New Moves They Must Learn

Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne flip and spin through the air like anti-gravity whirligigs during a wild martial arts duel. Tom Cruise, in full view, hangs by his fingernails from the side of a cliff. Not long ago, such eye-popping shots as these, from “The Matrix” and “M:I-2,” could only have been accomplished by highly skilled stunt doubles for the high-priced stars. But in today’s computerized Hollywood, the stars are performing more of the action themselves, often aided by high-tech trickery, and in the process, the entire motion picture stunt industry is changing radically.

Whereas once a stuntman’s only tools were skill, daring and whatever padding or rigging could be hidden from the camera, today the action game is increasingly played with the aid of safety wire and cable rigs that can be digitally erased from the shot, and digital compositing, which can take a blue- or green-screened actor and place him in the middle of the action. Many filmmakers see this as a boon.

“Digital technology allows you to do things that you couldn’t do in the past; they would have been too dangerous,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “It’s giving movies much more spectacle.”

Helping to fuel this shift in the way stunts are handled is American audiences’ growing taste for Hong Kong-style martial arts action. That has resulted in mainstream Hollywood courting Chinese action experts such as actors Jackie Chan and Chow-Yun Fat, director John Woo (“M:I-2”) and fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping (“The Matrix”). Director Ang Lee, who called on Wo-Ping to choreograph the fights for his upcoming “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which was filmed entirely in China, goes so far as to call the Hong Kong style “an almost perfect form of filmmaking, where the images and editing are like dance and music.”

Within the stunt community, however, these new and rapidly spreading developments are viewed as a double-edged sword. While no one argues that the use of wires to support a performer for a fall, a leap or a fight greatly increases safety, some fear it is also putting “stunt guys” (to use the fraternal vernacular) out of work.

“It will take away a lot of stuntmen’s jobs,” says Loren Janes, co-founder of the Stuntman’s Assn. of Motion Pictures, and a man who has spent nearly 50 years in the industry as a stuntman, stunt coordinator and second unit director. “Nowadays you get hooked up to a wire and you’re just a passenger, and anybody can do that. You don’t need the skills that stuntmen used to have as much now.”

Others, though, maintain that wire work requires more than just a ticket to ride.

“It’s gotten to the point where the wire work requires a certain level of talent that you really need to have,” says Eddie Perez, vice president of the International Stuntman’s Assn. and a stunt coordinator for the TV shows “The Jersey” and “Special Unit 2.” “To me it’s exciting, to some people it’s frightening, but it’s going to the next level and making us work a little harder and think more.”

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Some of that hard work is making the performer, whether it is the actor or a stunt person, not appear suspiciously weightless. “The danger of wires is that you don’t actually get a true flight line because you are suspended,” notes veteran stuntman Vic Armstrong, who served as stunt coordinator and second unit director for Columbia’s upcoming big-screen version of “Charlie’s Angels.” “Don’t kid yourself that because she’s completed the somersault that you’ve got the shot. I’ll say, ‘No, there was a millisecond hesitation before she completed it, she was hanging time, and we have to do it again.’ You have to put blinkers on and look at it as a focused cinema-goer, and they’re not fools.”

Because stunt players still have to rig, rehearse and test the stunts before a film’s star can attempt them, Armstrong believes that the new techniques are actually creating work for stunters. On “Charlie’s Angels,” stars Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu had three sets of doubles, although Armstrong says a good deal of the rough-and-tumble action on screen was gamely performed by the actresses themselves. In particular, he says, Diaz proved to be an amazingly adept stunt driver.

“She was very, very handy in a car, she has a genuine love of it,” says Andy Armstrong, Vic’s brother, who served as co-stunt coordinator on the film. “We put a radar gun on her going 42 miles an hour in reverse, changing lanes, and she did a reverse 180-degree spin and a forward 180 into a parking space. We joked about it, because if I ever had a job with a lot of car stuff and we needed an expert driver, and she’s not doing anything, I’d certainly call her up.”

Car stunts remain one area of action work that is largely handled in the traditional way, with minimal digital encroachment. Even the effects people seem to prefer it that way.

“All the visual effects supervisors I’ve worked with still prefer to do as much practical work on a practical piece as possible, as opposed to doing it blue-screen,” says Steve Davison, stunt coordinator on Columbia’s cloning adventure “The Sixth Day,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. “They’d like to keep as many practical components in a stunt as they can.”

In fact, special-effects coordinator Rory Cutler, who handled the effects work for Warner Bros.’ crime drama “Get Carter” starring Sylvester Stallone, sounds almost nostalgic when talking about that film’s fights and car chases, which were filmed without an abundance of digital trickery.

“It’s nice to see a few pictures like this,” Cutler says, “because in a time where so many shows are trying to define where the edge of the digital abilities and visual effects are, ‘Get Carter’ was more of a traditional piece.”

Still, not all computerized action is there just for the visual big bang. In many cases it is employed for safety reasons, even when experienced stuntmen are being used. For Warners’ fall action comedy “Bait,” starring Jamie Foxx, stunt coordinator John Stoneham Jr. staged a shot of 15 SWAT officers mowed down by an explosion in the hallway of a building. Rather than attempt it practically, Stoneham had the stuntmen filmed against a green screen.

