Among the most challenging and death-defying stunts ever filmed is the subway crash in Die Hard with a Vengeance. Not wanting to settle for optics or models, the filmmakers searched in vain for a New York stage large enough to accommodate the stunt.

They moved to Charleston, South Carolina to an empty General Dynamics plant that is still the largest building in the state. The crew built a true-to-life New York City subway station, complete with real subway cars purchased from the New York City Transit Authority and a quarter-mile of train track.

Special effects coordinator Phil Cory's most complicated task was to create an unprecedented stunt in which a detonated bomb causes the last car of a train entering a subway station to derail and speed onto a platform full of waiting commuters. The production had every detail of the stunt worked out prior to filming, and McTiernan had five cameras rolling.

Stunt personnel were warned that the train would be traveling at 40 mph and that if they fell, very little could be done to help them. "We had it controlled with a computer," explains Cory. "When the train was flying around the station, we knew exactly where it was going. We had programmed in the speed, and a set time when it was going to swing around and where it was going to end."

The end result is a white-knuckle experience like no other.

The Making of Die Hard With A Vengeance (10fps 2.1mb)