Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My father got a phone call to bring me in to meet with Spielberg for 'E.T.,' partially because they knew I was a physical kid, and I was known in the business somewhat as a stunt kid, and I could do all the bicycle riding.
Sometimes you may even have a stunt double do certain things for you, but when it's close-up and it's really dramatic, that's when you really need to concentrate. You cannot get body doubles or anybody else to do it for you.
The goal of reanimation research is not to make perfect living copies of extinct organisms, nor is it meant to be a one-off stunt in a laboratory or zoo. Reanimation is about leveraging the best of ancient and synthetic DNA.
We were very athletic growing up. My dad basically trained us like boys when we were little, so being able to physically challenge myself and to be able to do crazy stunts and not use my stunt double was super exciting for me.
I've done a lot of action movies, and there has to be a certain amount of emotion in the actual performing of the stunt. It doesn't have to be any particular emotion, but there has to be some life to it, and that's not so easy.
My husband's a stunt man, and he dragged me to stunt driving school with him because I hate driving and he felt that it would help to make me feel more comfortable. And it did in certain ways, and in certain ways I'm still not.
Some of the martial arts films, the motivation is about martial arts. That's where it's coming from. It is a visual, commercial film, to showcase the next stunt, the biggest thing. And character development becomes a side thing.
So there was always a stunt coordinator on those films that was from Stunts Unlimited and I was just one of the young warriors from Stunts Unlimited that got to be a part of it because it was a big show and they needed a lot of guys.
I've always loved the collaborative side of filmmaking, and there's a lot of things I can do in the acting side of things in terms of the creating of action sequences, and coming up with ways of doing things with a stunt coordinator.
My dad battled various financial mishaps for years before achieving success as a stunt director, but my parents ensured that my brother and I knew all about the family's struggle. We knew from where each piece of furniture came from.
I have a stunt double. His name is Glen Levy, and he has the hardest punch in the world. Seriously - it's actually been recorded by National Geographic. He calls it the Hammer Fist. And he's my stunt double! He makes me look awesome.
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.
My first break was in a Hong Kong movie that I shot in China - I was going out there and working as a western stunt man, if you like, but at the same time in England I was working in daytime soap stuff. Eventually I put the two together.
I had a stunt double for 'The Bronze.' She's literally the most amazing human being I've ever seen. She's NCAA women's gymnastics champion. She was incredible. I would poke her thighs, and my nail would break because it was like poking a rock.
I have no problem telling people I have a great stunt double. I'm not that guy who's like, 'I do all my own stunts.' Like, no, no, no - it's make-believe, and I'm not in the mood to die. I'm not in the mood to get hurt. I have a wife and kids!
Occupational licensing laws - in trades like moving companies, realtors, hair dressers, limousine services, beauticians, physical therapy, and on and on - stunt small business start ups, destroy jobs, and raise prices for lower-income consumers.
Stunt performing is a highly structured career path - you have to gain qualifications in six different sports to a high standard. It takes four or five years and costs at least £20,000; a black belt in a martial art from scratch costs a fortune.
For a while, I was a flight attendant. I lived in New York, and I was a bartender. I took cooking classes, martial arts classes. I taught a foreign language. I went back to college and studied acting, which I love. I was doing stunt work as well.
Actors always ask their directors what their motivation is in this scene or that scene, so I've always had this joke where I ask the director what my motivation is too. As a stunt person your motivation is usually to fall over a bench or something.
The vehicle-stunt world is so specialized. But when you spend so long in it as a stunt coordinator, you're exposed to all the disciplines, so it's always fun to combine the two ideas - a car chase and a fight scene - and make something more dynamic.
I realised how much misdirection is in stunt co-coordinating. It's similar to magic, the tricks we use to make people think the stunt is real. I also have a lifelong fascination with gambling cheats. I'm not one, but I do have a fascination with it.
In Montana, when we did 'Return to Lonesome Dove', we rode on the side of a hill at night in the dark; I was afraid my horse would step on one of the actors playing dead. The director said to leave it to the stunt doubles since they got paid for that.
When a male stunt performer falls down a flight of stairs, he has a lot of clothes on and can wear all this padding. But because actresses never have a lot of clothes on - they are always falling in their underwear - you can't wear any padding whatsoever.
I'm an athlete; I've got an ego when stunt doubles have to come in. Not an ego like that, but when it comes to physical stuff, if I didn't have to have a stunt double, I would always probably do it myself unless the producers were jumping in and stopping me.
Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.
Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.
I got a call from somebody who used to be the president of Little Persons of America. She got called from some producers who wanted someone of a certain size in the John Hughes film 'Baby's Day Out.' So that was my big break, as the stunt double of a nine-month-old.
I met this group of stunt people and it was like, I had found family instantly. We're all a variety of different personalities, but whatever that mutual joy or appreciation of the work is, I'd not felt it like that before. It was, 'Yeah, I'd like to do this forever.'
