Few films celebrate automotive chaos quite like The Blues Brothers (1980). What begins with a battered surplus police car waiting outside an Illinois prison quickly erupts into one of cinema's greatest showcases of vehicular mayhem. The film's unforgettable "Bluesmobile"—a retired 1974 Dodge Monaco Police Interceptor—became an unlikely legend, surviving shopping mall pursuits, massive police chases, and spectacular crashes while cementing its place among the most iconic movie cars ever put on screen.
Bringing this relentless spectacle to life required an astonishing fleet of real cars. More than a dozen Dodge Monacos served as the Bluesmobile throughout production, while dozens more retired police cruisers were sacrificed in elaborate chase sequences and demolition scenes that remain unmatched in scale and ambition. Director John Landis combined practical stunts, precision driving, and an unapologetic love of oversized American police sedans to create one of the most memorable automotive performances in film history.
In the conversation below from Ride: The Most Iconic Wheels of the Silver Screen, discover the remarkable story behind the Bluesmobile—from its origins as a humble surplus police interceptor to its transformation into a cinematic icon on what Jake and Elwood famously called "a mission from God."
Chris Nashawaty: The Blues Brothers is famous for the amount of car crashes it had. How much of that had to do with you beginning your Hollywood career as a stuntman? How did you get started in that?
John Landis: When I was 18, I went to Yugoslavia. A few years before that I had met the Hungarian director Andrew Marton. His daughter was a friend of my older sister and he’d been at MGM for, like, 50 years after escaping Europe right before the Nazis took over. Anyway, he had been hired as the second unit director on the WWII movie, Kelly’s Heroes, which was filming in Yugoslavia. This was 1969. He didn’t promise me a job, but he said that if I showed up maybe he could get me on the second unit.
Nashawaty: What was that experience like?
Landis: Well, we drove from Madrid to Belgrade in a beat-up old VW. And as soon as you entered the country, it was like the world went from color to black and white. Tito gave us the Yugoslav army to use as extras. I brought all the money I had in the world, which was about $900. I was there for the entire nine months of the shoot. It was really the best time of my life. I had all the enjoyment and all the experience of making a big movie, and none of the responsibility. And I became lifelong friends with Donald Sutherland.
Nashawaty: Let’s talk about the Bluesmobile, the decommissioned police car that Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood drives with John Belushi’s Jake riding shotgun.
Landis: The whole cop car idea was Danny’s. You know, he goes on about it having cop shocks and all that business. He would have made a great cop actually. He was a wild character, I love him. He’s really unique. Danny had never written a screenplay. I don’t think he’d ever read one. And his first script for The Blues Brothers was, like, 320 pages! He threw it over the producer’s fence and he used the San Fernando Valley phone book as its cover.
Nashawaty: Why so long? What’s in it that didn’t make it into the final movie?
Landis: Each member of the band had their own movie basically. Danny is a motorhead and a biker. Driving is fun for him. He would drive from New York to Los Angeles in two days, and then back to Ontario in a day and a half, all with music blasting. I mean, that was his idea of relaxing. But his original screenplay was unfilmable. It had pages and pages of description. He’s very maniacal about detail. It terrified the studio, and it certainly intimidated me. I’m shocked that the studio agreed to make it. Well, Danny and John were the stars of the hottest show in America [Saturday Night Live] and they had an album out that had sold millions of copies, and John had just starred in Animal House, which, at that point, was the most successful comedy ever made.
Nashawaty: How did you decide which kind of cop car to use as the Bluesmobile?
Landis: Danny was very specific about the model and make. He wanted a 1974 Dodge Monaco. That was a popular cop car across America for years.
Nashawaty: How many did you have to get?
Landis: Twelve or 13. What was complicated about shooting those chases is, we were traveling at real speed. There’s shots in the movie where I have 25 cars going 110 miles an hour in downtown Chicago. We shot most of that stuff on weekends, but it was very complicated because you needed to block any entrance to the street, any alley, any driveway. It would take hours just to make sure it was all cleared.
