The Great Escape (1963)

 During the climactic motorcycle chase in "The Great Escape", director John Sturges allowed Steve McQueen to ride (in disguise) as one of the pursuing German soldiers, so that in the final sequence, through the magic of editing, he's actually chasing himself. McQueen played the German motorcyclist who hits the wire.

Although McQueen did his own motorcycle riding, there was one stunt he did not perform: the hair-raising five foot jump over a fence. This was done by McQueen's friend Bud Ekins, who was managing a Los Angeles-area motorcycle shop when recruited for the stunt. It was the beginning of a new career for Ekins, as he later doubled for McQueen in "Bullitt" and did much of the motorcycle riding on "CHiPs."

McQueen's character of Hilts was based on amalgamation of several characters, including Major Dave Jones, a flight commander during Doolittle's Raid who made it to Europe, and was shot down and captured, and Colonel Jerry Sage, who was an O.S.S. Agent in the North African desert when he was captured. Colonel Sage was able to don a flight jacket and pass as a flier, otherwise he would have been executed as a spy. Another inspiration was probably Squadron Leader Eric Foster, who escaped seven times from German prisoner-of-war camps.

During idle periods while this movie was in production, all cast and crew members, from McQueen and James Garner to production assistants, and obscure food service workers, were asked to take thin, five-inch strings of black rubber and knot them around other thin strings of black rubber of enormous length. The finished results of all of this knotting were the coils and fences of barbed wire seen throughout the movie.