I came from the soccer world, so all I knew was get the ball in that net. And when you're working with WWE, you're pretty much doing stunt work. You have to train and make sure you're safe and you're safe for your opponent, but at the same time, you have to tell a story.
I was proud of 'Robin Hood,' even though critics wrote negative things. But I had to laugh when this big, shaven-headed Hungarian stunt guy first saw me. He said, 'You Jonas? You playing Robin Hood? You need to go to the gym today.' So I thought, 'I'm going to show people.'
I wouldn't have raced a horse. But you'll then throw back at me that Jesse Owens raced against a horse, and he's one of my heroes, so I'm not going to say it was a silly stunt. I know too much about horses. They're highly unreliable, and they've got brains the size of golf balls.
Tim Miller's idea of Colossus was to be bigger and stronger than everyone else, so for the motion capture, they needed an extremely tall man. I'm 6-foot-4, but he wanted Colossus to be over 7 feet, so they used a stunt double to recreate his height, and he did very good job there.
I like being able to do all of my own stunts. I appreciate stunt guys and what they do and, of course, the time and the effort that they put in, but for me, I'm young. You only live once, so to be able to do all your own stunts, train, become a real fighter... I feel like I can hold my own.
I go to this gym full of stunt men. There aren't any TVs or treadmills there. This is a spit-and-sawdust kind of place. It has a lot of great training aids - trampolines and bags and every weapon ever invented to do harm to a human being. If you want to know how to throw a knife, it's great.
I could take my grandma and put her in a cape, and they'll put her on a green screen, and they'll have stunt doubles come in and do all the action. Anybody can do it. They're relying on stunt doubles and green screen and $200 million budgets - it's all CGI created. To me, it's not authentic.
It's all choreographed; it's a routine. So I told everyone I really wanted to try fighting in action films. I had no stunt experience, but I had the dance background, and I was very agile and coordinated. And the best thing about being a newcomer to acting is you can afford to try new things.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
Nobody has really gone out to Russia to fight somebody like Kovalev. A lot of people are paying attention to it and can't believe what I'm doing. Some people think I'm going to pull out. I've seen comments saying 'Oh this is a good publicity stunt' and I was just laughing. They don't understand.
I always check my harness before I do a stunt; I test-drive the cars I have to race or explode; I'm present at all pyrotechnical rehearsals; and I walk through everything step-by-step. No man should put their life in someone else's hands unless they have covered their own safety from all angles.
Yakima Canutt was famously John Wayne's stunt double, and in the Western movie 'Stagecoach,' there is a fantastic scene where there are some horses thundering along, pulling a carriage. He climbs out onto the horses and drops down underneath them, so he's being dragged along, and then he lets go.
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.
A good choreographer is one that's going to collaborate, teach, guide - everything. The wonderful thing on 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' was that we had Philip Kwok - he choreographed John Woo's 'Hard Boiled,' and in the '70s, he was a martial arts actor, stunt man, fighter, choreographer in Hong Kong.
Because I do so many action-oriented films, I started working with stunt people doing fight training, then I found it to be just great exercise. Also I like to be fit, so I've continued on with fight training. Right before I got to do 'Conan,' I was fighting off four guys. Its great fun. And strange.
We have amazing stunt performers and in Miguel Sapochnik, a director who's so good at spending hours and hours and hours on every shot beforehand, so that he knows exactly what he wants when he gets to the battlefield on the day. We only shoot ten-hour days, so you have to pack a lot into those ten hours.
I've never been a popular person, but it doesn't matter. I have everything in my life that I want. I'm not a walking publicity stunt. I'm not an anarchist, or bitter. I'm not trying to be subversive. I just try to remain unguarded, unprotected by fear, and agents and publicists, and I feel comfortable that way.
When I started to trust myself to be an actor, and to be considered that way and consider myself, that is when people started to see me in that way because that was the truth then, as opposed to me being a stunt girl going, 'Please see me as an actor, please see me as an actor!' when I didn't see myself that way.
I do have a stunt double because there are certain things that they won't let me do. Like they won't set fire to me. They won't like let me jump off a 20 story building. There are certain big stunts that it's just impossible to get insurance to let me do, but for the most part I'd say I do probably 75% of my stuff.
As a stunt woman, I took it upon myself to be a bit of a jock about it. So you wouldn't see me vulnerable, you wouldn't see me hurting or sad because I was there as a professional to do my job. Nobody likes to see a girl get hurt - that's the truth of it - so I had to put them at ease so they would let me do my job.
I always kind of aim with the action stuff to make it feel like, as an audience member, you're experiencing what the people are experiencing. As soon as you go into slow-mo or repeated edits, shooting it like it's a stunt, it takes it out of that reality. The more real you make that stuff, the more tense it will be.
If the shot is going to be epic, if it's going to be awesome, and to make it epic and awesome you have to hit the ground and possibly hurt yourself, I choose to hit the ground and possibly hurt myself. Because in my silly stunt man mind, an epic shot that lives forever on film, I'll get over it in a couple of months!