If your movie is a love letter to stunts, you need to make sure you do the stunts right. When David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train) signed on to direct The Fall Guy, he knew that it would have to feature a wide array of stuntwork. The film, based on the 1980s ABC TV series in which Lee Majors played an underpaid stuntman who moonlighted as a bounty hunter, had been a key text for a lot of stunt professionals in their youth, Leitch included. “It was such an iconic thing from my childhood, and lit the fuse for a lot of people in my generation,” the director says.
In the film, Ryan Gosling takes on the role of stuntman Colt Seavers, who when we first meet him is at the top of his profession, doubling for massive movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and madly in love with Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a camera assistant and aspiring director. After a high fall goes wrong, Colt abandons the film industry and disappears from Jody’s life. He’s compelled to return to work, however, by the desperate producer (Hannah Waddingham) of a massive sci-fi action epic that Jody is now directing. So he jets off to Sydney, where the picture is being shot. There, he learns that Tom, the star of Jody’s movie, has disappeared, and he’s roped into investigating his whereabouts.
The Action Edition
The Action Edition
Leitch says he sees the noirish, romantic-action comedy as a kind of prequel to the original Fall Guy series. And not unlike the show, the movie also serves as a virtual compendium of stuntwork: parkour, sword fights, shoot-outs, car flips, car rolls, high falls, flaming falls, roof-to-roof jumps, boat jumps, truck-to-helicopter jumps, and whatever it’s called when a dog runs into a speeding truck and bites into a dude’s nuts.
“The way we do action is probably different than anybody else in the business,” says Kelly McCormick, Leitch’s wife and producing partner. “You could probably slot ‘high jinks ensue’ in the script, because that’s as close as we’re going to get to whatever’s on the page.” While Leitch worked with screenwriter Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation) on the script, the stunts developed according to a variety of factors. “It’s a little bit location driven, it’s a little bit character driven. It’s a little bit based on where the actors’ strengths and weaknesses are, which often ends up determining the choreo of any given set piece for us,” says McCormick. She adds that this sometimes drives studios crazy.
To plan these sequences, Leitch called on one of his closest friends, stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara, head of Stunts Unlimited. (The two had once shared a house alongside two other stunt professionals, and, yes, their home was indeed called “the Stunt House.”) O’Hara and Leitch came up with a huge and varied list of stunts they wanted to accomplish. “At that point in development, there’s really nothing that’s off-limits,” O’Hara says. “You try to go big.” As planning and preproduction and casting and location scouting proceeded, they eventually whittled down that list.
When pre-visualizing the stuntwork, O’Hara and his team employed the 3-D graphics-creation tool Unreal Engine, which is used in video-game development, to see what different scenes might look like, particularly those involving vehicles. The aim, of course, was always to do the stunts practically. “I think the superhero movie has really done great for the action genre,” says O’Hara (who has worked on everything from Avengers and Iron Man 3 to Lady Bird and Hubie Halloween). “There’s a place for those movies. But what we did on Fall Guy really was practical, and you can feel the consequences. One of the greatest compliments we got was when the visual-effects supervisor said, ‘I don’t know why I’m here!’ A lot of the things he thought he was going to have to do he didn’t have to do.”
There were also certain sentimental touchstones for the filmmakers. Among them, a spectacular “cannon roll” that stunt driver Logan Holladay, doubling for Gosling on the film’s vehicular stunts, had to execute early in the movie. This gag is achieved with a small but potent air cannon that’s built into the floorboard of a stunt car; when the cannon is fired as the car is speeding (80 mph in this case), the vehicle is launched into the air and rolls multiple times. The first cannon roll in movie history, engineered by the legendary stunt coordinator Ronnie Rondell and performed by stunt driver Gary McClarty, was featured during the beachfront car-chase climax of the 1974 John Wayne thriller McQ. “We wanted to do our cannon roll on the beach as well, just to pay homage to that first one,” says Holladay.
