Filmed in and around Mobile, Alabama.
Some scenes, when the bus is moving, were filmed while the bus was being pulled by a big rig truck off of Interstate 165 onto Water Street, in downtown Mobile, Alabama. Another scene on the interstate, was filmed on Interstate 10. Interstates 10 and 165 run through Mobile, Alabama. Also, on the final day of shooting, a scene was filmed in a vacant gravel parking lot right outside the Alabama State Port.
Shown in Australia as "Bus 657"
Gina Carano and Dave Bautista have appeared in Marvel-based films. Carano as "Angel Dust" in Deadpool (2016), and Bautista as "Drax the Destroyer" in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.
In a 2016 interview with Mike Fury, Scott Mann spoke about how the filming techniques were influenced by Speed (1994) and how the pace of the shoot differed from a big-budget studio film: "As it happens, my director of photography and I tracked down some "behind the scenes" material from Speed and even spoke to some of the original production team about how they made it, over 20 years ago! We couldn't emulate all their methods and tricks. For one thing they had five buses, all rigged differently and some cut in half to get different access for the cameras [Laughs] We were shooting on a real bus driving down a real freeway because we didn't have nearly the same budget to work with. The guys from Speed did give us some nice ideas though, particularly about lensing and framing, and we tried to use the space on the bus like a mini theatre, which was interesting and worked well in keeping a lot of the action contained.
The police you see in the film are the real police from Mobile, Alabama, who provided a rolling roadblock so we drove up and down the freeway constantly for days. Dave Bautista was making Spectre (2015) after our film and I remember him saying 'I want to get back on the bus' [Laughs] because they were working on an eighth of a page of script in four days and we were shooting 8-10 pages per day while racing down the freeway. It was very refreshing and organic."