Geek Syndicate
dred foot fall which gets your heart going as there is no getting away from the fact that you will be doing sixty-five to seventy miles per hour when you hit the air bag and have to stop within three foot, so you know all that is going through your mind, and that’s challenging but lots of people do that. In another movie I did years and years ago called Krull they had horses that were galloping faster than the speed of light so I suggested shooting against a blue screen, and the producer looked at me and went ‘Hmmm, ok’ and I explained how to do it. I said we can put them on treadmills so they would be galloping but not moving in the studio. I said get carthorses they are easier to use. He said have you got treadmills? I said no, but we will invent them, we will make them. So anyway I got the job, I walked out of the meeting, and Peter Yates the director who directed Bullitt, he was the director, and he said to me do you know what when you left the producer looked at me and said ‘He’s stark staring mad isn’t he. You can’t get horses on a treadmill in a studio’ and Peter Yates turned to this guy and said ‘I think he knows what he’s talking about you know, he is a horse rider, I think he can do it’ So he went along with it and we made the treadmills, and we did it. And that’s challenging, every little job is a challenge of some sort, it’s always going to be different to what everyone else does. In Hollywood it is all about numbers and the heads of studios get very nervous when their stars perform their own stunts. This is why we have stuntmen and women but occasionally there are actors who want to do as much as possible but which ones want to and which ones actually can? VA: Harrison Ford would have been THE best stuntman. He is analytical, he has got tons of ability, he has got a great sense of humour, he is good at everything he does. I think he would have made a hell of a stuntman. Tom Cruise is unbelievably courageous, a fantastic driver he would have made an amazing stuntman, I’m not sure about the personality but he would have made a hell of a stuntman. Chris Hemsworth who we did Thor with, was brilliant, you know, he got stuck in there and did it all. You get a lot of these actors nowadays, and I actually design stuff, because of CG you can have pads on the floor, pads on the walls, you can slide people, hang them in the air, on cables as thick as your little finger that take ten tonnes. When we used to do it when we were on Superman 1 and 2, we would be on piano wires that would snap, it was just a single strand, and bang they’re gone. So the safety aspect is much better now and as I said you can have pads underneath the people. I did a shot on Spider-Man, where Spidey runs leaps and does a somersault through the air, across the street, onto a roof on the other side of the road, and we had a full roof built in the studio, so we shoot it inside in the studios in LA, we had a air ram - you know one of those rams you hit and ping and it fires you, it is a ram that lifts up, a platform that pivots very quickly and if you are on it, it fires you through the air. So he ran and hit his air ram, ping! He somersaulted through the air and landed on the roof on the other side, we had an eight foot pad for him to land on just in case and also to save his legs a bit. He did that shot beautifully and then I said to my CG guy ‘what do you need from us now for you work?’ and he said ‘erm, ok just run the footage again, same camera movement but take the ram out, take the pad out, so I have got the footage on the roof with a proper roof underneath where the pads were covering it”. We did that and in the movie you see this guy somersault through the air, leap through the air and land on the roof, so it is wonderful in that respect, you know it helps to make the safety aspect so much better, therefore you can use actors much much more. With more safety equipment and sets being built, will we see more actors doing their own stunts in the future as long as the studios are not worried? Vic has his own thoughts on the matter: VA: Oh completely, it’s the law of danger: you just add up what ever the percentage of danger is and if its over a certain mark then its not worth risking a $200 million movie. You know the last Mission Impossible movie? I wrote that purely so that Tom Cruise could do all the stunts himself. On War of the Worlds, we wrote it knowing how he could work, and what he liked to do, knowing what safety aspects we could put in so he does everything himself. We’ll rehearse the heck out of it with a stuntman to get all the wrinkles out, and all the things that can bite you on the day if you like, so we have reduced the percentage of danger as much as we possibly can, so that it becomes an acceptable level. And to me that makes a movie, when you believe its your hero in there and not some computerised safe or body, or a body that you can’t see the face