Stunts & stunt coordination

Yes, we actually threw this guy out of the helicopter. Bill Ryusaki, who is a sensei master... ...was roped on to the helicopter, and harnessed and everything... ...so he could fall out and drop down about 20 feet out of camera. And then we'd have to haul him back up if we needed to do it again. We only had to throw him out three or four times. And even though he's a stunt guy, and skilled and brave as anything... ...it'll upset you. And I think it made him pretty sick. But he did such a good job there... ...that we brought him back on Point of No Return. .. ...to be teaching martial arts. You remember that, Frank? - Yeah. That's where you told me, "That's a sucker punch."

13:04 · jump to transcript →

Now, Candy Clark actually was a pretty wild driver. And she didn't do that particular stunt, but she did some that come up later... ...and I'll point them out. And I was foolish enough to get in the car... ...and ride with her while she was driving. Scared me to death. I'll tell you one thing, it's hard to read.

44:36 · jump to transcript →

The guy who just went out the door-- This is Terry Leonard... ...one of the great stuntmen of Hollywood. He was our stunt coordinator. And he's a phenomenal guy who's done... ...the most amazing stunts in Westerns where he's being dragged... ...by a stagecoach, right in between the horses. Terry directs a great deal, so we were very lucky to have him. And one reason I bring it up... ...is he's got a lot of broken bones and hips and pelvis and so on... ...he's accumulated over the years... ...and yet he insisted on doing this stunt where he falls down. And the reason he insisted on it was, he felt bad... ...because the guy he hired for the job couldn't show up... ...was stuck on a movie at Universal that went over on the day. And he said, "Well, I'll do it. I'll do it." And I said, "Terry, you can't. Your bones won't stand for it." "Oh, no, it's fine." That's how nuts these stunt guys can be. This car was being driven by great stunt driver, Carey Loftin. Carey Loftin did all the driving in Bullitt. .. ...that Steve McQueen did not do. And he was a phenomenal, phenomenal driver... ...and he was pretty elderly at this time. He was almost 70... ...but he could still whip that car around like nobody's business.

1:09:05 · jump to transcript →

when you get tonight, especially when you have explosions and fireworks and helicopters going over. It looks like the fucking Dirty Dozen and shit. It's amazing. That stunt, which is obviously coming up, it is...

11:53 · jump to transcript →

The next day we'd see dailies and then drive through rush hour traffic. You know, Kevin was pretty damn good with the bike. That's Kevin right there. It seemed like there was a lot of shots where that's not a stunt guy. You know, he's really rocking that triangle. Gary Hymes was our coordinator. Did an awesome job. And he's been for years the best bike guy in the business. And we just spent time in India with him training one of the Indian stars to ride a bike. Oh, he worked on it too. Wow. He came along too. It was not...

1:07:27 · jump to transcript →

anything like Kevin. He already knew it or he picked it up. He really looked convincing. He knew what he was doing in a lot of this. And we had a good double for death-defying stuff. Yeah, yeah, of course. All right, here's a stunt. This is a toe gag. No CGI, not even really regular visual effects. We just did this. This was a trifecta. Every element you see in the shot was in the shot. The bike, the truck, and the helicopter. The bike, the truck, and the helicopter. And gunshots. Just a couple different camera angles, shit flying around. It was terrifying. How many cameras did you have on it?

1:07:57 · jump to transcript →

Well, and I love when it rains and they play that as a sound blip on the radio. God, I've been giving Sean credit for that. Well, believe me, Sean gets credit for a lot. He's just amazing. Now, Amy, how do you feel about these big stunts here? You've got a stunt going. I know, and I'm a girl, and I fail the driver's test five times, so cars totally scare me.

44:27 · jump to transcript →

You know, this is the kind of thing where, like, everything's planned out. The stunt guys come with their little matchbox cars, and it's all storyboarded, and then you just... It's when you really have nothing to do. It's like you sit back, and then it gets accomplished, or not. But they pulled this off. They made this look great. That's good. Now, was the full set of tools yours? I love that. He's got the full set of tools. Don't remember.

