Australian Penthouse

Despite advances in technology and safety, more stuntmen die or are injured on film sets than ever before. Penthouse speaks with seasoned vets and the new guard in Australia and America about life as a body for hire…

THE past few years have seen several high-profile accidents lead to injuries and deaths of stunt performers on films as varied as The Hangover Part II, The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In early 2011, the Independent newspaper asked whether the profession required assessment, quoting an Equity (UK actors’ union) spokesperson who revealed that insurance claims from stunt accidents were rising. Downward pressure on film costs, the rise of automation and a culture of blame have all taken a toll.

Veteran British stunt coordinator, performer and second-unit director, Vic Armstrong, says that stunt work is no different to car racing or parachuting. The 65-year-old, best known for his work on many James Bond and the Indiana Jones films, says sometimes things just go wrong: “It doesn’t have to be anybody’s fault but there is an inherent risk in any stunt.”

But Armstrong is quick to point out that planning with safety in mind is the key to survival. “It should be a long and exciting life, but it shouldn’t be any more dangerous than any adventurous sport if you approach it correctly.”

The task of the stunt team is to make actions that look dangerous safe to execute, planning the set-up and logistics (stunt co-ordinator), dressing up to take the fall or bullet (stunt performer) and often directing the second unit; it involves a lot of waiting and armies of technicians to capture often a just few seconds of footage. It’s an evolving art.

In his book The True Adventures of the World’s Greatest Stuntman, Armstrong describes being asked to ride in a motorcycle sidecar for 1968’s Subterfuge, assuring the director he could even though he’d never used one in his life. Somehow, they muddled through and got the shot, but Armstrong says this would never happen with today’s endless red tape and clearances.

Australian stunt performers are determined to keep safety at the top of the priority list as well as fostering initiative to solve creative problems. Reg Roordink, stunt performer and safety supervisor on Romper Stomper and McLeod’s Daughters explains, “I never say ‘No we can’t’. It can all be done if we put the right procedures in place.”

“It’s when the output is taken away from the individual and put into so many other hands that things can go wrong, when you rely on technology more than your own spirit,” Page says.

“Physics don’t change and inertia, friction and momentum are the way we work out how a physical action will come out—that’s how we make it safe. What’s changed is that we’ve introduced so many other factors [that are] controlled by people whose arse isn’t on the line.”

And while it might be tempting to think that the stunt game is for young-uns while shuffling older performers out to pasture, guys of Page and Armstrong’s age and status have an ace up their sleeves that can help enforce the safety of the entire industry. “I’ve got to admit that I’m not physically as capable of really high-energy stuff as I was 30 years ago,” Page claims, “but experience replaces a lot of that energy so you don’t have to try as hard to get it right.

“The good thing about the aging process is that you never let go of the knowledge you’ve developed, so less is likely to go wrong.”

But the digital age means audiences are demanding ever-bigger thrills. Even Tom Cruise was prepared to dangle from straps halfway up Dubai’s 830-metre high Burj Khalifa tower. Each director wants to top the stunts filmed by the last one, but now that audiences are expecting feats of superhuman ability, are we asking too much of the men and women who have to deliver it on the screen?

New Zealand stunt artist and frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator, Zoe Bell, 33, has seen the limits of technology take over what the human body can do, and she believes we will always chase the extreme.

“Anything we feel like we don’t have a handle on, we’re going to create technology to push it a bit further,” claims Bell. “We’ve got CGI, so there’s lots of things you’re not going to use humans for because [the stunts] would probably kill us. We just want to see bigger and better stuff all the time. That’s just humanity, not the stunt industry alone.”

Safety concerns change within the stunt industry because the type of work changes with the tastes of filmgoers. As Bell explains: “I’m in the generation that started in the martial arts and wire-work era around the time of The Matrix; it was a more precision-based art. The older guys were from the era of westerns and cowboys and did a lot of horse riding, brawling and jumping-through stuff.

“The older guys were from the era of westerns
and did a lot of brawling and jumping through stuff”

Plus, if you go back that far in time, I simply wouldn’t have been allowed to do what I’m doing because I have boobs!,” she laughs.

However the stunt industry is shaping up, it seems Australia is where it’s at when it comes to safety and a workmanlike approach that consistently delivers great results. “I love working in the industry here,” says Page.

“We don’t have the big money America has, which is actually limiting for them because they automatically throw money and technology at a problem. In Australia, we come up with innovative ideas and we’ll always have an angle because we don’t have too much money.

“People think that’s bad, but the lack of money has made us come up with some truly great stuff.” Because more money attracts more interests, the U.S. industry has been left to drown in a sea of red tape.”

“We’ve always been conscious of safety,” Armstrong explains, “but nowadays it’s all about filling in forms and laying the blame on someone else and very little about being safer. I prefer the older days when it was more free-wheeling, but [excessive oversight] is just something that’s crept into the business, the same as it has in all our lives.”

Though Armstrong’s term “free-wheeling” may horrify modern bean counters, Page says it simply means we should focus not on less caution but caution where it counts. The stunt, he believes, should begin and end with the stunt artist, not the insurance assessors.

“You’re virtually instructed like a learner driver in some of the American car rolls, with big ramps and all the technology to back it up,” says Armstrong. “’Drive here, turn left there, push that button when you get to the yellow line and hang on’. Sure, you get a big result, but you’re not feeling it because it’s just not natural.

“In the old days, we’d go out there and roll cars, set ourselves alight and jump off buildings, and we knew that if we didn’t have our arse covered, we weren’t going to get through.”

When it came to the jaw-dropping Mad Max opening stunt, Page says the tiny crew built the ramp with timber, rocks and bricks found in a nearby paddock: “If it was an American film, there would have been engineers signing off on the ramp and it would have got so complex that little things would have gone wrong.