“An explosion that takes out 15 people in a hallway would have to be so big that it would probably kill the first six or eight, the other guys would be on fire, and those at the end would probably survive,” he says. “[With digital] the guys don’t have to take as big of risks, you don’t have to gel them up [with fire-retardant gel] and protect their faces with masks.”

Some stunts, however, cannot be faked, even if the stunt coordinator would like it that way. For Fox 2000’s “Men of Honor,” the story of Carl Brashear, the first African American Navy diver, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., the script called for a diver encased in a 200-pound hard-hat diving suit to free-fall into the sea from the deck of a ship, severing the umbilical hose on the way down. Stunt coordinator Ernie Orsatti had to stage the fall for real, with real-life Navy master diver Todd Rood taking the plunge.

“We did that one live, no tricks,” says Orsatti, a 35-year veteran of the stunt field who, months after completing the stunt, still speaks with a sense of relief that all went well. “I had to devise a way to have the guy fall off the side of the ship, head first, hitting the water from 15 feet, while his tether cord, which has air and radio going into the helmet, gets severed.

“I made sure I brought the boat close to the shore where it was only 30 feet deep. We had one safety cable and I had him on air inside [the suit] and divers already down under the water. All the Navy divers were standing around watching how we were going to retrieve the guy. It was a very dangerous stunt, and it had everybody concerned.”

According to Orsatti, Gooding (whom he calls “a stunt coordinator’s dream”) did much of his own underwater work on the film.

The willingness of certain stars to do as much action work as they can--such as Cruise who, according to “M:I-2” co-producer Paula Wagner, tackled the stunts in that film with minimal trickery--continues to blur the line between acting and stunt work. Increasingly, though, the decision to double or not double an actor in a shot depends as much on a film’s budget as the skill or availability of the stars.

For Walt Disney Pictures’ “Remember the Titans,” a high school football drama starring Denzel Washington, stunt coordinator Lonnie Smith staged a car crash and fights using the traditional methods, but for a mass student brawl in a school corridor, Smith worked with the actors and extras themselves. “In ‘Titans’ there was not a lot budgeted for stunts,” he says. “I couldn’t have them throw punches, because they didn’t want to pay for [stuntmen]. But the story was more about the football game than it was the fights in the corridor, and I understood that.”

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For some stunt guys, the growing concern is not so much over today’s technology, but where that technology might lead in creating a wholly convincing digital performer to replace humans on screen. The groundwork has already been laid on films such as “Titanic” and “The Patriot,” both of which employed digital “stuntmen.”

“You’re able to computer-generate large numbers of people for big battle scenes,” says Jeff Imada, stunt coordinator for New Line’s “Little Nicky,” a supernatural comedy for which he rigged star Adam Sandler and other actors to fly. “You can have a smaller group of people and computer-generate other figures from them, and make it look like a much larger number of stunt people is fighting.”

For others in the stunt community, the critical issue related to the use of actors in stunts, either performing the action for the cameras or having their images digitized over a stunt player, comes down to residuals. As Screen Actors Guild members, stunt players receive residual payments for films the same as actors do, but only if they have appeared on camera. Residuals are not paid for off-camera work, such as shot development, rehearsal, testing, rigging and safety work for other stunt players, which includes such duties as inflating a crash bag or slathering a fellow stunter with rubber cement for a fire burn.

The payment question becomes even murkier in cases where stunts have been filmed against a green screen for later digital enhancement. That can obscure both the stunt players’ identities and their work.

Digitally enhanced action also rankles many stunt players and coordinators on a creative level as well, since almost anything is now possible in film, to the detriment of realism.

“Stunts are getting bigger and wilder and crazier, and there’s nothing real about it, nothing that a human could do now, because [movie characters] are all becoming supermen,” Janes asserts.

“When you have an actor doing something behind a blue or green screen, and you know it, what’s the jeopardy there?” asks Diamond Farnsworth, a second-generation stuntman (his father is former stuntman and actor Richard Farnsworth) who is stunt coordinator for CBS’ “JAG.” “It’s like cartoons; when Wile E. Coyote falls off the cliff, you don’t go, ‘Oh my God!’ because it’s a cartoon. And people are going to start saying, ‘Wait a minute, what’s the jeopardy behind this?’ And I think they’re still going to want to see stunts.”

For that reason, even though the pinch is already being felt in the stunt community, most believe it is not yet time to relegate stunt players to the same museum that houses analog recording equipment. “There are still so many things you have to do and want to do with stuntmen,” says Bruckheimer, whose company produced “Remember the Titans” and is currently working on “Pearl Harbor” for next summer. Wagner, Cruise’s producing partner, agrees: Stunt people “are a very necessary and integral part of creating a sequence. Doing things green-screen, for example, requires a lot of precision, which those people are trained in.”

Ultimately, the bottom line, in the words of Andy Armstrong, is that “it’s not necessarily about making work for stunt people, it’s about making it believable that an actor who may not have any physical skills can do something that’s very tough, very skillful and dangerous and clever. Engineering and development go hand in hand, and there’s no reason the stunt industry shouldn’t be the same.”