44:56 · jump to transcript →

And then we went and we shot the actual, you know, our actors, our cheerleaders and Sean and all of that. And we had to shoot the game. And I didn't have any of this, like, heavy-duty, you know, body-crunching stunts and the close-ups of Forrest, you know, making animal noises. That's not me. And the studio...

47:23 · jump to transcript →

Oh, the to fuck your wife line? Yes. He asks me where I'm going in Spanish, and I tell him to fuck your wife. That's very good. That's a great shot. That's a shot by Tom Richmond. Tom Richmond is up on the bridge covering that from another angle. That's great. Great shot. Very good stunt driving by Bobby Ellis. Very good. Bobby Ellis, an outstanding, outstanding player. Outstanding teamster and outstanding... Here it comes. Here comes the...

22:47 · jump to transcript →

exactly what it is. We laid Venetta's lines in on the post also about the hot, the car being hot, et cetera. That's where I put it in the Roswell, New Mexico town. He's still doing much right of the Valkyries. Dick Rude's stunt. Oh, you know that hurt. Planned or non-planned? This right here, Del. He sort of planned it, I think. So good, so good, so good right there. You look...

47:54 · jump to transcript →

into the pocket. Alex always insists that his actors do all their own stunts. Remember Eddie was mad because there was garbage on the ground? Oh, he didn't think there should be garbage. Yeah, he says, garbage, I don't like this garbage when I come out.

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There it is. That's the money right there. Back left pocket, which is where I still keep all my folded signals. I remember this. It's so sad, but you love doing this. You love doing this. Are you kidding? I thought I was Harrison Ford. You did. You were all over this. I thought I was one of the Duke boys. He was doing stunts. Mac was doing stunts. He was very into this. That's the thing that's funny.

6:06 · jump to transcript →

You know, that's the thing. I'm still waiting for my barge. But, you know, absolutely. Wait, so seriously, though, and this is, I hope viewers aren't frustrated that we're not commenting on these spectacular stunts. Believe me, they're going to be much more into this. But wait, so we were about halfway through filming when...

13:57 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, well, that was kind of them to actually have you wait 10 more minutes instead of having to do it again. I think he was being kind to all of us. I would concur with that. Yeah, absolutely. Sustained. So, yeah, I remember that Rod, our director, was freaking out at that point because you had a stunt woman, actually. Your stunt person was a woman, I think, in her 30s or 40s? Probably, yeah.

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And we shot this very close to the end, didn't we, Jacques? This was a little tabletop thing. Seems to me it was the last week. Yeah. I'm trying to remember if Robert did any of this stuff. It wasn't him, was it? No, no. I think it was his double. Yeah, it was all a little tabletop. Yeah, I think Tony did some of this. Tony Cecere, maybe. Could well be. Tony Cecere, the stunt coordinator. Yeah. And my racquetball partner for the last ten years. And there's Amanda. Yeah, it's Amanda Wyss.

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Jim Doyle's really tour de force here, where this entire set is rotating, and all of the light fixtures outside attached to it for the moonlight through the window are also attached to it, so the shadows don't shift. And the actress is simply told to go with the room. So now she is on the floor, really, and the camera's upside down, along with you, Jacques, and myself. Yeah, Mandy is so good at this scene. Wow. That was a stunt lady.

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so that the stunt lady could take over for the glass breaking shot. Right, because she was going to be seen. I don't think I did it that successfully. No, no, it worked very well. That's a great shot. Oh, we did this. It was the first time I think anybody's ever come out from a mirror, you know. Really? If anybody's ever used a breakaway mirror before, that's what they told me it was. That's a great shot. This, I remember we shot this at the end of an 18-hour day. Yeah. And all those feathers everywhere.

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Gary Goddard

It's a textbook in everything. Virtually every scene has either pyrotechnics, explosions, optical lasers you have to put in later, just stunts. It's one thing after another. This was to establish those doors, because later you'll see the doors play into the action sequence.

