A New Risk in the World of Film Stunts

In the rough-and-tumble stunt world, Terry Leonard is a legend.

People still talk about how he managed to crawl under a moving truck, doubling for Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Or the time he stood in for Michael Douglas in “Romancing the Stone” and nearly killed himself driving a car off an 80-foot waterfall outside of Durango, Mexico.

From riding horses in the John Wayne movie “The Train Robbers” to directing stunts in “2 Fast 2 Furious,” the burly 62-year-old has done it all, and made a pretty comfortable living doing so.

But Leonard, who competes in rodeos in his spare time and typically sports a Stetson and spurs, has mixed feelings about his son’s decision to follow in his cowboy boots.

“I’m very concerned about the sort of career my son is going to have,” said Leonard, as he picked over a plate of biscuits and gravy at a restaurant near his ranch home in Agua Dulce. “There could be a time when all the stunt work is done on computers.”

Leonard is no Luddite. He knows that the growing use of digital technology is a boon to the industry, drawing audiences with the kind of death-defying scenes that no stuntman could ever perform. But at the same time, the ability to create stunts on a computer screen clouds the future of a community already struggling from the effects of runaway movie production and fierce competition for jobs. If that’s not enough, makers of movies such as “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” and the “Lord of the Rings” series increasingly are turning to actors to perform tasks that traditionally were handled by stuntmen.

“They’re all worried their way of life is going to go,” said director and writer John Milius, who has been involved in stunt-heavy projects from “Apocalypse Now” to “Clear and Present Danger.” “They’re right....To a large extent they’re going to be a casualty.”

Some say that’s an exaggeration. The Screen Actors Guild and the loose-knit associations that represent the industry’s 6,600 stuntmen and stuntwomen do not keep track of how much stunt work may be lost to digital technology. But they say their members continue to play a critical role in movie making today and point out that, in some cases, the trend toward digitally enhanced special effects has helped create more work for stuntmen and stuntwomen.

That said, most agree that the burgeoning technology will one day have the potential to replace much of the work that stuntmen and stuntwomen traditionally do. What’s happening to the stunt community, industry leaders say, is merely another reflection of the digital change that’s transforming every inch of Hollywood.

The shift to digital equipment is nearly complete inside the editing rooms. The switch to digital projectors is slowly underway and promises to one day make film obsolete. On sets, everyone from designers to cinematographers is scrambling to adapt to the changes brought about by the use of digital camera systems.

Yet unlike these crews, the stunt community is among the first to feel digital’s sharp bite while working in front of the camera.

“I see myself as a relic,” said Max Kleven, 69, a veteran of the business and second unit director for “Spider-Man” and “What Lies Beneath.” “These digitally enhanced movies are making a fortune.”

Several factors are driving the trend: The declining cost of digital equipment that can erase unsightly wires that might be hanging in the background of a shot, rising insurance rates to cover live-action stunts, and the popularity of computer-generated imagery among the teenage moviegoers so coveted by studio executives.

The biggest attraction for filmmakers is the ability to create scenes that defy the laws of physics outright.

In “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” digital animators spent weeks taking detailed electronic scans of the faces and bodies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kristanna Loken, the actors who play assassins from the future. The team used the data to build virtual models of them.

For a scene in which Schwarzenegger and Loken battle one another in a small bathroom, blasting through doors and walls in the process, the production crew used a real crane to destroy a real bathroom -- and then dropped the virtual actors into the footage after the fact.

Leonard himself employed digital techniques in a scene he set up in “2 Fast 2 Furious,” in which one car appears to rocket over another as they fly off a bridge. In fact, the cars were filmed separately. The car that flies overhead was digitally inserted to make it look as if both vehicles were in the same sequence. That saved considerable time and expense and also eliminated the need for a much more dangerous stunt.

“The thing about computer-generated imagery is that it helps our business and it hurts our business,” Leonard said. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Today the technology is so powerful, it’s often invisible -- giving filmmakers more incentive than ever to use virtual stunts in place of the real thing.

