Geek Syndicate Issue 7 | Page 47

Geek Syndicate
life has been like as a stuntman: the real life you live and the characters you meet, the things you do. So I kept turning everyone down. Then Robert Sellers approached me and I looked at some of his work. He had done an awful lot of film books including Tom Cruise, George Harrison and Rebel, and I just liked his approach, and he said ‘Look Vic, it is going to be everything that you want to tell, nothing else, nothing more, nothing less, and if you don’t like it at the end of the day we won’t publish it, we may not even get a publisher’. I said ‘Ok’ and we started on it, it took six years because nothing was written down apart from I used to keep a list of films that I had worked on up until about ten years ago. So he would say ‘right lets go from, for instance, 1965 to 1969’, and we start ‘You Only Live Twice’ and all the memories would come flooding back to me you know, and then I would go away on location for six months, he’d write it and we would email backwards and forwards and I would do corrections and things, and so on and so forth and we would work our way right up to the present day. Then he presented this and Titan jumped at it, they snapped it up straight away. In his first decade as a stuntman on movies, Vic Armstrong worked on over fifteen films, including three James Bonds: You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (as George Lazenby’s ski double) and Live and Let Die as Roger Moore’s stunt double. It was during this first decade he became the assistant stunt arranger on A Bridge Too Far which is one of my favourite Second World War movies. If you know the film you know there were a lot of stunts in that film. Knowing just how many films he was in and how many stunts he performed or helped set up how did he remember them all? Did he go back and watch them again? VA: No I just remembered every moment, and I just figured if it’s in my memory that’s what I want to put down, all the anecdotes, everything: all the names of people of people I could remember, every single one, it was amazing. In 1978, Vic went to work on what would become one of defining comic book movies of all time as the stunt
Image © Vic Armstrong, 1978 Vic Armstrong as the Man of Steel in the classic 1978 movie.

double of Christopher Reeve’s Superman. This would lead on to his performing and supplying stunts on both Superman 2 and Superman 3. One notable scene was when Superman is blown backwards into a bus by Zod and his two companions in the first sequel. I always remembered this scene for being just like watching a real comic book come to life. It was Vic in the Superman suit in that scene and he nailed it as far as I was concerned. A few years later Vic was hired to work on a film that was the brainchild of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the film? Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was a film designed to showcase stunts of the old school kind. It was also the start of an amazing friendship with the movie’s leading actor Harrison Ford. Armstrong became firm friends with the actor and did Harrison’s stunt work in most of his films. Taking one example from Indiana Jones, we talk about the scene where Jones jumps from the back of a horse to a tank in The Last Crusade which even today is one of my favourite stunts. VA: The jump onto the tank in Indiana Jones was for me technically very difficult. Being a horseman to get a horse that you could charge galloping flat out in a straight line, and as you stand up on its saddle you don’t want it to deviate or slow down or pitch your off, and you have to run the same speed as the tank, and close to the edge of a cliff, and you don’t want it to swerve away as you jump otherwise you go under the tracks of the tank, you don’t want to get too close to the edge otherwise the horse will slip of the edge and get squashed, and you know they are very challenging.

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