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Gary Goddard

The father there in that picture, her father was the actual stunt coordinator on the project. Deliberate choice. Fantasy is the theme of the high school prom. Maybe a foreshadowing of the

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Gary Goddard

This is good. This is the stunt double for Billy Barty making a little hop through the fire here. I always liked that shot. Now we have the detective, and he's going to take matters in hand. He's going to get out there. This is the shot coming up that blew out the windows on all the local businesses. Another interesting thing is you're going to see a lot of aerial shots later over this street in Whittier.

1:05:13 · jump to transcript →

That is the special effects coordinator going down there, Gary Combs. I mean, the fall is, of course, is Nancy, but the big fall is Gary Combs because the stuntwoman we had couldn't do it. So Gary took on, let's say, took a female part there. Gary Combs I worked with also in Hollow Man and in Showgirls. He was my stunt coordinator on three movies. And he had a broken back, too.

18:47 · jump to transcript →

But we had all these other gags, like the gas spraying out and hitting the window, as you'll see, and this stuff. But the special effects guys had only read, the station blows up. And boy, the station blew up, but none of this stuff was ready. And so on the night of, we just had a terrible time trying to get the other gags going. And I remember that night, the stunt guy, because I went over to say, hey, we're going to be able to do this tomorrow. And I think he was going to hit me with an axe handle. He was so mad at me.

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See here, this little spraying gas thing, this nearly cost me my life. Why was that? Because the stunt guy was so mad at me, he was going to hit me with an axe handle. Not the stunt guy, the special effects guy. He married the production controller and later was killed in an automobile accident, which I'm sorry about.

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Luckily, your emergency trip to Iran saved the day. Now, David, you directed this movie? Yes, the whole thing. David showed up every day. That's amazing. Part of every day. Now, this was a big surprise, wasn't it? Yeah. Now, is this the one where Leslie pulled out his back? I think he did. Well, you can see he already has a hump there. Yeah. How many of these stunts? He came up whining, as I remember. How many of these stunts did Leslie do himself? There were no stuntmen.

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The police station, you see. Time was spent on these names. You'll see, that's coming up, I think. The hospital. Is that one of the Everly brothers? Wait a second. Did you ever get negative mail on any of this stuff? Any of the stunts? Just from the studio. And to this day, you still get the negative. Oh, we love the police scientists.

25:53 · jump to transcript →

That's a stunt dancer. Great situation because he was wearing a mask. Couldn't ask for one. Yeah. So Leslie's on vacation during the shooting of this. Yeah. Didn't even know where he was. Most people don't know this song was written for this movie. We wanted him to write an original song. Didn't we meet with Randy Newman?

1:09:12 · jump to transcript →

The stunt here, I remember being there when you guys shot this. This was really fun to watch. Yeah. I mean, you got water in the dead. There'd be a puddle on that campus. This is that cool kind of geekazoid techno music that was just becoming very popular then, and Tom Newman did a great job creating our own version of it.

6:33 · jump to transcript →

You might think that that was all set up, and it was. You know, Gilbert, I feel different already. And here comes this big bicycle stunt. Again, I mean, I'm not Michael Bay, put it that way. How many times do you have to carry that thing? A lot. And didn't you have the whole thing was filled with stuff? You had really, I mean...

7:06 · jump to transcript →

Boy, talk about your great introduction to an evil character. Yeah. And he's not even the evilest of the evil characters. He's the sidekick. It's just... And he's 50. I know. Well, he got held back, you know? He was actually a stunt person who came in to audition as Ogre. He was way too old. He had a beard. I told him, you look too old and you have a beard.

