"We did it twice," he explained. "Once in a big area … a runway, because we had to check that when it got blown over that it stayed straight. Because obviously if it gets halfway up and falls to the side -- we were in the middle of the Chicago banking district -- it would've gone through a bank's window. So we had to flip it once in rehearsal to check the pressure on the ram and then we went down to the street -- it was La Salle -- and we did it. We actually flipped the truck and it was standing again. It's like 54-feet in the air when it's at the top of it."
By the way, the rig wasn't remote-controlled or CGI'd or anything like that -- an actual person was behind the wheel. And he sounds like he's a bit of a superhero himself.
"There's a real guy driving that," says Jennings. "Jim Wilkey. A great old stunt character from L.A. He's always chewing tobacco and spits [it] on the ground. He's walking up and down before he's doing his stunt. He's walking to the point where he's going to press the button. [Makes spitting sound.] It's just really cool to see him. He just got in the car. We had to be careful about the sewer and stuff and all the pipes under the road because a pipe was coming out with a hundred tons of pressure and if we got in the wrong place it would blow through the road and put a wedge in the road and stop the truck. So we had to find a part of the road where it didn't have any wires or drains so that it didn't punch through [it]. He just pressed the button and over he went."
As cool, calm and collected as a veteran like Wilkey may be, Jennings is fully aware that any stunt -- particularly something as enormous as the truck gag -- could conceivably go wrong at any time.
"When we're doing stunts," he says, "I always say to the boys, 'The first thing that a stunt coordinator wants, what I want to see is that the guys put their thumbs up -- "I'm okay."' Then after that if the shot went wrong or right -- you want it to go right and that's great, but you want to see that the boy is O.K. So I want a really early thumbs up. And all the guys that go running in, the first thing that I say to them is, 'Give me a thumbs up.' And if you don't get a thumbs up early you're in with the paramedics and you're in with the firemen and you're getting them out. So safety first all the time. When you're doing a stunt like that, the good stuntmen know what they have to do. You've just got to focus on what you've got to do. You concentrate on what you've got to do. You don't think about the negatives because you've covered all the negatives -- what if, what if, what if. 'I've got this in place. I've got this in place. I've got to do this. This is just what I've got to do.' You focus on that and then do it."
So how scary and nerve-wracking is it to put a stunt like that together?
"There's a point being where that's as nervous as you can get and that's as scared as you can be and then you've just got to focus on the job at hand and not let the fear [and panic in]," he explains. "Or not let the fear stop you doing what you need to do. … That's how you make mistakes. That's why a good stuntman can be really afraid and still do it."
