How the New Point Break Stayed True to Its Adrenaline-Junkie Roots

The remake of the surf and skydive heist movie is opening Christmas Day.

It was a really intensely scary experience,” says actress Teresa Palmer of filming a long underwater sequence for Point Break, a remake of the seminal 1991 surf-and-skydive heist movie, opening on Christmas Day.

“I’m totally scared of the water. I’m the polar opposite of most Aussies I know. But I had to film a sequence where Luke [Bracey] and I were under the water for hours and hours at a time. I certainly had to face my fears.” That kind of daring seems to be the guiding principle behind director Ericson Core’s reimagining, which, in featuring a variety of extreme sports—including big-wave surfing, mountain climbing, and wing-suit gliding—places a premium on on-location shots and practical stunts.

“Everything we did was authentic,” says Core. “We’ve done essentially no greenscreen, C.G.I. work at all.” Capturing that kind of realism meant traveling to many far-flung locales, from massive swells off the coast of Tahiti to Venezuela’s vertiginous Angel Falls to the stormy peak of Mont Blanc. Filming in those treacherous, hard-to-reach places “makes [acting] easier because you don’t have to imagine anything,” says Édgar Ramírez, who plays criminal-mastermind surfer-philosopher Bodhi, a part made famous by the late, great Patrick Swayze. Staging all these intense, physical scenes meant a lot for the actors personally too. “It was a lifetime’s worth of experience in six months,” says Bracey, who takes over for Keanu Reeves as undercover F.B.I. agent Johnny Utah. “Hanging about 3,000 feet above the earth off Angel Falls was something I’ll never forget. I don’t think my heart’s raced that fast, ever. And I don’t know that it ever will.

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