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Bill Paxton

I encouraged the actors to customize their own costumes and armor, to give the impression they had been out a lot, that they were seasoned, that they had been away from command authority on their own a lot and were good enough at their jobs that they were allowed these kind of latitudes. This is a continuation of the motif from the first film, where they're wearing Hawaiian shirts and all kinds of strange stuff, all of which was a new idea in science fiction. People always wore uniforms on spaceships. That's how it worked from Star Trek on. Every science fiction film ever made, there was the general-issue uniform. Alen broke that mold and it just seemed so right to people. They recognized the archetype instantly. "Oh, these guys are truck drivers." "They dress however they want. There's nobody to tell them not to." And so the idea here was extrapolated to a military unit that's worked at the extreme fringes of human civilization. The power loader was not designed by anybody in drawings per se. I had done some preliminary drawings, but it evolved basically from trying to figure out how to make it work. We built full-size mock-ups of the arms and legs in foam core. There's a guy inside that thing, a big, strong English stunt man moving it. It's supported by cables. It's completely an on-set gag. The English visual effects guys thought we were crazy the way we wanted to do it. I said "It's the gag where the dad lets the daughter walk on his feet, his three-year-old." So standing behind Sigourney right now is this big 270-pound body-building English stunt man. He's raising the arms himself and he has in his hands a control that allows him to raise the forearm of the power loader. And then when they walk, they have to walk together. The weight of the machine is held by a crane which is off-camera, or some kind of overhead track rig - we had two versions of it. If we didn't need the machine to turn, we mounted it on a pylon, a boom-arm thing, and if we needed it to pivot we hung it on wires.

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Bill Paxton

James Horner came up with this music sting here and I always thought it was totally over the top. When I saw the whole film put together with the score, I thought "No, that's what we need." I thought "How can you sting somebody opening their eyes?" But it works. Oh! Mm-hm. She shouldn't have had the bangers and mash. Kill it. Fry it. Come on. What are you doing, Hicks? Bad-ass nasty shot. That's a nasty shot of that thing. That's a good shot of it there getting fried. Gosh. Here they come. I think our chestburster looks a little cooler than the one in the first film. Stan Winston's guys really did a good job on it. John Rosengrant and Shane Mahan. Look who's back. Another one of our problems to solve for this movie was creating the whole army of warrior aliens and being legitimate to the original movie but having to improve on it for movement and for the look of being able to study them. In the original A/ien they were rubber suits and very difficult for the actor to move around in. And yet he was very tall and very skinny. And Jim wanted to do a lot of very interesting moves with the warrior aliens, so we came up with a technique to create the suit that really involved a lot of spandex and pieces on it. And then we designed the set pieces for the aliens to fit into the walls, like the one that is behind him there, so that the camouflage would work. An enormous amount of wirework for all of these stunt alien performers, which required that the alien costumes be extremely user-friendly. This was inspired by the scene in the first film where Dallas is in the air vents and they see the signal moving and get a little freaked, and Veronica Cartwright says "Get outta there" and he makes the wrong move and gets killed. That's one of the most suspenseful scenes in the first film. I took that idea that they're getting these readings that are getting them spooked and then they make some bad moves. Form follows function. This is a perfect example of it. You start with what it is you wanna achieve, and once you have that, you can design it, so the actions and the performance is consistent with what you want in the finished film. Believe it or not, very few people work that way. They just wanna come up with something that's cool, and then you spend hours and hours trying to get it to work for the ultimate film. I happen to agree with Gale. My background is as an actor. I really come from a place where the creatures and the characters are wonderful to look at, but it's always about their performance. We have to figure out how they're gonna be able to act, and create a good performance, or it's a waste. And so that's really always at the top of the priority list when we're creating any creature - what is it gonna do and how is it gonna do it? What he does is create a character, and that's why I think his work is So unique. When you look at a film, you can always tell who's done the creatures, if they actually have a character. Because he creates a character that can act and perform. The whole film builds to this moment, where the power transfers from the authoritarian structure to the individual who takes action. Ripley's not supposed to do anything. She's just there as an observer. We're coming up to a sequence where Sigourney takes control of the APC and this sequence is comprised of live-action shots, but as it comes down this hallway and is banging into pipes and walls and sparking, that's all done in miniature. In some cases, the cameraman - cos the set was mounted at an angle - was on a cart, a wheeled cart, and was rolling backwards as the radio-controlled APC was coming at camera. There was a point when he was just put into free fall, rolling backwards downhill, photographing what was in front of him as he went backwards. Here we go. - This is the shot. This is also miniatures. There was a shot with the full-size when the brakes didn't work, and took out the camera, and luckily it was a remote-operated camera. It was the shot where we were actually crushing an alien warrior, when it broke through. This is the shot, actually, when it took the camera out. Then there's another shot where it takes down an alien.

