Ethan Hawke's Nail-Biting New Thriller Stole a Movie Magic Trick from Indiana Jones

"Every day presented some kind of riddle"

The day before he filmed The Weight's most intense scene, Ethan Hawke gave himself a minor injury.

"For a variety of dumb reasons, I pulled my hamstring," Hawke tells Polygon.

So there he was, way out alone in the middle of a rickety (but safe) rope bridge, catching giant fake gold bricks and throwing them to the other side while the camera rolled.

"When you're falling all over the ropes over a couple days, it really starts to hurt a lot," Hawke says. "But I loved doing it because I believed in the movie and we had this great group of people around and our director was incredible."

Let's rewind for a second. In director Padraic McKinley's new gritty historical drama, The Weight, Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, a down-and-out single father who gets separated from his young daughter and sent to a brutal work camp in 1930s Oregon. Murphy soon befriends the manipulative warden (Russell Crowe), who offers him early release in exchange for a favor: smuggle several bags of gold bars out of a mine before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal goons can seize them, and deliver the goods to a secret dropoff point.

Murphy is joined by three other inmates, two untrusting gold miners, and an Indigenous runaway (Julia Jones) who catches them on their way out of the mining camp and decides to tag along. The group meets plenty of deadly obstacles along the way, both natural and human, but the most difficult challenge is without question that perilous rope bridge. It's too flimsy to hold the weight of more than one man at once, so Murphy agrees to stand in the middle of the bridge as they toss the gold bars across one by one. If he lets even one drop, he might as well just jump over the edge with it.

It's a scene that evokes William Friedkin's iconic action thriller Sorcerer, although that movie involved driving an entire truck over a perilous rope bridge, and McKinley is leaning into the comparisons.

"We took much more of a cue from the Sorcerers of the world," he says, in a nod to both the parallel bridge scenes and the deep green vegetation that fills the screen for most of both movies.

The Weight was filmed in Germany (mostly the Bavarian region), and McKinley's crew scouted all over the region to find the right spot for a rope bridge.

"Then we had to figure out how to build it," the director says. "Our production designer, Cora Pratz, was able to build this bridge that was stable and safe, but really swung, and you could go over, no problem. All the gaps in it were bigger than your foot. So if you didn't watch your step, you were falling through."

It was a fully functional bridge, but one side was anchored securely into the ground, while the other looked more natural — and dangerous. That meant McKinley could only shoot in one direction (facing away from the anchor), which required some camera trickery.

"Se shot one group of people throwing the gold bricks this way, and then we switched out the backgrounds a little and shot the other people," McKinley says. "Ethan basically just turned around."

"It wasn't without its own set of treachery, but it wasn't quite as bad as it looks — a little bit of movie magic."

"We were out there"

The bridge scene might serve as The Weight's nailbiting centerpiece, but the entire movie is full of tense moments that were difficult for the entire cast.

"Pretty much every scene in this movie was stressful and difficult," Hawke says. "Every day presented some kind of riddle that was much more difficult than I had imagined."

Even just the experience of walking in the forest became its own type of challenge.

"As we filmed we'd get banged up," Jones says. "So the further we got into production, it did feel like we were getting deeper and deeper into the woods, but also, you have a sprained ankle now because of the jump you took yesterday. The irony of it is, that's helpful as an actor, given the script."

"It was the constant day after day of a new challenge that got really hard," Hawke chimes in. "Even if it's just hiking a mountain. To get a shot where you can't see anything means we have to be in the middle of nowhere. A lot of that was really fun. I look back so fondly on the talks we all had when we were getting ready to do shoots and walking through the woods. It's fun in hindsight, but in the moment, there was the fear that something would go terribly wrong."

Shooting deep in the forest also helped the cast immerse themselves in The Weight's historical setting of 1930s America.

"We were out in the middle of nowhere and away from our own lives and away from cell service," Hawke says. "It's very easy to transport your mind back in time."

"We were out there," McKinley confirms.

"We borrowed from the best"

For McKinley, the challenge wasn't just braving the woods long enough to make a movie, it was figuring out a way to turn all those locations into a believable stand-in for the wilds of Oregon. The solution came from a surprising classic movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

"We looked at Indiana Jones, where they shot it in three different countries, three different locations," McKinley says. "We borrowed from the best, and we took some angles that they used in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There's three VFX shots in it. The rest is all practical."

The Weight is in theaters now.