Stunt doubles

Because there was a shot that we needed seeing Tom jumping from the wall to the ridge, did it all in one shot. And that shot, I was set for the stunt double to do it. But Tom insisted to do it by himself. We had a really long argument about it because I tried to stop him, but it didn't work. Tom said he liked the challenges. He liked to do something he had never done before.

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And he had never liked cheating. And he told me, whenever he watched an action movie, he said, it was easy to tell which shot was done by a stunt double, which shot was done by the actor, because the body movement, the timing, the performance would never match. And he didn't want to see it happen. And I let him do it. And then I was very scared. And by the meantime, I was scared of heights. So I would stay away from the cliff 20 feet.

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Please, baby, open up. Open up. Five, four, three, two, one. I'm going down. Ethan, wait. We have four things, put them together. The second unit shot the helicopter fly around the building on the roof, and the stunt double hang outside the helicopter. We saw all Tom's jump on green screen. And then we built a platform about 80 feet high.

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Here comes what? Here comes some more blood spraying the face. Here it is. Look at that, right on his own face. It's a tricky thing to fake that you accidentally are spraying yourself with something by accident. It's counterintuitive. Yeah. That's Jeff Imada. He's a very accomplished stuntman. Oh, gut shot. It looked a lot like Egg Fu Young, I remember, on the day. Well, we did a test with real animal guts, and that was too realistic, so we went with more cartoony sort of guts.

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But your timing on you talking to me this whole time is really, to me, one of the funniest things. How did you get up there on that mountain peak? They dropped me off in a helicopter. The helicopter hovered over there. It doesn't really look quite as dangerous anymore. Man, you had gone crazy at that point. You were doing shit that no normal motherfucker would have allowed himself to do. It was the last thing we were shooting in Hawaii, so if something went wrong, we would have had most of the movie, the exteriors, in the can. So it wasn't that big of a deal. Even the stuntman said he was scared shitless. Yeah, Brad. You're really nailing the accent more than you ever have. Yeah, yeah.

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black rain wait a minute yeah what the hell is that thing it's actually um there's a combination there's a uh is it animatronic it was there's an animatronic head and then there was a um a um a little person inside of a suit um stuntman guy and he and i wrestled a little bit it's like that movie alien though the less you see of the beast the scarier it is right except for this beat we have to reveal this is a little bit what you think when you see that mr black

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Simon West

I thought she should do something beautiful, but also very athletic and daring. And this is a very impressive routine that Lara does every night before she goes to bed, but Angelina actually had to learn to do for real. Now, I never expected her to do all this. When I cast her, I never thought of her as a stunt person, but during her training program before the shoot, she just learned how to do this thing from top to bottom, and I realized I wasn't going to have to use stunt doubles at all.

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Simon West

As I said, I came up with the idea of the swinging log quite late while we were already shooting. And so the set wasn't actually built with the log inside it. And so it was a late addition. And Angelina hadn't had time to rehearse jumping on this log and riding it. And so I had the stunt doubles.

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Simon West

she got on the log and we let it start swinging and literally within three or four minutes she was standing up on it and something that not even the stunt doubles could do and she obviously of course didn't just stand up she did it with style and grace and I was rolling with three or four different cameras and I got the whole thing with Angelina actually surfing the log into the into the urn for the scene but as I said it's one of these things you just think up very quickly and you're not sure whether anyone's going to be able to to do and

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Oded just, you know, there's nothing there. So Oded is throwing himself at windows and over chairs and benches. He and Brendan were rather beaten up in this sequence. It's very hard for... If you're fighting a stuntman or a man in a mummy suit, it's much easier because at least you have some resistance, somebody holding you back from really hurting yourself somehow. But when there's nobody there and you're throwing a punch and there's nothing to connect with, or you're throwing yourself...

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back over a chair and there's no one to catch you. It's much harder on the actors when there's nothing there than when there's a stuntman in a mummy suit. Brendan is particularly good at that in this sequence. He's a terrific physical actor, and he really sells the fight. Obviously, we're cutting all over the place. Again, these are soundstage shots.

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It's a wire gag, and the stunt performer is sort of wrapped in a wire as he's thrown across the room. It unwinds. So imagine being wrapped in piano wire and then being yanked 40 feet through the air. It's not real fun.

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We wanted the focus of the battle to be Gandalf trying to out-strategize the orcs... ...and to give him a real hands-on feeling. And we wanted him to get his hands dirty, as they say... ...rather than just be shouting out commands... ...to actually be doing some, fighting himself. This is no place for a hobbit! Suffice to say that this is a mixture of Ian plus a stuntman... ...who is also doing some of the fighting.