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Bill Paxton

I think editorially it's a fun moment. I like the build. I didn't do any editing directly on this film. Because it's film-based editing, with rapid cutting, I thought it had really good energy. You see that cutting now with the Avid cos you don't have to make each splice manually. This is the Alamo told with six people. So the sentry guns are the equivalent of the first couple of attacks. I think it's great foreboding. It's just coming at them like a wave. If these guns don't stop them, they're screwed. I think it works pretty well, but the studio talked me into taking it out. So I'm happy to see it restored in this extended version. Ray Lovejoy was our editor and it was a tremendous responsibility. And this is before you had all of the Avid and Lightworks and any kind of digital editing. There was so much film and we had a pretty short postproduction schedule and he did just a tremendous job. I hired Ray for one simple reason - cos he had worked with Stanley Kubrick. It took him a while to really get what I was trying to do with this movie. A lot of his early cuts I didn't really care for. It's not that there was ever any tension between us. I just didn't feel I was getting what I wanted. Ray was getting really frustrated. I remember toward the end he cut the alien queen battle, the power loader queen battle at the end of the film. He was really nervous, cos he hadn't given me the action cutting that I wanted and I'd had to mess with it a lot and there was another editor who was cutting some stuff, and I was liking his action cutting better than Ray's. Ray is just a dear guy and a really good editor, but he was struggling with it. SO, finally, he just grabbed all the film, locked himself in his room, said "Don't bother me." Not mean or anything, but "I just gotta do this." And he went in and he cut the entire last eight minutes of the picture. He showed it to me very nervously. He cut in a day or two. He showed it to me very nervously and I watched the whole thing and I said "It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Don't change anything." And that was that. He felt like it was such a huge victory because he had actually got it. He had mastered the style for the film. Sigourney, she's very liberal politically and despised the idea of any kind of guns or anything, and tried to talk me out of them having weapons. I said "They're marines. They'd have weapons." She said "Do I have to carry a weapon?" I said "Yes." She said "Why?" I said "Because it's not Sigourney Weaver in the film. It's Ripley. And Ripley wants to survive." So I took her out shooting a Thompson machine gun, out behind the studio, and she fired off a 50-round magazine from the hip. And then she looked up at me with this sly grin and said "That's really fun." Another liberal bites the dust. There were a few things she asked if she could do when we had our first meeting. She wanted to die in the film, she wanted to not use guns and she wanted to make love to the alien. And between the third and fourth film she got to do all of those things. But fortunately for this film, I said no to all of them, even though I was petrified. I thought she'd bolt from the project, but she didn't. She had a lot of good ideas. But she did have certain specific things she thought should be done in the Aven mythos. When she got to a position of power on the later films, she made that happen. This scene coming up with Ripley and Newt, which is the attack of the facehuggers, was a really tough scene to orchestrate, prepare for, as far as we think we're now back 16 or 17 years. So we don't have any kind of digital animation and there's not gonna be any stop-motion animation, and these facehuggers have gotta come to life, so we created I think a half dozen different facehuggers that would do different things to create the performance coming up, including our hero, which had completely articulated hands, multiple cables that had to be controlled by six puppeteers for one facehugger. We had one that would run across the floor. We called him our pull toy. We had stunt facehuggers that we could throw to hit the wall. We had actually two different heroes. There's the one that crawls up over the counter coming at Newt. And then a completely articulated one with tongue and fingers that Ripley would fight off with all of the cables down her arms through the whole sequence. And there's so much that happens in that. You think of the facehugger that's coming after them, and multiple to create that one scene.

1:41:44 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

And they let them use that clip because it specifically spoke about Punch and Judy and violence. This was one of the last things shot on the movie because they had to destroy the set. And this was all the stunt guys like Vic Armstrong and getting to wear these pullover masks that Rick and his crew made pretty early on. Because there was a Screen Actors Guild strike while they were

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Paul Davis

sequence which was in brick lane which is now like luxury flats you know overlooking tower bridge that was um that was just one day that was one day of shooting so john said okay well we've got if we've got time let's do a little bit more with it and right there at the bottom of the call sheet is standby wolf costume and john was telling me about it that he had alf joint who was the stunt rigger on this uh create like a bungee device which is what they use to pull the the

1:07:37 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

But that sequence, man, Piccadilly, they shot that over two nights. Well, the main stuff at the location, they shot over two nights. This is all in the documentary, but I'll give you the abridged version. On location, it was two nights. It was a Saturday into Sunday, Sunday into Monday. And they essentially had to do the stunt in two minutes. They would do the stunt, clear the street.

