Keanu Reeves Movie ‘Speed’ Cut a $2-5 Million Action Scene Featuring a Different Character
The Keanu Reeves movie Speed is full of thrilling action sequences. There’s Reeves jumping on the moving bus, there’s the freeway jump, there’s Reeves rolling under it and more. There was even one epic action scene you never got to see because they didn’t film it. Screenwriter Graham Yost described it in a recent interview.
Yost was a guest on the Script Apart podcast on Aug. 17, 2021 to discuss his original screenplay. That screenplay included an elaborate action sequence they cut before filming.
‘Speed’ originally had 1 more action scene but it didn’t involve Keanu Reeves
In Speed, Reeves plays Jack Traven, the SWAT team officer who jumps on the bus to keep it from exploding. The deleted action sequence would have introduced another SWAT team member.
“We called it The Baker Sequence because it was this character named Baker,” Yost said on Script Apart. “[Director] Jan [de Bont] was so heartbroken when we couldn’t do this because we came up with this all together. Keanu, Jack, gets a cell phone, calls in this is the situation and they send a helicopter. They drop a guy on a line and he hooks onto the bus and he’s climbing in. Then they see oh sh** there’s a bridge coming up.”
The Baker Sequence included another classic near miss, but it didn’t end well for Officer Baker.
“He can’t get the line unhooked and now it’s going to pull down the helicopter,” Yost continued. “He’s hustling and he gets the line and goes up in the air and he just clears the railing on a bridge. But just then there’s a truck with plate glass on it and he gets shredded by the glass.”
The reason ‘Speed’ cut The Baker Sequence from the movie
Yost understood the reasons The Baker Sequence was cut. There were financial and narrative reasons to eliminate it, so it didn’t matter how awesome it was.
“It was a big sequence but it was like I don’t know, $2 million, $5 million to do that and it was like no, we can’t afford it,” Yost said. “We’ve got to cut The Baker Sequence. It’s interesting because it would’ve been spectacular but it’s not about Jack. It’s about another character. We were just going to introduce him.”
It’s also a bit morbid. Not everyone survives Speed. Bomber Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) blows up a passenger trying to escape. Some of the SWAT teams aren’t so lucky either, though they die in explosions, not shredded by glass.
The Baker Sequence did have thematic resonance
Even if the money and story couldn’t justify it, Yost could explain why The Baker Sequence mattered. A big theme of Speed is Jack and his partner Harry (Jeff Daniels) asking each other “what would you do” in different scenarios. The Baker Sequence showed that not every SWAT officer makes the right call.
“What I wanted out of it was here’s the real hotshot SWAT guy in the SWAT gear, I’m the SWAT guy and I’m cool,” Yost said. “I’m dropping down from the helicopter and I’m military kind of thing. He dies and Jack keeps going. That was the whole point of it but just couldn’t afford it.”
