A few months ago, I got lost during a bike ride in a rural area. Passing what appeared to be a warehouse, I went down the driveway hoping to find someone who could give me directions. At first sight, it reminded me of an auto repair shop, but there was a pristine quality to it, with some impressive, high-tech workmanship on display. The friendly man inside told me that the owner was in the movie business. He modified vehicles, called “car cams,” to film car scenes in movies.
On my way home, I reflected on how many movies I've seen that were made with such equipment, and how much better they look than the older ones in which directors like Alfred Hitchcock used studio techniques such as “rear projection” to simulate the feeling of vehicular motion while shooting on a sound stage.
Director Walter Hill displayed his mastery of car cams In The Driver (1978), starring Ryan O'Neal (known as “The Driver” in the film) and Bruce Dern as “The Detective.” The Driver’s car streaking and screeching its way around LA’s nocturnal streets supplies so much for the senses that director Hill knew he didn't need to supply much plot, dialogue, exposition, or even real names for his characters. O'Neal, whose character’s an archetype of the stoic antihero, says about 200 words in the entire film. The Driver's car, unlike Steve McQueen’s in Bullitt (a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback in Highland Green Metallic) isn't fancy. Sometimes he drives a red pickup truck in the getaways.
The Detective’s hot on his trail, so a vehicle that stands out is no good. The car’s such a versatile tool that a skilled director like Hill, who described his film as a “neo-noir existential western,” can build an entire film around one. The Driver remains a neglected masterpiece of pure, motion-filled simplicity.
The car chase scenes in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), starring McQueen, are more ballyhooed than those in cult classic The Driver, as is the film itself. Both deliver thrilling chases that showcase the driver’s and director’s skills. The hills of San Francisco make Bullitt’s car scenes more kinetic and identifiable, while The Driver’s chases are more varied and technical. In both of these films, the music-less scenes are gritty, not flashy like the slick opening car chase in Baby Driver (2017)—filmed so that every maneuver's timed to the beat of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms”—that feels like a high-octane music video for a song about fleeing from the law.
No discussion of the car chase scene is complete without discussing two films by William Friedkin, who considered them to be the purest form of cinema because they rely entirely on visual storytelling—movement, rhythm, framing, and editing—rather than dialogue or exposition. The French Connection has a chase scene, shot with handheld cameras and minimal rigging, so visceral that the viewer feels like they're in the passenger seat alongside detective "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman). Many critics consider it the best car chase scene in cinematic history, but Friedkin outdid himself in his underrated To Live And Die in LA, in which the chase unfolds across LA’s freeways, surface streets, and the concrete-lined Los Angeles River basin. The multi-vehicle pursuit—six minutes of raw action throughout the city’s urban sprawl— is at its most thrilling when the villain, Chance (Willem Dafoe), drives against oncoming traffic on a freeway. Cars swerve, honk, and crash as he weaves through the chaos in a battered sedan. The director knew that for a car chase scene to work, it has to be carefully choreographed while still feeling chaotic. In To Live And Die In L.A., he produced the most gripping car chase scene ever seen.
Cars propel plots forward, enabling escapes, pursuits, and journeys. In Five Easy Pieces—a “road movie,” but hardly a typical one—Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) takes a drive from California to Washington State with his clingy girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) in his aging Buick. It's a working-class kind of car signaling his disaffected, blue-collar lifestyle. The drive is the physical journey that he's making to undergo the spiritual journey of reuniting with his family. The fact that they're traveling by car introduces the possibility of random encounters, like the ones with the hitchhikers they pick up, and the famous diner scene. The car, unlike in Bullitt and The Driver, isn’t used to provide excitement. Instead, it's a “vehicle” that allows for the success of a loose narrative structure driven by character development rather than plot.
Wim Wenders is closely associated with cars, but in a different way from American filmmakers. He uses cars to explore his characters’ inner lives. Cars are essential to his work, because his characters are dislocated and perpetually on the way to “somewhere.” In Alice in the Cities (1974), a German journalist drives across America, and later Germany, with a young girl he's taking care of. The car becomes their temporary home, a private place where they connect as they drift. Hollywood uses cars to represent joyous freedom. Wenders’ cars communicate a sadder kind of freedom—one without a destination.
Filming characters inside the car with “interior shots” allows Wenders to create an intimacy that showcases personal interactions, emotions, and feelings of alienation. His exterior shots, in which the car is dwarfed by the sweeping landscape, display his characters' smallness and rootlessness. Wenders uses cars to explore the landscape by turning it into a dynamic part of the story rather than a fixed backdrop.
Wenders admired Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), another film built around cars. But Hellman takes a different approach in making the road a dangerous proving ground where skill and endurance are tested. Singer-songwriter James Taylor plays, just as in The Driver, a character known just as “The Driver,” and Beach Boys member Dennis Wilson plays his buddy, “The Mechanic.” The film features an American landscape of endless asphalt and heat as The Driver and The Mechanic, in their souped up ‘55 Chevy race “GTO” (Warren Oates) from New Mexico to Washington D.C. But the race isn't the centerpiece—the journey is. The winner is never revealed, arty touch that may have contributed to Two-Lane Blacktop’s flop at the box office. Nevertheless, it remains a must-see, original piece of art-house Americana.
Director Barry Levinson uses the car in Rain Man (1988) as a place of forced intimacy where two brothers—Charlie (Tom Cruise) and Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman)—drive from Cincinnati to Los Angeles and get to know each other. In Vanishing Point (1971), Vietnam war hero/pill-head Kowalski (Barry Newman) races toward self-destruction. His car becomes a coffin speeding through the American West.
In National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), the car’s an aesthetic joke, making it a source of humor. In Thelma & Louise (1991), the car represents liberation for two women Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) escaping abusive lives.
The car, along with the motel, the diner, and the bar, is one of the four pillars of American filmmaking. Directors can build entire films around them, as Barbet Schroeder did with bars in Barfly (1987). Alfred Hitchcock did it using a motel in Psycho (1960). In Diner (1982), Barry Levinson built his entire film around a diner. That's what filmmakers like Walter Hill, Wim Wenders, William Friedkin and Monte Hellman have done with cars.