The blurring of the lines also makes it possible for actors to take credit for the danger.

During a recent interview with “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno, actor Will Smith touted how “real” the stunts were in “Bad Boys II,” including an action sequence in which he races a silver Ferrari across a traffic-packed bridge. The film’s villains, who have stolen a semi filled with automobiles, begin flinging the cars onto the road.

“In this age of computer-generated images,” Smith said proudly, director “Michael Bay went old-school and he shot the stunts for real.”

That came as a shock to the staff at Sony Pictures Imageworks, the visual effects powerhouse in Culver City that handled more than 100 digital effects shots for the movie, including the bridge chase scene.

Smith could not be reached for comment. Bay acknowledged that though some stunt work was done traditionally, computers were used to “add dimension that would otherwise have been impossible to achieve.”

In the early days of virtual stunts, the technology was so raw that it tended to be limited to the portrayal of animals. The extraordinary dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park,” the charming pig in “Babe” and the adorable mouse in “Stuart Little” helped the major studios recognize that computer-generated life forms could be integral, even indispensable, characters in their films.

As the technology developed, virtual humans began cropping up, populating the passenger deck in “Titanic” and the Coliseum stands in “Gladiator.” The digital figures were relegated to the work of background extras because they still didn’t look believable up close.

For a while, this technological drawback actually helped create new opportunities for stuntmen and stuntwomen.

They could be used as stand-ins for stars who were too busy or too expensive to perform technical stunt work. Instead, a stuntman or stuntwoman would be covered with motion-capture sensors so that each move of an arm or flicker of an eyelid would be stored on a computer and used as a guide for the digital animators to create actual movie footage featuring the stars.

But as the technology became more sophisticated and the animators and visual effects teams gained experience with the emerging tools, the virtual actors were brought closer to the camera lens. And for that reason, a growing number of directors are opting to have the film’s actual star, or an actor, move for the computer.

Although stunt people understand how to move their bodies to achieve death-defying acts, few possess the same ability as actors to speak with their bodies and convey emotion through something as simple as a stare.

Such a technique was embraced by “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson, who tapped a Shakespearean stage player named Andy Serkis for the role of Gollum, the wheezing, lisping wretch who stars in two movies in the trilogy.

A stuntman could have walked through the movements of Gollum, said Randall William Cook, director of animation at WETA Digital, the post-production house that handled effects on the “Lord of the Rings” series. “But he’s not going to have the charisma of an actor.”

Director Ang Lee agrees, and took a similar path on his recent action film “The Hulk.”

The visual effects team at Industrial Light & Magic spent months casting various people to act out the role of the angry green monster while wearing a motion-capture suit. Stunt people, body builders, former professional football players -- even ultimate fighters -- slipped into the suit and stalked around a bare stage.

Yet none was able to move in exactly the way that the director, a classically trained Taiwanese actor, wanted. Finally, he began to move his own body as an example. The ILM team began filming.

“By the end, we dumped about 60% to 70% of the footage we had of the stunt people and got Ang into the suit,” said Colin Brady, animation director for “The Hulk.”

That, of course, is the exception. Digital effects teams continue to rely heavily on stuntmen and stuntwomen to fulfill such roles, and they are not likely to be replaced by computers anytime soon. Ultimately, humans still fill a niche that no computer code can, visual experts say.

“Technology has its limits,” said Mark Stetson, visual effects supervisor for “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.” “Right now, we depend on the stunt coordinator, and they depend on us. We need each other.”

That’s little solace for many stunt veterans, who say sweeping change is inevitable.

Leonard saw a glimpse of this future in a television commercial that aired during this year’s Oscar ceremony. It showed a daredevil motorcyclist roaring off a cliff, and it was done almost entirely digitally.

Leonard found himself admiring the seamless work, until he thought about his 24-year-old-son, Malosi, a former wide receiver for the University of Arizona, who had just broken into the business.

“I said, holy smokes, that’s what Malosi’s up against.”