The stunt that Holladay was most excited (and anxious) about was a 225-foot jump in a GMC truck over a canyon. To get that right, he practiced for weeks, doing initial test rehearsals at a flat area and slowly working his way up from smaller jumps — starting with a 75-foot gap and then growing it 25 feet at a time. At each step of the way, the team tested out different shock adjustments and tire pressures while also carefully studying wind resistance. “We found out that if the wind was over ten miles an hour, it was not doable. If it was blowing head-on, it would send the front of the truck way up in the air. If it was blowing sideways, it would turn you and blow you to the side of the landing ramp,” Holladay says. Once he knew he could do a 225-foot jump over flat ground, they moved over to the actual gap for the jump. “We work it out mathematically and with lots of testing, so it takes a little bit of that stress out of it,” he says. “But it’s still pretty stressful and scary.”
For one of Fall Guy’s central fights, during which Colt and a dog named Jean-Claude (who responds to the command “Attaquez!”) do battle against a variety of goons inside and all around a large metal rear-loading dumpster that’s being chased through the streets of Sydney, the filmmakers were inspired after seeing the “bin trucks” that are ubiquitous all over the Australian city. (Originally, the fight was supposed to happen on a beer-keg truck.) O’Hara noticed the trucks while scouting the city and shared pictures with Leitch. They then took one of the bins, brought it to a soundstage, and played around with a fight sequence, which they shot and edited to demonstrate what it might look like. “That’s how we do everything,” Leitch says. “You beat up the sequences. I make them design it over and over, and we give notes, and we go back and forth, asking, ‘How do we make this fresh, original? And how does it work for the character?’”
To achieve the finished chase and fight, the stunt team built two separate rigs and outfitted them with a variety of straps, latches, and pulleys to keep the performers safe inside the bins and on the vehicles and to make sure they didn’t spill out onto the road while careening through Sydney. The specially rigged trucks were outfitted with truss towers placed on large arms hanging over the actors, which in turn required keeping an eye on height restrictions in tunnels and bridges while designing these elaborate contraptions.
Shooting in any major metropolis is difficult, but production found it uniquely hard to block off streets while shooting in Sydney. They could only film these exterior street stunts on weekends and were limited in terms of where they could do so, which prompted another crucial but charming development to the bin-truck fight: It’s now intercut with Jody belting out the Phil Collins classic “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” because she’s sad that Colt, busy getting his ass kicked, is missing a karaoke night at the local bar. The cutaways to karaoke allowed the filmmakers to move the action around different parts of the city. Meanwhile, the romantic mood of the song wound up dictating the rhythm of the action scene, as these mad stunts are now accompanied by the soft, aching sounds of Collins and Blunt singing their broken hearts out.
Though Gosling likes trying to do as many of his own stunts as possible, there were multiple performers doubling for him during a lot of the film’s more spectacular sequences. Alongside Holladay’s driving stunts, Ben Jenkin served as the actor’s primary double — taking punches, getting hit by cars, jumping over just about anything and everything — while Justin Eaton performed many of Colt’s martial-arts moves. Troy Brown took a 150-foot fall out of a helicopter onto an airbag that Holladay suspects “looked like a napkin from that height.” Of course, double is a bit of a misnomer. All these performers are effectively playing Colt Seavers. “We’re all just keeping the character alive,” says Leitch, who for many years worked as Brad Pitt’s stunt double.
The Fall Guy mines plenty of humor and drama out of the fact that actors and their stunt doubles often have rivalries. “People will never believe the anecdotes that I have as a stunt performer,” says Leitch. “We’re behind the scenes and we’re doing all the cool shit, and the actor’s taking all the credit.” But he adds that the situation is getting better, thanks to major stars who have openly credited their stunt teams, including Pitt, who starred in Leitch’s previous film, Bullet Train. “Brad has been a huge supporter of the stunt community his entire career. And Keanu Reeves has highlighted stunts and was never afraid to say, ‘I work with these great stunt professionals who make me look good.’ That’s not always the case.”
Holladay came away from the movie impressed with Gosling’s dedication and his down-to-earth support for his stunt team. “Ryan is so cool,” Holladay says. “I spent a month teaching him how to drift a car and slide around and hit marks while sliding the car.” He remembers Gosling came out to watch him do his cannon roll, even though the actor wasn’t working that day. Interestingly, Holladay has a small role in the film — as the guy who straps Colt into the car before the cannon roll and then pulls him out afterward. The irony was not lost on Gosling. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Man, this is so messed up,’” Holladay recalls, laughing. “‘You’re actually the guy who does this, and I’m the guy who’s acting to do it.’”
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