Black Widow's Taskmaster Tank Was Actually Driven Around on Set

In Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) are chased through Budapest by Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), but this isn't an ordinary foot chase. Taskmaster goes after the pair in a tank, making the chase all the more pulse-pounding and while it would be easy to assume that Taskmaster's tank was mostly VFX, it turns out that it was actually a practical tank that was driven around set. Chris Hammack, VFX Supervisor of Industrial Light & Magic told ComicBook.com that while there was a digital version created for some fill in shots, the tank was mostly practical and operable.

"It's actually mostly practical," Hammack said. "I believe Paul Corbould and his team built three versions of a practical tank that ran with truck racing engines. And it was pretty amazing, and we were able to go to Budapest and close down a relatively major street. And there were 'crash' vehicles out there, that it could run into practically, and basically over and over again. It was pretty amazingly operable, I should say. We did a digital version of it, to fill in shots and do some CG cars for it to run over, do the bigger distraction bits. It was a mixture, but it was mostly practical."

Of course, just because it was a practical vehicle that could be driven doesn't mean that just anyone got to do so. Hammack said that he did try but wasn't allowed to and explained that the tank had a very limited area of visibility.

"Tried very hard, very hard," he said when asked if he tried to convince anyone to let him drive the tank. "No, it was driven from the interior with just a very thin slit of visibility. So, as much as I would love to, in a foreign country, where I could get thrown in jail and actually stay for a while? No."

And it wasn't just Taskmaster's tank that had a sense of practicality or plausibility to it in Black Widow. VFX supervisor Geoffrey Bauman also told ComicBook.com that the film hired special consultants to determine if the film's Red Room could actually be operable in real-life.

"I think one thing that we did kind of chat about is, okay, 'How high could it [the Red Room] be, in order to sustain a two-minute free fall? I think it was 20,000 feet or just below that, where you could buy the fact somebody could still be breathing, they don't need any oxygen," Bauman said. "It'd be very cold, and it would give us enough scream time to possibly buy the descent. So, that's a simple example, as far as you know, something like that goes."

Black Widow is now streaming on Disney+.