“We stuck that ramp together virtually with our finger in the air to feel where the wind was coming from. It was done on feel.”

American Rick Baker is a legend in the world of special effects make-up. Since winning the first-ever Best Make-up Academy Award for An American Werewolf in London (1981), Baker has been at the forefront of innovation in the field. Penthouse spoke with the make-up master about creating 127 original aliens for Men In Black 3 and staying relevant in Hollywood.

Interview: Drew Turney

How do you keep raising the bar after such a long and lauded career?
It really is hard, especially when you’re as fucking good as I am! [Laughs] A lot of times, the script sparks ideas, and what I like about the Men in Black films is that I’m a real collaborator. Barry [Sonnenfeld, director] and I come up with ideas I might not be able to conceive on my own. Barry wants that collaboration and appreciates it. It’s not always appreciated.

What was your inspiration for the alien designs in the Men In Black movies?
Pretty much every 1950s and 60s alien movie there ever was, but there was one in particular called Invasion of the Saucer Men. It was a ´50s B movie and this guy called Paul Blaisdell made these big-brained, bug-eyed alien masks that little people wore. And we got to do a saucer man for Men In Black. It’s not an exact duplicate—we made it a little cooler—but it was very much inspired by that.

In describing your work, do you think of yourself as more of a make-up artist, designer or sculptor?
I’d always just called myself a make-up artist, but then I realised I was taking it to another level and started doing stuff a normal make-up person wouldn’t do. I didn’t like the limitations of make-up. When you’re working on an actor’s face, that’s the armature for your sculpture. If you’re putting a new nose on someone and they have a bump, you can’t really get rid of it. Or if their eyes are a certain distance apart, you can’t really make the distance any wider.

So that’s when I starting getting into animatronics and puppetry. In the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London, we did what we could with standard make-up and then we had two fake heads containing animatronics so they could transform on camera. That was the only way we could do it. I actually got a lot of flack from make-up artists because that stuff wasn’t make-up but, to me, it was a natural evolution.

Is staying aware of the technology a way of staying relevant?
You bet. I’ve kept learning because I’ve been a fan of this stuff for as long as I can remember. Jack Pierce, the make-up artist at Universal who did Frankenstein’s Monster and The Wolf Man and The Mummy and all these classic films, didn’t progress with the times. Other people were using foam rubber appliances and he was still using cotton and spirit gum. I took note of that as a kid and told myself I was going to stay on top of what’s new. But doing that’s easy because it’s just more fun.

“What’s hard when it comes to aliens is trying to come up with something nobody’s seen before”

What make-up work has really impressed you lately?
I was really impressed by the work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I so wanted to hate that movie because I did the make-up for Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes, which isn’t very fondly remembered, but I think most people think the make-up is really good. To me, Planet of the Apes was actors in make-up, and that’s where I’ve come from. But they did Rise… on computers and I thought it looked great. I was very impressed.

I worked with the digital guys on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We made real-world silicone heads, which they scanned and made the computer models from. In the ´90s, CGI was kind of crappy. It was neat that they could do it, but I thought the stuff we were making still looked more real. But CGI’s come a long way.

You’re known for monsters and creatures, but are human make-up effects like those you did on Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor a whole different ball game?
They are, and I like doing both of them. Aliens are easier in a lot of ways because you don’t see aliens every day. Human make-up is the hardest to pull off. What’s hard when it comes to aliens is trying to come up with something nobody’s seen before, but if you have a defect in the rubber, you can leave it because nobody would know the alien isn’t supposed to look like that.

Do you prefer monster effects because they’re a little more visible and you can get more recognition?
I just like mixing it up, I always have. Sometimes I’ll do an alien, then I’ll do the fat suit for The Nutty Professor where the characters are all human, then I’ll do a big ape suit or The Grinch. I just don’t like doing the same thing over and over again.

Unconcerned with being typecast, Goldie giggled her way through her feature film debut, playing a dancer in 1968′s The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, and as a scatterbrain mistress in Cactus Flower (1969), which earned her both a Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

With her career on the rise, Goldie starred opposite Peter Sellers in 1970 farce There’s a Girl in My Soup, holding her own against the comedy legend. She then showed she wasn’t just a fun babe with a rockin’ bod by impressing critics with her mature performance in drama Butterflies Are Free (1972), in which she portrays a young woman who helps her blind neighbour/lover deal with his past and controlling mother.

It was official: Goldie Hawn was versatile. Also in 1972, the beauty surprised fans yet again by teaming up with country music stars Dolly Parton and Buck Owens to record the album Goldie, which features covers of Parton’s ‘My Blue Tears’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Carey’.

Private Benjamin was also released in 1980, and proved to be the film that Goldie needed to launch her back onto the A-list. Hawn is fantastic as a snobby socialite turned army chick, and her entertaining performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Hawn also made her debut as an executive producer on Private Benjamin, and she has since produced an additional seven movies.

Then along came lucky bugger Kurt Russell. Even though the two had worked together previously on The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, they fell in love on the set of 1984′s Swing Shift, and went on to star in the 1987 leadweight comedy, Overboard.

Proof that Goldie could still do scorching (now well into her 40s) came via 1990 action comedy Bird on a Wire, in a scene where a gust of wind lifts Hawn’s skirt to reveal brief briefs and a healthy amount of arse to an appreciative Mel Gibson, who quips: “When did you start wearing underwear?”

No digital trickery was required when Goldie played a woman with a perfect figure following an immortality treatment in 1992 comedy Death Becomes Her, before letting it all hang out as an ageing groupie in 2002′s The Banger Sisters. Passing the sexy on to daughter Kate Hudson. So much for the ‘dumb blonde’.