In “The Fall Guy,” Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, the stunt double for Hollywood action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Seavers, like “The Fall Guy” director David Leitch and stunt designer Chris O’Hara, got his professional start as a stunt performer before 1999, when “The Matrix” served as a turning point for the profession.
“When my generation came in, ‘The Matrix’ was a big influential time in my career as a stunt performer,” said Leitch on the IndieWire Toolkit podcast. The director worked as a stunt performer on Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s 1999 groundbreaking film. “I learned [and] became heavily exposed to wire work.”
Not only did “The Matrix” successfully integrate wire work, which had become a staple in 1980s and ’90s Hong Kong action films when they hired legendary Chinese fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, but the film broke ground in combining practical stunts with visual effects.
“Visual effects became a really big part of that movie, and it transitioned the film business into something new,” said O’Hara, who worked on the second and third films in the “Matrix” trilogy. “That changed the game for filmmaking, everybody wanted ‘The Matrix’-type of action.”
Practical stunts by no means disappeared with the introduction of wires and visual effects. Nor did it result in some binary choice of doing things practically vs. utilizing CGI (despite what some directors pretend). Rather, a symbiotic relationship developed between the visual effects and stunt departments.
“There are practical elements even in these big sci-fi superhero movies, the stunt team is still crucial to making those things happen,” said Leitch. “It’s a ton of wire work against green screen. There’ll be face replacement or performance capture, but to help the animators, you’ll do some really big [stunts that] will be animated over. Stunt performing and designing is not dead by any means, all the best visual effects supervisors want as much practical as possible.”
As Leitch and O’Hara rose to the top of their professions, both are proud of their contributions to helping American films build and expand on what “The Matrix” started by designing and directing incredible action scenes for films like “Atomic Blonde,” “John Wick,” films in the “Bourne”and “Fast and the Furious” franchises, and dozens of others. With “The Fall Guy,” they reached for something very different.
“Because this movie was inspired by ‘The Fall Guy’ the TV show — that ’80s show when I was a kid that sort of lit the fuse for stunt people from my generation –– it felt like we should go back and do some old school, practical stunts and really lean in to see if we can do them in a really fresh way, but make sure we’re paying homage to the classics,” said Leitch.
In addition to drawing inspiration from the ’80s TV series, the story and its setting are a throwback compared to modern action films, which are often sci-fi and/or superhero films. The focus on cars and cowboys supplied a very different texture that lent itself to adapting an old-school approach to action filmmaking.
“The high fallout of the helicopter — we really don’t do that much anymore because we can do wires,” said Leitch, referring to one of the film’s big action scenes featured in the film’s trailer and poster. “You’ll have wires attached. We’ll have a descender rig that decels you, and visual effects erase the wires. It’s a rather simple rotoscope sort process, so why not? Right. But back in the day, we would always use airbags or boxes to jump [from] heights. It’s kind of a lost art. It was fun to bring it back and to see the craftsmanship in the artistry.”
The behind-the-scenes nature of the story, the making of the fictional film “Metal Storm,” also gave Leitch permission to further celebrate the craft by showing what is actually involved in pulling off and filming big practical stunts.
“We wanted to highlight some of those big stunts that stunt guys are known for: big car jumps, big wrecks, setting guys on fire, and things that really are visceral to the audience that you can really tell when they’re doing it [practically],” said O’Hara.
O’Hara believes there are stunts, like the 225-foot car jump featured in “The Fall Guy,” that could and should still be done in modern films. The difference with “The Fall Guy” is Leitch and producer (and wife) Kelly McCormick made sure it was a priority to get O’Hara’s team the time and support necessary to pull it off.
“Stunt scenes these days are like, ‘We don’t have the time to do that, we’ll just do this on green screen,’” said O’Hara. “Stunts are driven by locations. They’re driven by time. They’re driven by budget, and so we had support on all those fronts. We had the time to properly test it.”
With the car jump, O’Hara had a space right next to the main set (which was still being built) to build a mockup set to test the car jump, therefore making sure the stunt team could test under the same weather, wind, and terrain conditions as where they would be doing the stunt for camera. Just as important, they had time to take baby steps: 50 feet, then 75 feet, then 100 feet, 125 feet, 150 feet, before getting up to 225 feet, with suspension technicians on set to make adjustments along the way. Obvious as it may sound, they also had the time and money to make sure they had the right vehicle.
“We had done all of the legwork to make sure things [we could] pull off all these stunts in a safe, repeatable manner so that we could achieve the outcomes that we did in the film,” said O’Hara. “We could not have done it if production didn’t stand by us and understand what we were trying to achieve.”
Universal Pictures will release “The Fall Guy” in theaters on Friday, May 3.
