The New Stunt Dummy
Recently here in Australia, during the production of a documentary, a stuntman
was killed when a stunt he was performing went wrong. The stuntman, John
Raaen, fell 7 metres from an old power station and hit the edge of an airbag,
flinging him heavily to the ground. Two other Australian stuntman have died
in similar falls since 1995. It’s tragic, but the work of stuntpeople,
needless to say, has always been quite high risk, so it’s probably not
surprising that these things happen from time to time. After all, that in
a sense is their role - to take the risks that studios don’t dare let
their ‘valuable’ actors take. And done with enough skill and concern
for safety, they usually work out. But not always.
Some actors are renowned for doing their own stunts - or at least as much
as they are allowed to by movie studios. Jackie Chan would probably be the
most famous - and wreckless. Another is Harrison Ford. Respected by the stunt
people on the films he works on for his experienced handling of fight scenes,
Harrison may have wished he wasn’t so gung ho during the making of the
film Clear And Present Danger. Apparently during a choreographed fight scene
he got kicked in the nuts by another, less experience actor, who thought
he’d give stunt acting a shot. It could’ve been worse for old Harrison
- like it was for Brandon Lee during filming of The Crow.
No essay on movie stunts would be complete without mention of Yakima Canutt,
one of Hollywood's best known stuntmen, who specialized in stunts involving
horses, wagons and stagecoaches. Canutt and second unit director, Andrew
Marton, directed the famous chariot race sequence in William Wyler's Ben
Hur. Amazingly, with only one exception, none of the stuntmen or horses were
injured during filming. The exception being Canutt's son, Joe, who cut his
chin while doubling for Charlton Heston during the spectacular stunt where
Ben Hur's chariot and team of white horses leap over the wreckage of another
chariot. Canutt took the jump too fast and was flipped over the front of
the chariot - but was able to cling onto the hand rail and climb back in.
The resultant extra unintentional footage was so impressive that it was included
in the film. Close-ups were filmed later showing a plucky Charlton Heston
climbing back into his chariot - in the relative safety of the studio.
The art of filmmaking has always been about illusion, right back to the days
of George Melies and his man in the moon. Whether it’s special effects
or the point when the stuntman takes over from the actor it’s always
fun to spot the illusion. One of my favourite examples of the latter is Jonathan
Harris, the Doctor Smith character from Lost In Space, who was seemingly
incapable of doing even the slightest strenuous movement without resorting
to the stuntman double (usually shot from behind, or in long shot, or with
his hand over his face to hide the fact it wasn’t Harris). What delicious
irony then that doddering old Dr Smith survives today in the form of reasonably
spry (and still charming) Harris, while action man Guy Williams (John Robinson)
is no longer with us. Wily old self-preserving Dr Smith would be rubbing
his hands with glee.
But with the help of more advanced special effects, computer animation, etc,
the line between reality and illusion is getting harder to pick. Technology
is making entertainment more and more convincing. Special effects show us
everything imaginable, from morphing bodies to exploding heads. And computer
generated images (CGI’s) give us realistically rendered people falling
to their deaths (often damaged on the way down by some protrusion) without
the need for ridiculously fake dummies in James Cameron’s Titanic. A
particularly interesting feature of that film was a shot showing what looked
like Leo and Kate running down a passageway with a flood of water perilously
close behind them. Apparently Leo and Kate’s faces were grafted onto
the heads of their stuntdoubles care of CGI’s.
So in future, CGI’s will probably take over some of the work that
stuntpeople do, particularly the more dangerous stunts. But I doubt that
they will seriously threaten their work, as filmmakers will always need the
extra realism that only real stunts with real stuntpeople can provide. Certainly
it’s hard to imagine even a film as high-tech as Spielberg’s Saving
Private Ryan without the spectacle of real stuntguys ‘burning to
death’ or getting blown up and losing limbs on cue. Anyway, flames are
such a bastard to reproduce realistically on computer.
All of this has got me thinking of those last bastions of Rome’s
gladiatorial arena - like the boxing ring, the rodeo and the bullring. Is
it possible that one day we will grow out of the need for those brutal real-life
spectacles, where the participants - like stuntmen - sometimes die for the
privilege of entertaining ‘fans’? Can we sublimate our seeming
need for violence through a virtual catharsis? I suspect, although computers
may be the new stunt dummy, they will never completely be a substitute for
‘the real thing’.