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And then as a separate pass, we shot the stuntman being jerked back onto the pyre, and we combined the two elements. And this was just another image that I had in my head way back at the very beginning, as I just wanted the flaming Denethor to jump off the prow of the city and plummet. And now, it could never happen in real life because the distance between where the tomb is and where the prow is is so far. He'd have to be running about a mile to get there. Poetic license. I just like the image of him plummeting.

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Oh, that's a great pile-up, isn't it, that one? Yeah. We literally were just following Miranda or Miranda's stunt double on a horse and we put all the battle action in afterwards. We shot a lot of elements of background horses galloping left and right and we were able to take those and put them into all sorts of different shots and build the battlefield up, add a lot of CG horses, make it seem a lot busier. If you look at these original plates, the documentary on the green screen, they're so much less spectacular than what you're seeing here.

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Something happened with Kate just gets riled up around Speedman, and it makes her just go a bit batty, and she just loses it. Now this next scene coming up here, Marcus is swooping in. Jim Churchman, my rigger, my main rigger and assistant coordinator, has this great rig right here. It's a computerized winch, which allows us to repeat these moves. And this was the stunt double Adrian Hine.

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playing on our video. Mike Gunther. We had this prosthetic piece that went over Gunther that was a shirt, and he didn't have as much rubber on it as the Marcus stunt double, so it really looked like a shirt, and unfortunately right there it did, and then at the end of the movie when we do the fight in the dungeon,

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See? You spilled wine all over my Han Solo shirt. Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I get a little carried away with that cut thing. Wave my hands. This Millennium Falcon's not going to look the same. This was Brad on second unit right here. Who was doing that stunt? That was Adrian Hine, the Marcus stunt double. That was great. I really wanted that to be a...

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because while the car is wrecked, it's not a crash that I believe would incapacitate those two guys for very long. I wanted to hit the car more broadside, but I also didn't want to kill the stuntman. Ryan with his finger off the trigger again, and now his finger on it. One thing that I read in a review which I'd never picked up on is the notion that we never see cops

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urged to please cut away sooner, and I thought, no, you gotta see the actors get out of the car. And the broken mirror on the car, by the way. But these two guys, Andres and Armando, the one on the right, the older guy, is a stuntman, and the younger guy has never acted in his life. This was his first film.

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Doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to guess that not a lot of this was actually Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee. That's the great thing with doing stunt fights with guys with long hair and beards is that you can disguise a stuntman relatively well. I think even the stuntman sustained some injuries from that scene, didn't he? Yeah, one of them cracked their head badly on the side of a trampoline when they were going to land on a trampoline and they fell short and they actually hit the metal part of the trampoline on the back of their head.

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and Elijah was just great. He ran another, what's this jump? Because this is a real jump, it's not a stuntman, it's actually Elijah and he does this huge jump, bang. It looks pretty, it's more dangerous than what it actually looks like because the boat was really floating and floating away and he had to make that huge leap. And what was funny about this night too was the Bucklebury Ferry started to sink and our producer Barry Osborne who has some yachting experience sort of stood on there about three o'clock in the morning trying to explain to the crew how bilge pumps work and we had these hand

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Barry Sonnenfeld

That was his stunt double flipping over. Once he landed... ...we tricked that guy out and Tommy Lee Jones into the shot seamlessly... ...SO it looks like Tommy did that flip.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Will actually did that and went all the way up into the ceiling. Then we took him down... ...and his stunt double, Randy, was dropped into those tubes. But Will did almost all of his own stunts in this whole movie. All of this stuff, Will is on wire, holding on to green bags and stuff... ...being pulled around the room.

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The bodies under the water here, of course, are supposed to be fallen soldiers from the battle that was in the prologue of the Fellowship of the Ring, isn't it? It's that same period of history that they've been lying there for about 2,000 or 3,000 years. They're actually really creepy. Yeah, these were silicon dummies that Richard Taylor's team made at Weta. Was this guy real? Yeah, the guy that we're seeing now was a real person. Everybody else is a rubber dummy, but this guy's a stuntman that looked the most like an elf.

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Oh, that's a Peter Jackson moment, the old thing going through somebody. Yeah, well, that stuntman actually broke his leg on that. That was one of the few serious accidents that we had on set. In fact, it was just about the only accident we had shooting Helms Deep was the stuntman that got hit with the grappling hook. He had like a jerk wire that pulled him back against the wall and he just landed awkwardly against the wall and broke his leg very badly on that particular shot. Great shot.

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okay, now we'll see the stunt person create the character or continue the character as if it's some sort of station break. It is Charlize all the way through, and I think that's why you get this sense of connection to Æon Flux the way that you wouldn't if we had used a stunt double or had to use a stunt double. Not everyone is as flexible, as athletic, and...

