Geek Syndicate Issue 7 | Page 49

Geek Syndicate
and slow them down, I am also on the committee of the tourist Welsh Thunder Awards and so everything that’s entered into that we do analyse and say how much are physical stunts, how much is cheat and CG if you like, and so we break them down like that, in that respect. If it is a good movie then I’m totally lost in it to begin with, it’s when it’s not a good movie that I start critiquing it! From the list of movies that Vic has worked on it is clear that he enjoys a very creative relationship with many acclaimed directors but where does it start and end in terms of planning scenes or stunts. VA: It can vary, somebody like Martin Scorsese or Stephen Spielberg they have a set thing in their mind and they have chronicled their film in their head and they edited it in their head beforehand. We went up and down the Thames every Sunday – I was working on Entrapment six days a week and on Sundays we would get a boat and we had a wonderful guy that owns all the boat concessions on the Thames he knew every nook and cranny. We’d go up and down, up and down and invented the chase. The thing about chases is that they must never get repetitive, and with a car skidding around the corner, and a boat go up and down the water, it can get very repetitive so we kept adding of general stuff. You know you are working in busy streets and you have stuff to add into your chase, and when I was told that they wanted a chase on the ice: a) we had to find a location and everything else b) I thought what the heck do you do with just two cars and what’s gonna add to it, you can’t have a nun running across on fire, and make him swerve across into a gas station which explodes and blah de blah de blah. Then I started thinking. Once I saw the location, once I had got there and everything else I just started dreaming up ideas and I could see it all with an operatic orchestral music in the background and as a ballet on ice if you like - using the location, using wide shots of the glacier and the icebergs and passing them. I mean two people similarly matched,
Image © Vic Armstrong, 2004

Newer films, like The War of the Worlds mix CGI and regular stunts

But when Vic is left to his own ideas we get some truly amazing stunts, like the boat chase in Die Another Day on the Thames. VA: I looked at different boat chases and thought what can I do to make this different and exciting, and you know working on the Thames the busiest waterway in the world and the script in fact just said Bond leaves MI6 at Vauxhall broads in a boat and he finishes up at the Dome and we want a hot air balloon involved so I set off with stunt co-ordinator Simon Crane who had worked with me for years - he is now top man in his own field.

something different into it which is why we took it out of the water and we had a jet boat you could blast along the ground for a little bit, then back into the water and so on and so forth. Keeping on the Bond theme, Armstrong cites that one of his proudest moments was also in Die Another Day: the ice car chase between Bond’s Aston Martin and the villain’s henchman’s Jaguar. VA: I have just done a little voting for some stunt clips on movies and there are car chases in that, and you look at them all and they have all got the same sort of feel to them, you know the same sort

with the same fire power just trying to outwit each other like a big game of chess. So the end result I thought was actually beautiful it just made a very, very interesting and it took the viewers to a wonderful location and you can see all the location and it wasn’t shot close up, I was just very proud of it, what we made out of what was asked for. If you read Vic’s book you will understand the hard work that goes into his stunts but one question he gets asked a lot is what were the most challenging stunts he had to perform? VA: There have been so many over the years, really. I did a hun49