Stunt coordinator Simon Crane sits down with MakingOf to talk about working with Angelina Jolie in Salt.

(MakingOf) What's the first thing you look or in action sequences, or just your role in general?

(Simon Crane) My role really sort of is to look at the action sequences.  Sometimes they're merely place holders for what we're really going to do, and try and come up with an action sequence that is character based and follows the tone of the film that they're going for.

(MO) What was the most challenging part for you in Salt?

(SC) The challenging part really was to come up with this tone.  We wanted to make it real, you know, we wanted to make a hard edged action film that was, you know, when you're dealing with a female, sort of, action hero, you need to tailor certain things to her physicality, but more importantly you can see where it would be great for your main star.  Like for Angelina there's one instance where she has to get a guy off of a motorbike, and in the script it was, oh she just pulls him off.  Well she's, you know, as light as a feather and the guy on the motorbike probably weighted, you know 190 pounds, so there's no way that that could happen.  But the simple way, and again keeping with her character is literally she grabbed the handlebars, turned the handlebars as the guy is moving along, and crashed him into a parked car.  He flipped off, she got on, she rode off.  It's really using brains against, sort of braun.

(MO) What is the limit?  When do you say, 'Okay somebody has to step in here...?'

(SC) Taking Angelina, we designed all the action so that she is totally capable of doing every piece, every single piece.  Probably in the whole film she did 99 percent of the action, and that's a hell of a lot.  And really the only one percent that she didn't do was because she wasn't available.

(MO) In Salt, when Angelina is climbing on the outside of the walls, can you walk us through that scene and walk us through what you're doing on set?

(SC) That took quite a bit of rigging.  That was in an apartment in New York.  I think it was on the eleventh story so it's about 100 feet high.  We had three cables on her, one above and one on either side so it would help her as she traversed.  We probably filmed it with four cameras in all, but there was one camera that we had on a very primitive sort of cable cam system so we would actually manually haul it so we could look up at her face and then go over above her so you could see it's really Angelina Jolie 100 feet up.  But that was the first sort of action scene we shot in the film, and as we were rehearsing it and she's out there, and it was cold, and she just looked up at me and she was having sort of a bit of a joke because she has no fear of heights, and she said, 'Remember I'm a mother now,' and it was just like quite funny.