Did you catch that crazy ‘Barry’ chase scene? Here’s how it came together

That motorbike chase.

Nothing in Season 3 of “Barry” stands out like the virtuoso sequence near the end of Episode 6, “710N,” when the hitman/actor tries to outrun a vengeful motocross gang amid jammed traffic on the titular freeway.

There’s more to the episode, though, which is why it’s earned three of the HBO comedy’s 14 nominations this round: for star Bill Hader’s direction and Duffy Boudreau’s writing as well as the stunt riding team.

Consider that John Ford-inspired desert idyll where Fuches (Stephen Root), obsessed with revenge on his ex-partner in contract killing, blows another chance at paradise. Or master beignet baker Mitch (Tom Allen), the stoner oracle who imparts sage wisdom to Barry, Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), which they promptly ignore.

But yeah, that chase.

“The standout component of the sequence was really Bill’s vision of how he wanted to shoot it,” says stunt coordinator Wade Allen, himself a nominee for the season. “It wasn’t covered like a conventional action sequence, he didn’t go out of his way to make it actiony. He let the camera sit back and look at what was happening, and that kind of did everything for him.”

That began with previsualizing the entire sequence via computer animation. From Barry’s car surrounded by the murderous Taylor gang’s motorcycles and him crashing into and commandeering one of their bikes, to moving into traffic on the 710 in Pasadena, then lane-splitting through dozens of idling vehicles on the freeway’s Alhambra stretch, every shot was prevised to perfection.

“It had the camera angles in it, for the most part, there was only one angle that we didn’t use,” Hader tells the Envelope. “People could see this isn’t a chase where there’s a lot of inserts, of cutting to speedometers or a hand revving an engine, and it’s not shaky. It’s just very simple shots, simple dynamic coverage.”

Deceptively so. The lane-splitting was rehearsed around 40 cars in the Forum parking lot. The California Film Commission, Highway Patrol, Caltrans, LAPD and Alhambra police all got involved with permitting and securing the 710 freeway shoots, which took place over three Sundays last September. Two cam-cycle specialists, Regis Harrington and Dan Wynands, were hired to drive the 100-pound, remote-controlled camera rigs in front of and behind the picture bikes.

“Don’t turn!” was the trick to zipping between cars at 40 mph, according to Dave Castillo, the nominated stunt driver who doubled for Barry. “That was easily the fastest I’ve ever lane-split. I was a bit worried that the beignet bag that was hanging from my wrist might catch a side mirror on a car and make me crash. Luckily, that didn’t happen.”

Clay Cullen managed a botched gun handoff bit with perfect, slapstick intention. In it, one of the gang shoots at Barry from the sunroof of a vehicle stuck in traffic as Barry zips past. A handoff of the gun to the biker close behind goes badly and the biker clips a vehicle and crashes into the traffic ahead.

“That was actually an awesome, easy gag,” nominee Cullen reports. “My whole career I’ve crashed motorcycles, generally straight to the pavement. Wade had me clip the back of a cargo trailer, then I flew into boxes. I still tumbled, but it was kind of nice not going straight to the ground.”

A special ramp was built for another nominee, Jolene Van Vugt, to ride onto the roof of the used car dealership that Barry runs into during the sequence’s final, interior-exterior wide shot. The location was an empty AutoNation in Torrance.

“The steel deck was raised up about 4 feet, level to the edge of the sides of the building so I could be seen clearly by the camera below for the riding and the gun shots that take me down,” Van Vugt says. “It was an extremely fun scene to shoot, technical and creative.”

It all had to be.

“In the original script, there was just one italicized line that said, ‘There will be a great, lane-splitting sequence,’ and it didn’t really elaborate on that,” according to director of photography Carl Herse, who shot “710N” and is nominated for Season 3’s finale, “Starting Now.”

Boudreau acknowledges that his contribution to “710N’s” iconic sequence was limited, but he did help work out some of its comic aspects.

“Bill was inspired by ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ and all the traditional chase stuff, but it also had to be consistent with what our show is, which is it’s funny,” the writer, who’s known Hader since they were teenagers in Tulsa, Okla., says. “It’s a lot of dumb stuff going wrong, like the bike not working, so the sound design became a big part of the joke. Little moments like Barry crashing into the trash cans in the background while the used car salesman is oversharing. When we’re doing a big action scene like that, you also want to do something cool to make it part of our show.”

From beignets to bikes and ballistics, that can mean a mad array of moods that somehow work together.

“Me and Bill like ‘70s movies and foreign stuff that plays with different tones, can have very serious and very funny in the same movie and are not so concerned with genre,” Boudreau says. “We’re comfortable having those moments together. That’s always been a big thing in the show.”

“It’s kind of like, well, it’s funny and everything, but it didn’t really hit me until I sat down and watched a cut of it just how insane it is,” Hader says of the “710N” trip.

Staff writer Mark Olsen contributed to this report.