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I have a country-boy sense of humor. I come from a poor family, and I have no education. But I am Middle America, and what makes me laugh is what makes them laugh.
I never had a burning desire to direct. But Burt and I, on many pictures together, used to watch other directors and we realized that he or I could do a lot better.
The worst was practicing a stunt for John Wayne in 'McQ.' I lost two teeth, broke six ribs, cracked a vertebra and punctured a lung. I spent 12 days in the hospital.
The $25,000 stunt was a demonstration of the automobile air bag system for an Allstate Insurance television commercial. I drove a car into a concrete obstacle at 25 m.p.h.
Is there fear? No, there isn't. Now, I've made mistakes. I've broken 56 bones in my body, and each one was a mistake. But when we do stunts, there's just no room for fear.
When people say Evel's a stuntmen I want to throw up. He's nothing but a daredevil idiot. The only reason he's famous is because he wrecks his motorcycle every time he rides.
As far as I know, there is only one other director who was a stuntman - guy named Chuck Bail who directed 'Gumball Rally.' Doing stunts isn't exactly a common path to directing.
I loved acting and wanted to be a leading man. But I decided I'd rather be a big fish in the stuntman pond than a little acting fish. I guess I must have made the right decision.
I went to an acting class for 3 years. But then I figured out that, since there were already 26,000 actors in SAG (Screen Actors Guild), I could make a better living as a stunt man.
For 'Death Car' I had three vehicles for the leading lady, because you never know when something is going to go wrong. You can blow a tire or start spinning around and hit a lamppost.
Of course when you toss a stick of dynamite at a cartoon character, he can come back to life again in the next frame. Getting the same effect with actors is going to be a lot tougher.
I'd say most stuntmen are injured working with horses. They have a one-celled brain and change their minds right in the middle of a stunt no matter how many times they do it right in rehearsal.
Stuntmen bring a lot to the film industry, especially in action films, but if you start trying to give an Oscar for a stuntman, say he doubled a star, I think that takes away from the star's value.
My first job was as a treetopper, and I was so damn good at it they called me 'Squirrel.' And then I joined the military and became a paratrooper. And later on in life I raced motorcycles and cars.
There's a standard pay scale for stunts. The more difficult the stunt, the more money involved. But if I'm the only stuntman who can do a particular gag, there's usually a little more in it for me.
I hope to be remembered for mentoring the future generation of stuntmen and fighting for the rights and respect that stuntmen and stuntwomen deserve for their contribution to the world of moviemaking.
I'm not a big fan of CGI. When I look at it, I go: 'Wait a minute. That's not possible.' And I think other people see the same thing. The movies I worked on, we did stunts for real. And I think it shows.
You are not behind. You are not lagging. You are not supposed to be somewhere else. You are exactly where you should be. Embrace now and go from there. Don't think that you have to catch up to something.
You work a lot when you're hurt when you're a good stuntman, because you're going to be hurt quite a bit. And you can't let a sore leg or a bruise or something stop you, so you just take a Percodan and go to work.
I love horses, and when the SPCA tells me off I get real mad because I know more about horses than they do. They say you can't rear a horse up backwards, but I do it so they fall into foam rubber and don't get hurt at all.
I often tell my students that you can't worry about the end of an improv scene because the end is not up to you. You just play as hard as you can until someone changes the scene. The scene has changedthe end is not up to us.
Some stuntmen become actors, but Hollywood is a caste-oriented society. Most of the time you just don't have the opportunity to get out of your field if you're a grip, an electrician, stuntman, set designer, director or actor.
The night before we began shooting 'Hooper,' I threw a $7,000 bash for the whole crew. I told them, 'Get as drunk as you want tonight, because for the next month and a half you're going to be working your tails off.' And it worked.
Guys like O.J. Simpson and Tony Dorsett can take the ball and run through the line, but I defy them to follow me over a 70-foot cliff or let a horse drag them a few hundred feet. Nobody can beat a stunt man for overall athletic ability.
Out of a year, a half-dozen stunts are pretty tough. The rest are kinda routine. To go out and slide cars around and lay a motorcycle down hell, you do that without even thinking. But on the tough things, you put an awful lot of planning into it.
When 'Smokey' was released and became a blockbuster, Trans Am sales went through the roof. If you wanted a black Trans Am, you had to wait a minimum of six months. By the time we were ready to shoot 'Smokey II,' I was on a first-name basis with Pontiac.
I could jump out of this window feet first, which would be the safe way. But the way I'd do it would be to use a ramp, get a running start, dive through head first and maybe throw in a little roll at the end. Doing it that way makes it more spectacular.
Can I tell you what I really believe is the reason everybody wants to work with us? I believe they sign on because they're almost assured that it's going to be a very commercial film. A Burt Reynolds film is a guarantee of exposure... And also, we have a lot of fun.
They started saying stuff like 'Should we cut the movie? Is it too this, too that?' It got drastic. It got heated. I said, 'Wait a minute, folks. I didn't make 'Smokey' for big-city audiences. I made it for the South, the Midwest and Northwest. Those are my people.'
While prepping 'Smokey,' I saw a picture in a magazine of a Pontiac Trans Am that gave me a product placement idea. I could picture Burt Reynolds behind the wheel with Jackie Gleason on the chase. I called Pontiac and asked if they would like to have the car in the movie.
When I came in, Westerns were the big thing, so I did horse falls, transfers, bulldogs, big fights. That's where you could really shine if you were really good at it. But then all the Westerns stopped, and I was capable of doing car stunts, motorcycle stunts and high falls. I could do it all.
We try to reduce the danger to a minimum, of course. And then we prepare for accidents with alternate plans. For instance, if I'm turning over a stagecoach, I try to take into consideration what moves I have to make if it flips in the wrong direction. Without those emergency plans you get hurt.
You've gotta be careful. People don't want to be reminded of Vietnam and Korea. We lost thousands of fine young men and didn't win either of those wars. Nobody wants to hear about them. 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Deerhunter' weren't box-office hits.There was too much violence and blood and gore.
People doing rote assembly-line movements, or someone tossing dough over and over in a pizza parlour is boring. It’s boring to watch and boring to perform. But if you’re a bad pizza thrower who drops the dough or watches it stick to the ceiling, then we know something more about your character.
Here's the thing that I think really pushed me, was my versatility. Because when I came in to the movie business, all the stunt men were specialists. If you did horse work, that's all you did. If you did cars and motorcycles, you did that. But when I came in, I taught myself how to do everything.
If a producer has 5 million bucks tied up in a picture, he's not about to let a guy like Burt Reynolds wreck a car when he can get a dummy like me to do it. But some stars would make good stuntmen. Reynolds is one of them. Bob Fuller and Doug McClure are strong, tough guys with plenty of courage, too.
'Megaforce' is a privately financed army of freedom fighters financed and manned by all the free countries of the world. We don't say the force is American-based, but it's obvious because they are driving Fords, encountering rattlesnakes and they ride a Continental Airlines plane. Also the landscape looks like the American desert.
'Death Car' was shot on a freeway that's under construction. It's called 'Chips' Freeway' because it's where they shoot the NBC series. We bring out our own traffic, too. This is true in all such scenes, even the car chase in 'The French Connection.' You have to work in a controlled situation, otherwise there would be numerous lawsuits.