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We also worked with a wonderful second unit director, Alexander Witt, who'd worked with Charlize before on The Italian Job. Yeah. And Charlize and Marton and Sophie worked with him in these sequences. So it isn't as if when Alexander was filming the action sequences, there were stunt doubles.

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It's nice when you have actors that can ride horses like that. You don't have to get stunt doubles. New Zealanders are like that. They're tough. That's the blood stuff. Bill loved it. He's so enjoying it. Bill is a very sloppy drinker. - Yeah. And fake blood doesn't taste very good.

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Remember, that was gonna be a much bigger scene too. That's not two stunt doubles. We did this again. That's another one we pulled. So you know that set you're looking at, the underworld of the castle? The underground part is actually the same wall... ...we used to make the canyon at the beginning for Sonja. Now, Patrick, explain this. Some people have asked me what Viktor is holding. I was tempted to cut that out. We built a doll as something he give to his daughter. The only time you see it before that is in the memory. It is there. I think it's just a wide shot. It's also there when he gives her the necklace. Yeah. - But you don't... We haven't been able... At one point, I was ready to lose that. I thought... But it is something he gives the daughter. I have a question here. What is in these barrels? I never quite figured that out. It's kind of like some very special oil... ... from mediaeval time. Like mediaeval napalm or something? What's in those barrels is me going that we have... ...No different kind of... You know, we can't do just swordplay after swordplay. It's some kind of explosion element, mediaeval version. Yeah, we need to have that. I think this scene works great. It's very successful. I love him screaming against the door, there's so much energy there. I tried to have him have a little dialogue moment here. Just didn't work. - No, it didn't work. It just felt totally awkward, so. There's something about them looking at each other... ... that they have a poignant... Now the rain. Pain in the ass, but I think it worked well. It worked very well. Everything that's a pain in the ass looks better. And conversely, everything that looks good is a pain in the ass. All the elements of snow and wind and fire and all that. Remember on the first Underworld... ... you were adamant about wanting... ...a lot of these scenes to happen in the rain. "No, dude, we can't do it. It's gonna be such a--" And you stuck to your guns. Thank God you did. It looked great. Do you remember how much I had to fight for that rain? Yes, I do. When you're on the same set for the entire movie... ... you'd better find ways to reinvent it. And the rain was one way for us to give it a different tone. I just think that something horribly... Just tragic happened... ...1n Richard's life with rain. Did you have the same problem on number one? But it does. It makes everything a kind of a nightmare to... The equipment... - But the result is... Hey, two words: Romania, winter. Imagine if we had had to shoot this in Romania in the winter. But the other thing that you get with the rain is you're able to do.... Have your stunt doubles replacing these primary actors... ... 1M a way so that you really don't even know the difference. I can't picture this in a dry... I mean, this gives such a different energy. Yes. And the lighting on top of that. Just flashes and... All right, next movie I won't argue about the rain, I promise. It's about time, Richard.

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E. Elias Merhige

The interesting thing here is that this is a real stunt. This is where off the side of the mountain we had a stuntman just fall about

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That was not easy, by the way, because that's a real person on fire. That's not true. - No, it is! lt was a stuntman? - Yeah.

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Andrew Niccol

And the one coming up was gonna be a very large one since nothing explodes quite like explosives. And this was the first explosion actually that Jared's South African stunt double, Warren, had ever been part of. And we only had one take where the stunt double had to run and fall down in exactly the right place. And you can do this digitally, but I didn't have the money or the time.

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We did concept-design work with an artist called George Hull... ...Who Larry, Andy and James all Know from Matrix. And he drew up the initial sketches that we approved... ...and put into the digital pipeline. When we were shooting it, we didn't actually do a great deal different. We kind of left them to it. We ended up having some rig removal. And the way the blood was done was very crude, if you like. We literally taped plastic bags of stage blood... ...to the costumes of the S.W.A.T. members. And V's stunt double, Dave Leitch... ...used a real knife. And he just had to be very precise to cut the bags... ... Just at the right level so that the blood would splurt out. There are some shots when the knife is in the air... ...where we have got digital knives. CG knives that we put in there. And then, throughout the sequence we had tracked V's motions... ...and rendered in the trails that you see. It's the final confrontation... ... sort of ideological confrontation... ... between Creedy, who represents the administration... ...and V, the independent-minded terrorist. The great line at the end of it is that, you know... ...when Creedy can't shoot him. And he says, "You can't kill me because an idea cannot be killed."

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This is our much more intense version of Jesse getting pinned to the wall. We actually redid this in visual effects with her splitting in half and her guts dripping out. But yeah, that was her stunt double for her, and that was real-time, in-camera, actually hit the wall. I thought she snapped her neck when we did that first stunt. We probably did it four takes. I could not believe how hard that stunt woman was great.

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