1:30:19 · jump to transcript →

William Friedkin

And very live and very capable in all of the physical stunts that he did. And he did almost everything in the film himself, including a lot of the driving. But he assured me he could get up on the rails and make the run. And at one point, we worked it out where he would actually do that for a short stretch. And after we made the shot, of course, I had a severe talking to from the airport managers.

26:34 · jump to transcript →

William Friedkin

I came up with this idea of a car that's being chased going the wrong way up a freeway. Which I thought, wow, I've never seen that. And these ideas are just dictated to me by the movie God. And then I'll talk to the great stunt coordinator, Buddy Joe Hooker, and we try to figure out a way how to do it. But, you know, I thought, what have I not seen?

1:26:39 · jump to transcript →

William Friedkin

a car on a freeway traveling against traffic. If we can pull this off, this is going to be very hairy. And Hooker came up with any number of ways to do that with a team of fantastic stunt drivers to make it believable. And it is pretty believable, I think, even to this day. And the only guidepost was that it be

1:27:09 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

And a kind of traditional stunt style of shooting is just... Static cameras, you know, like this, what you just saw, you watch the guys get thrown out in the background and you rack focus to Dillon in the foreground, here you... Somebody signals Arnold and the rack focus to Arnold. Now, this is second unit.

23:19 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

And no one was hurt on the film. One stunt double for Arnold later on... Ah, there is Painless firing.

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John McTiernan

One stunt double for Arnold, he had hurt his knee. I think we were pretty lucky, we didn't...

25:24 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

I did not go back. With this type of sequence, it was a second unit that went off and a number of units within that second unit of cameras. Because some of these are one-off stunts, you don't want to have to do them twice.

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Roger Moore

be the man who would find out these extraordinary mumbo-jumbo, to me, mysterious objects and bring them in, and great stunts find them. Very good at it. I don't know where he went, but he would find out all sorts of things. I remember one of the episodes we...

11:53 · jump to transcript →

In Daley's, she was great. In Daley's, I was worried she was so great that Holly would be in her shadow until the story started to pop. And she had been working out. She has a sort of a small stunt that happens very shortly. We actually had her working out with a hurdle guy in Chicago before we started filming for it. I don't think she's gonna make it.

21:43 · jump to transcript →

This was just a guy being into his character, so... So we... And Joan was the gun. She almost got seriously hurt in the stunt coming up. That one. Whoa! Hey!

23:07 · jump to transcript →

the friendship between these two guys. They're good buddies dating back from high school days. Oh, this is an interesting sequence. This is the old HP. This was something that I recall in my college days at the fraternity house. I used to do this as kind of a stunt. And it was something that

1:05:49 · jump to transcript →

That was Don. Are any of the other production team in the film in small roles? No. Well, the stunt coordinator was at the beginning playing one of the underworlders. He's the one that does the kidnapping. So this is Bianca warning Bain that there's something going on between the other gangsters and to be wary.

34:34 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

You saw, you got a real realistic feel of how a shot goes. Missed the first one, probably got him on the second or the third. And it took, you saw the delay in him hitting them. Timing-wise, it's complicated to pull that off. You gotta pop the squib at the right time, but it was a good, terrific Filipino crew, assistant directors, and stunt guys, and special effects helpers that were really terrific, with Yves Bono on special effects. Yves Bono was an Englishman.

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Eleanor Bergstein

written a scene and rhythmed it against that and always imagined it in your heart and soul to that, it just is not going to work when you do something else. And so, as I said, as we took the songs out and tried to replace them with new songs, the scenes just didn't work. Okay, here's this nice scene where Patrick does his own stunts to everyone's terror. But he insisted on doing them and does them quite brilliantly.

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