One Battle After Another has been generating a lot of conversation since its release last September, and for good reason. Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature film has been met with critical acclaim, including ranking among CinemaBlend’s top 2025 movies and earning a whopping 13 Oscar nominations. Among the reasons One Battle After Another has been so praised so much is for its action-packed moments, including the thrilling car chase sequence. Prior to this, there’s also a scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob has to jump out of a moving car, and CinemaBlend learned how this particular stunt was changed at the last minute so it’d be less painful for the actor.
Bob is forced to make this dangerous exit from the car when he and Benicio del Toro’s Sergio drive by a police vehicle right as Bob is taking a sip of beer. With authorities now on their tail for drunk driving and Bob racing against the clock to rescue his daughter from Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw, Sergio, who was behind the wheel instructed Bob to jump out of the car so the cops wouldn’t interfere with his mission. Leonardo DiCaprio did indeed jump out and fall into a ditch on the side of the road, but that wasn’t always where the stunt was going to take place. As Brian Mochleit, One Battle After Another’s stunt coordinator, told me:
Yeah, that had its own challenges, I think we did two to three takes from the front, and two to three takes from the back. And again, what's really great about that is finding the location. Originally I think where we were going to do that, he was gonna land on concrete. And I was like, ‘Well, if we go two houses down, Leo could get away with doing a lot of this here.’ We found that nice little dirt area, it dropped off so he could hide from the police. So it warranted to help the story, and also we can give the actor ability to do his version of it, And it made it a little bit safer not landing on concrete.
First off, I assumed that a stunt double handled the actual jumping out of the car, so props to Leonardo DiCaprio for doing that himself. However, it sounds like if the production shot at the original location where Bob fell on concrete instead, Brian Mochleit would have tasked a stunt performer with that big moment. It’s hard enough to jump out of a car and land inside a ditch without getting injured, but you replace that with a concrete surface, it’s better to let the professionals do the job. The last thing we need is DiCaprio breaking any bones.
It’s fortunate that Mochleit spotted that dirt area just a few blocks away right before cameras started rolling on the car jump sequence. When I pointed out that stroke of good luck during the filming of One Battle After Another, he responded:
Yeah, it literally was just two houses down from where we originally thought we were gonna do it. And this movie lent itself a lot to that creative organic feel. We scouted a lot, we looked at things, but as we were shooting it, a lot of things just evolved and got better.
You can revisit Bob jumping out of the moving car and all the other craziness he endured during One Battle After Another by streaming the movie with your HBO Max subscription. Unfortunately, the Oscars’ stunt category won’t kick in until 2028, otherwise I feel like One Battle After Another would get recognition for its work in that field. However, you can see how it fares in its 13 nominated categories by watching the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 15.
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