Film is a collaborative art form. I don’t know why you wouldn’t recognize the stunt performers.
I always end up hurting myself doing something mundane. If I have to do some complicated stunt, I’m fine.
As much as possible, I try to encourage people to use stunt men because that is really their job.
My family has always believed that anybody can do anything if you are trained for it. So I trained with Barry John’s in Mumbai, did marital arts, and then went to stunt school in the U.S.
The scariest stunt I’ve ever done was on ‘Captain America.’ We were doing some underwater sequence. I was in a submarine, and Chris Evans had to break the glass, and the water had to fill up quickly in the submarine.
Awards sell tickets, and they’re a clever publicity stunt.
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.
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 come from a huge theater background. The whole action and stunt world just came as the roles were available.
I am very hands on doing my own work, all my own stunt work.
And getting stunt coordinator Dan Bradley and everybody from the whole ‘Bourne Supremacy’ crew, I think was real cool for our film because we do a bunch of really big jumps in this movie.
I go to temple a lot less than I would like because when I do, people still look at me as if they think it’s a publicity stunt.
I stepped away from stunts and into acting right around when stunt people started getting put into motion-capture stuff.
I have talked to stunt drivers all my life, 32 years of talking to stunt drivers. There’s a craziness to them.
I’ve been pushing and training for Lucha Underground and AAA, as well as parkour and stunt training for my movie, and I’ve blended those styles together for my wrestling.
I felt good when I did a stunt, and if it was really dangerous – like if I got out on a horse or a bull that was rank, or jumped out of this building on a bag – I felt great.
All stunt men and women are as competitive as I am. They’re just not as talented.
I’ve been on sets where I broke my ankle on a television show doing a stunt playing Arthur in ‘Camelot.’ That was because it was really rushed, and it hadn’t been thought through properly.
There’s a huge amount of faith and confidence in the stunt team.
Before becoming an action director in 1990, my father was a stunt man for about 8 years. During that time, he was body double to many actors in that era, one of them being Sanjay Dutt.
Since I was a kid, I have always froze when I saw an action star perform a stunt defying the parameters of safety and fear.
As a stunt girl I’ve done most varieties of female fight action.
One time they traded me for seven horses. Seven stunt horses.
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.
The guys on the stunt team are really fantastic. It’s really funny, because for all the aggression they have to display on screen, they’re actually really happy, good- natured people.
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 like the fact that I can do stunts, but I don’t think of myself as a stunt guy. Those guys are really good at what they do.
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.
Being a stunt coordinator, I have to take care not only of myself but I have to make sure everyone is safe.
In the stunt world, fights and vehicles are often two different disciplines.
I definitely dabbled and had done a number of stunt jobs in which I was doing fighting.
I’ve had my face sliced open one day. Stunt man went one way, and I went the same way and had a few stitches.
My particular rule of thumb is to allow disruptors to let their flags fly. If they want to stage a stunt, who cares?
There’s something that feels more organic about watching a stunt that’s done by you. There’s also a feeling of accomplishment doing it yourself.
Since very early in my career, I have always did my own stunt fighting.
We don’t move on in the stunt unless it looks like a hit. So when I see it on TV, I’m generally satisfied that people are going to buy it.
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.
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.
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.
On ‘Angel’ I got to work a lot with Mike Massa, who was David Boreanaz’ stunt double, and Mike would let me do most of my stuff by myself. I did almost all my fight scenes by myself.
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 remember hitting Sarah Michelle Gellar with a right hook during my first week on the job. It was awful. They usually pair actors with stunt doubles to avoid things like that.
I was in Australia in 1983 and did a stunt in a lion’s cage.
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.
I would never consent to a lame publicity stunt at a time when I already want to hide.
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.
I had the opportunity to go cast for a Hollywood film that was filming in Thailand called ‘Mortal Kombat 2.’ Out of 100 people, I was cast to be the stunt double for Robin Shou.
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.
I was Renee Zellweger’s fat doppelganger. If she ever played in a movie where she needed to be fat, apparently I could be her stunt double.
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.
Big Brother sounded like a silly stunt and that’s what it is.
I don’t do stunts and I don’t think many actors do. For an actor to say they do their own stunts I don’t think is very respectful of the profession of stunt men and women.
It’s a very, very rare moment when another actor hurts you. That’s not normal. If anything, it’s the actor accidentally punching the stunt double, which happens quite a bit.
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.
Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. It was the 1970s. I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. And the tool that I used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle.
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.
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.
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