While speaking with EW, Russell talked about an overwhelming experience involving a scene that featured “one of the most intense fires.” According to Russell, it wasn’t pretty. “Snot was running out of my nose, I could barely breathe, my eyes felt like they were going to burst,” the actor recalled. “I felt a rising panic. I really wanted out of there bad. I turned around saying my line and the cameraman wasn’t there, Billy (Baldwin) wasn’t there, nobody was there! The room was completely black smoke. It was sort of a great moment. I said to myself, ‘Nobody could ever accuse me of not being totally there.’ It was like my fire. I had forgotten that we were making a movie.”
Thankfully, Russell wasn’t injured during the scene, and the results speak for themselves: whatever you think about “Backdraft” as a whole, you have to admit the fire sequences are stunning. “The fire was all in-camera,” Ron Howard told THR when the 30th anniversary of the film rolled around. “We had gas burners and fire retardants and a team of 10 Chicago firefighters around us at all times with extinguishers at the ready, and they needed to move in at times. No matter how well planned, [we] just never knew when the fire was going to get away from us. And it did on occasion.”
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