10 Movie Scenes Shot For Real

There are so many incredible stunts in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and also so many seamless visual effects that it's easy to take some of the slightly less-spectacular practical work for granted.

One of the movie's most under-appreciated yet mind-bogglingly impressive practical stunts occurs during the climactic third-act chase where the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) is pursing the heroes in a commandeered police helicopter.

There's a heart-stopping beat where the T-1000 nonchalantly flies the chopper underneath a freeway overpass with mere feet between the helicopter's rotor and the bridge above it.

Though it's easy to assume there was some state-of-the-art trickery at play here, the brief beat was shot with no Hollywood tricks whatsoever - that's literally a stunt pilot flying a chopper four feet off the ground while riding under an overpass with a miniscule margin of error.

In T2's DVD commentary, Cameron confirmed that the appointed camera crew actually refused the shoot the scene because it was so dangerous, and so Cameron resorted to grabbing a camera and filming it himself with a crew member driving the chase car.

There's a reason why helicopters are almost always CGI in movies these days - they're a total pain in the ass logistically, and it's incredibly easy for even a basic stunt to go horribly wrong.

That this was done for real without any injury or loss of life is, frankly, astonishing.