10 Insane Movie Stunts They Filmed FOR REAL

10. Plane Hijack - The Dark Knight Rises

Starting off the list is Christopher Nolan, who has always been a major advocate of completing action stunts within camera. As a director given free rein to do whatever he wants, the ambitious lengths he goes to with each major release remain consistently high.

For the final entry in his superb Dark Knight Trilogy, he wanted to take on a massive set piece that would establish the enormous scale of the production while also introducing its lead antagonist, Tom Hardy's Bane.

The sequence in which the villain makes a death-defying aerial escape was filmed in Scotland in 2011. The six-minute scene involved two planes and took three days to film. The smaller plane we find Bane in was actually a massive turbo-prop that was towed along behind the larger C130 Hercules.

From that larger craft, four stuntmen on wires dropped onto the CIA plane, who then took apart the turbo-prop to simulate the plane losing its tale. Finally, this remaining "fuselage" was dropped to the ground in a vertigo inducing shot. With these external shots completed, the final piece was the action inside the plane.

For the interior, a separate set was built so the actors could perform their action shootouts without being miles above the ground. With this set of shots being seamlessly blended with the outdoor footage, the end result is a sublime opening.