Why the ‘Beverly Hills Cop” director chose to film an actual car falling off a building over using CGI: ‘The stakes are real, and the danger is real.’

Though “Axel F” marks Molloy’s feature directing debut after decades of commercial work and directing TV in his native Australia, the filmmaker knew instantly that the only way a fourth “Beverly Hills Cop” movie would work would be if it stayed true to the texture and attitude of the beloved first two movies, which were box office hits and made Eddie Murphy a superstar in the late 1980s (let’s just forget there was a third movie).

“A lot of films these days, everything is so VFX-heavy that there’s a perfection there,” he said. “I wanted to ground it. The stakes are real, and the danger is real. Like films 1 and 2, those were gritty films.”

Bruckheimer loved the idea, which led to Molloy filming Murphy driving a massive snow plow through rows of parked cars in Detroit and a scene in which they actually had a car fall off the side of a building in Los Angeles.

But the action sequence that kept him up at night was the helicopter scene. Toward the end of the movie, Foley and Detective Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) steal a police helicopter to escape Grant (Kevin Bacon), the crooked police captain. Aside from the interior shots of Murphy and Gordon-Levitt in the cockpit, the entire sequence used a real helicopter that did everything from freefalling between buildings to flying so low that there were sparks as it scraped the road. The sequence concludes with the chopper landing not so gracefully in front of the Beverly Hills Town Hall.

Looking back on it now, Molloy laughs in disbelief at how he tackled such ambitious scenes. “It was very challenging.”

“Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F” is now available on Netflix.