Nashawaty: How many stunt drivers did you have on the picture?
Landis: A lot! And in the big scenes where there’s, like, 35 cop cars, the last 20 cars are real cop cars driven by real cops. There were so many cars on the movie that we had a 24-hour garage and chop shop going that we built. So when people ask, How many cars did you destroy?, it’s not as many as you think because we kept fixing the ones that crashed to use them again. The biggest danger wasn’t for the people in the cars, it was for the pedestrians. That’s why all the pedestrians in the movie are stunt people.
Nashawaty: Was there one main hero car for the Bluesmobile?
Landis: Yeah, but for a lot of the stunts, they’d take one of the Bluesmobiles and rig it so that each tire could be controlled by the driver and the passenger. It had four independent wheels. That’s how it makes those amazing sharp turns. They also built this cannon in the bottom of one of them that looked like a log. You might even be able to see it in the movie when they flip over a Pinto. It would just get launched in the air.
Nashawaty: What was the biggest technical challenge?
Landis: Probably traffic control. Other than that, I’d say the Daley Plaza stuff. There’s this big glass skyscraper that has a marble lobby. It’s very fancy. And I asked Mayor Byrne if I could drive a car through it. And she said, How? I said, You know, smash the window and go out the other side. And she said: If you can do it safely and fix it immediately, then okay. So that shot took some real precision driving.
Nashawaty: What was the top speed the stunt drivers hit during those chases?
Landis: We had Bud Ekins, the stunt driver from Bullitt. He’s one of the great Hollywood stunt drivers. So Bud drove and I was the passenger. There was a camera on the front of the car. I think we got up to 125 right before the big pileup. That was very scary. When Jake and Elwood finally reach the end of their odyssey at Daley Plaza, the Bluesmobile just completely falls apart. It’s like the car is saying, “Enough!”
Nashawaty: That’s a great gag; how did you pull it off?
Landis: We got the idea from those old Laurel and Hardy movies. Those Model Ts would always fall apart, right? So I said to the special-effects guy, I want this car to just fall apart. And he said, Okay, Mr. Landis. How many pieces did you want it to fall apart in? And I made up some number. I said, I don’t know, 40? I just made up a number. And he said, Okay, and goes away. He figured it out. It was the most complicated Rube Goldberg way of doing something. Hydraulics and push rods. And it worked perfectly!
Nashawaty: How did you get Steven Spielberg to do a cameo in the scene that comes right after that?
Landis: I asked him, that’s it. We shot that in Los Angeles. That was a set at Universal. His office was there, so it was no big deal for him just to come over and do it. Plus, he knew Danny and John from 1941. I thought he was great.
Nashawaty: Which cars gave you the most trouble on the film?
Landis: You know the red Pinto we use as the car for the Nazis? Well, we had to buy a lot of those because we drove two off the end of the bridge. We had to test-drop one from a helicopter to prove to the Cook County Board, the Chicago City Council, and the Federal Aviation Authority that the vehicle would land where we said it would. And then we had to cut one in half with a rear-screen projection that would have Henry Gibson and the actors inside. I think we bought 20 of them. What did you do with the leftover ones at the end of shooting? There were probably 15 left over. So we shipped them to Universal. And for, like, three years, the security guards on the studio lot drove around in these red Pintos with “White Power” bumper stickers on them!
Nashawaty: Do you have a favorite car scene in the movie?
Landis: Yeah, there’s a scene when they’re on Lower Wacker Drive, where a cop car cuts them off and they come roaring up an off-ramp up to the street above. And as they get there, a cop car pulls right in front of them. So you see Danny, I don’t know if he steps on the gas, but he does something, and the Bluesmobile just flies right over that car and lands on the other side. When we did that gag, I said to the stunt driver: I’ll give you $100 cash if you can just hit the Mars bar lights on the roof of the cop car. And he did it! The rear tire just kisses the Mars bar. It was an extraordinary stunt.
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