How 'Ant-Man And The Wasp' Filmed San Francisco Car Chase Scenes

Ant-Man and The Wasp featured some of the most creative car chase sequences from Marvel Studios to date, as computerized size-shifting and San Francisco city streets dominated the screen. Director Peyton Reed prides himself on how practical the shoot was, despite much of the size-manipulation requiring effects work, after the fact.

"We filmed a lot in San Francisco," Reed told ComicBook.com. "The SUV flip is an all-practical SUV that we flipped down that hill. If you go online, somewhere early on where we were still shooting, there's all this sort of people hanging out their apartment windows, watching us catapult that thing down there. So it is a combination of CG cars and real cars, but the bulk of it was built on doing real car stuff. Any time when Hank Pym's van, when Hope is driving it through the city, we were really doing that."

Of course, the Pym Particle hasn't yet been invented in our world (fingers crossed it comes along soon, though) but Reed and his crew had a tremendous experience creating the scenes which unleashed on cars in a location which hasn't been used for iconic chase scenes in some time.

"I have to be honest with you, when we started to design a thing that we were shooting in San Francisco, I had real reservations, or concerns rather, about whether the city was going to let us do some of this stuff," Reed said. "Luckily they said 'Yes.' Because there had been bad blood, I think, ever since Bogdanovich's movie What's Up Doc, where they were doing that crazy chase, and that was 1972. But the people in the San Francisco Film Commission, they'll go and they'll point to these concrete stairs and say, 'Okay, see those chips where the concrete is chipped away? That's from the Volkswagen in What's Up Doc,' and they've never repaired it since. They're very cautious about it."

In fact, the historic San Francisco streets weren't the only real icons Reed's team used in making Ant-Man and The Wasp.

"You know, we shot all that stuff down at the actual piers, and we shot on Lombard Street," Reed said. "Obviously we did not flip a car down Lombard Street, but we shot all the place and the action and stuff of the van coming down Lombard Street. So it is a combination of live action and CG."

Ant-Man and The Wasp and Avengers: Infinity War are now playing in theaters. Captain Marvel will follow it in March of 2019, with Avengers 4 coming in May of 2019 and Spider-Man: Far From Home slated for release on July 5, 2019.