Bullitt Director, Peter Yates, Passes On

Peter Yates, the famed British director of the movie Bullitt and other Oscar-nominated films, died Sunday in London, England, after a long illness. Yates was 82.

The U.S. career of the four-time Oscar-nominated director was launched by the movie and its nine-minute, ground breaking chase scene between Steve McQueen in a Mustang and a pair of Chicago hit men in a 1968 Dodge Charger. Even today, watching this chase on a big screen TV or in a movie theater, can leave your pulse pounding.

For Yates, though, there really was little that was ground-breaking about the car chase. “In the beginning you establish anticipation. The middle should confuse people so you’re not sure where everyone is going. The end is where the good guys come out best,” he is quoted as saying by the U.K. Telegraph. You can check out the chase scene in the video below.

Yates did some sports car racing before changing to the entertainment industry. One of his early efforts was Robbery, based on the real 1963 heist known as the Great Train Robbery. This production confirmed him as a talented director of action sequences. Debatably, few subsequent chase scenes have eclipsed Yates’ effort in Bullitt, but ones in The French Connection, Ronin and some of the James Bond movies come close.

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