During the production, veteran stuntman
Victor Magnotta drowned while performing a car stunt in which the auto was driven off a Hoboken, New Jersey pier and plunged into the Hudson River. Vic's untimely death (in his early forties) was the result of several miscalculations. The car was supposed to run off the end of the pier, flat-splash in the Hudson, and sink slowly, but the vehicle had been stripped of all excess weight, including the gas tank. There was a small canister tank under the hood with just enough fuel to pull off the stunt, because environmental laws prohibited fuel leakage into the river. This made the car abnormally nose-heavy. Vic was strapped inside in a five-point harness, and had a "pony" air bottle w/regulator close at hand. For whatever reason, it was decided to replace the car's glass windshield with with one made from a sheet of plexiglass. When the effects crew screwed down the new windshield, the torque on their portable drills was apparently set too high, and the screws stripped out their holes. Vic drove off the end of the pier, but the car had the weight of the engine in front, and very little weight in the rear. Instead of "pancaking" into the river, the car immediately nosed over, and hit the surface grille-first. The onrushing water hit the windshield, ripped out the screws, and wrapped the plastic strip around Vic. He couldn't even get to his air bottle. Safety divers responded immediately, but before they could unwrap him from the failed windshield, he was dead. The actual sequence (not the aftermath, of course) was used in the film.
