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  • 2 years ago
Before directing Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, or Bullet Train, David Leitch was one of the most prolific stuntmen in Hollywood. He doubled for Brad Pitt in Fight Club and Troy. He executed stunts on two of the Matrix movies and one of the Bourne installments. He is a scholar of the action flick and told TIME his latest movie, The Fall Guy, is a "love letter to action movies."
Transcript
00:00 Obviously this was a sort of a love letter to Stunts and that having been in
00:04 the business for over two decades as a stunt performer and coordinator I wanted
00:09 to make sure that we were doing some really big practical stunts and also I
00:13 wanted to pay sort of a homage to the history of Stunts and doing some really
00:18 fun ones in the spirit of some of the classics.
00:21 [Music]
00:23 David challenged the team to break a world record he actually even put it in
00:29 the script and ended up deciding that it was a cannon roll and that's from Casino
00:35 Royale was the last longest car roll I think they had the world record before
00:40 we, on film I should say, that one went downhill and ours was on sand flat
00:46 which is sand is hard because that cannon hits down into a surface and the
00:51 harder the surface the easier it is to roll it I don't know how but somehow we
00:55 all were like we're gonna get eight and a half or I think it was eight and a
00:58 half but was like always we're gonna get eight and a half like we want eight and a half
01:02 because I think the last record was seven.
01:05 The high fall was kind of inspired by
01:07 Sharky's Machine you know there was a great high fall in that movie
01:10 Assassin's Creed yeah Damian Walters did one maybe 150 feet 125 feet something
01:16 and we had you know we did what was our 150.
01:22 True Lies is such a great movie for action and relationship right and the
01:27 stakes involved in those sequences there's the final helicopter gag where
01:32 you know he's holding he grabs her from the limo as it's going over the edge and
01:38 helicopters rising up and he's got her by one hand like that's an insane stunt
01:43 to drive the car off of the bridge and lift her up that's a really insane stunt.
01:55 The chase where we have the garbage bin spinning around and things like that
01:58 that was really inspired by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there's a
02:02 great truck sequence in that where Indy is like trying to transfer from truck to
02:06 truck and like he's hanging behind it and I think we started out there but
02:09 then as the guys got into the choreography that started to become its
02:12 own version of that it's definitely inspired by Indiana Jones and sort of
02:16 how he's always some overwhelmed and outmatched but somehow figures a clever
02:21 way out of it. And when he's under the truck being pulled yeah.
02:26 Dragged behind the truck. That whole era of stunts from the from those 80s action movies 80s
02:32 and 90s action movies are baked into the DNA of the Fall Guy for sure.
02:38 There's a big car jump at the end of the movie that's inspired by Smokey and the
02:43 Bandit and Hooper both Burt Reynolds movies so it was really fun to like
02:48 figure out like how can we take that to the next level. First sort of truck jump
02:52 in the movie it's inspired by the Fall Guy television show. Every episode you'd
02:57 see the truck the GMC Sierra enter the chase from behind the hedge or bushes or
03:04 over a wall and it was always sort of this classic like here are the bad guys
03:07 and then they would come in hot pursuit. So we wanted to sort of do that same
03:11 sort of jump with the new Sierra and we did it. It was great. It was fun.
03:18 you
03:20 you
03:22 (upbeat music)
03:25 (gentle music)
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