way through the crowd of 500 or 600 people, but he eventually gets taken out by the villain [played by Marton Csokas], who we first see sitting up on a balcony high above the stage at the back of the cathedral," Semler continues. "Rob wanted to do a shot sweeping up from the floor to the balcony using our Technocrane, but it didn’t reach high enough. So we got another crane out of Germany that had a 48-foot reach and put it on tracks on the ground. My dolly grips, Jeffrey ‘Moose’ Howery and John Murphy, tracked in and craned up into a tight close-up of Marton in the balcony. Tony Rivetti was in a separate scissorlift off to the side riding remote focus, since he needed to be at the actors’ eye level.

"I lit the balcony by again using firelight, this time from the torches on either side, all the way down the length of the cathedral. They just kept spurting, two seconds on and two seconds off, and we played them like an orchestra. I augmented the firelight a bit with my own simulated fire if I had to, but I generally didn’t use anything else.

"Shooting interiors by firelight was trying because of the heat generated by the mass of fire," Semler adds. "There was no ventilation or circulation in the place. Even though it was about 10-below and snowy outside, it was close to 130 degrees up on the balcony!"

Another challenging sequence finds Cage and the mysterious Yelena (Asia Argento) racing in a Pontiac GTO to keep tabs on an unmanned boat loaded with chemical weapons that’s speeding down a river. Cohen wanted to use the Mic Rig, the Academy Award-winning rig originally designed by Mic Rodgers for The Fast and The Furious, which combines a tow vehicle and an insert car. (Cohen bought the rig and now leases it out; see Production Slate, May ’01). "By the time you put people and lights on a regular insert car and add the car with the actors, it becomes a huge rig, and speed and cornering must be handled with caution," Semler explains. "The Mic Rig was a truck that was cut and stripped down so all that was left was the cabin. The back was flattened and lowered so the insert car could sit on it with its wheels actually rolling on the ground. A stuntman drove the Mic Rig at real speed, and the GTO was able to drive like a regular car up to at least 60 miles per hour, take corners at speed, back up, stop and turn without hassles. Vin and Asia were in the car, and it’s totally real — the background is screeching by behind them, which really gives that footage high energy. It must be so much better for the actors, too, because they’re actually feeling it. They’re low to the ground, they’re driving a car and it’s fast."

Of course, the actors are looking at the back of the truck rather than the open road, "and there are a bunch of people sitting there with cables and lights," Semler notes with a laugh. "We were loaded up with three cameras, one mounted on the side and two up front, with an operator and a focus puller on each of the front cameras. Plus, we had two special-effects guys, the sound guy and Rob all traveling at 40 to 60 miles per hour down that little road. There was only about four feet of working space at the back of the cabin, where the cameras and the lights were. I used two 2500-watt Pars powered by two 5K generators mounted behind the cabin with a 216 or a light gridcloth frame to create soft fill in the car interior. I also had a couple of Kino Flos hidden in the back to light the backseat up a bit when it opens up and reveals a huge assortment of weaponry. Knowing that the natural light would be changing as the rig traveled the route, I’d take a rough guess at the average stop, send the boys on their way and keep my fingers crossed.

"We used long lenses rather than going too wide, and we found once again that the rougher it was, the better, so we kept the shake, rattle and roll going," he continues. "Sometimes the image almost strobed vertically from the vibration. That rig is a great invention, because it really gives a whole new dimension to speed. We also strapped Marko and Tony into Danny Wayans’ great motorcycle rig, which he’d brought over from the States. We used that primarily for fast profile, ‘unattached’ traveling shots at high speeds."

The film’s seemingly endless barrage of action setpieces — which include a parasail landing on a runaway boat, a snowboard racing just inches ahead of a landslide, and a car’s death-defying dive off a bridge and into a gorge — demanded the talents of not only Hollywood’s finest special-effects artists and stuntmen, but also genuine extreme-sports athletes. "I went to the X-Games and met Sean Palmer and Mat Hoffman before we even started writing the script, just to get the vibe of what their lives were about," Cohen says. "Once they saw how real I wanted to make this movie, they had unbridled zeal."

In fact, many X-Game contestants, including Tony Hawk, Carey Hart, Rick Thorne, Jason Ellis, Mike Jones, Larry Linkogle and Jeremy "Twitch" Stenberg, appear in XXX as characters, or as Diesel’s doubles. But when things got too dangerous, the filmmakers turned to visual-effects artists at Digital Domain for assistance. "The challenge was that we had a monolithic character who’s supposed to have an extreme variety of skills," Cohen says. "We had to make Vin Diesel into a champion motocross freestylist, free-climber, skateboarder, skyboarder and extreme snowboarder without killing him or making him look silly. I sat down with [visual-effects supervisor] Joel Hynek, Nancy Bernstein and Kelly Lestrange at Digital Domain and said, ‘I don’t want to hear the word ‘greenscreen,’ so no cutting from the wide shot of a double into what I always call ‘Elvis on a surfboard.’ I made my own Vin-like Draco [the CG creature in Cohen’s Dragonheart], and we could place him in close-up in all the action and keep him safe. We’re talking about 316 visual-effects shots that go far beyond normal face replacement!"