One short cut into the stunt business that I never took was working as a stand-in. As stars luxuriate in their trailer, the job of the stand-in is to literally ‘stand-in’ for the actor while the lights and camera angles are laboriously worked out. Les Crawford got his break this way before he became Roger Moore’s regular stunt double on The Saint. When Moore took over as James Bond, Crawford went too. At Pinewood on the set of Live and Let Die our hero is tied up with Solitaire, played by Jane Seymour, on a platform hanging precariously over a shark pool. Using a buzz saw in his watch Bond cuts the rope, flips over and swings across to land and confront the villain. Les called off sick on the day of the stunt, complaining of a heavy cold. Guess who was called in as replacement. Having already doubled George Lazenby, I was about to don the shoes of yet another Bond newcomer. But it resulted in a nasty accident, which still plagues me to this day.
Because the platform wasn’t braced very well, the weld gave way under my weight as I was doing a full somersault and my feet smashed into the ground, cracking my heels and crushing the pads under them. It was absolute agony but, of course, being a macho stuntman I grinned and bore it and never told anybody. You feel you’ve failed if you have an accident; it’s this strange stupid ego stuntmen have, plus there’s the need to keep working. So I stuffed rolls of toilet paper underneath my arches to support my heels, but I was still seeing stars and feeling ill. They fixed the platform and I did the stunt again, with no problems this time, thank God. That night I remember going upstairs to bed on my hands and knees. The next day Les Crawford turned up and Roger Moore said, ‘Hello Les, got over the pneumonia then? That was quick.’
Live and Let Die also afforded me the opportunity to work again with Bob Simmons, at closer quarters this time. Simmons was choreographing a vicious knife fight between Bond and baddie Mr Big, played by Yaphet Kotto. It was great watching Bob work. You have people today who say they’re fight choreographers but all they do is string a few repetitive moves together. They don’t know how to shoot it or how it’s all going to edit together. Bob was very insistent on varying the moves and the punches and the angles to shoot them at. I was involved in the rehearsals and saw how he broke a fight down, which I try to do to this day, and I saw the way he co-ordinated it for Roger and Yaphet to step in and do most of it themselves. I learnt an awful lot about fight choreography from Bob.
Although I wasn’t on for the whole movie it was a big step forward for a young stuntman to do a Bond. That’s why I always tried to give as many people a crack at it as I could when I worked on the Pierce Brosnan 007 films, because I knew it would look good on their resume. The irony was that I’d get far more kudos from doing Live and Let Die than I would from say Billy Two Hats, and I put tons more work and expertise into Billy Two Hats. But that’s the business. People don’t judge you by what an incredible stunt you’ve done, but by what movies you’ve worked on, be it for a day, a week or a month. I did a couple of days on A Touch of Class doubling George Segal. ‘Wow, you were in A Touch of Class,’ producers went. ‘Gee, we’d love to have you in our movie.’ But falling out of a helicopter for Figures in a Landscape, because the film flopped, it didn’t mean diddly-squat to anyone. Strange, but it’s the way the industry still works today.
After Bond I was off to Hamburg for The Odessa File, the Frederick Forsyth thriller, which is chiefly remembered these days for the scene in which star Jon Voight is pushed under the wheels of an underground train. This was done in a local tube station with me doubling Voight and jumping onto boxes laid out on the track, and then laying underneath the curve of the platform as the train came roaring by. We used a bit of camera trickery, but it was a real train and so quite nerve-wracking for me. I’ve never actually seen the sequence but when I tell people about it they go, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that,’ so it must have been quite effective.
Joe Powell choreographed the stunts on The Odessa File. He’s one of my heroes and one of the best stuntmen there’s ever been. Famously he doubled Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King when he fell from a collapsing rope bridge into this huge chasm in Morocco. His fall was 80 feet onto a ledge with cardboard boxes as his landing pad; if he missed that it was a few hundred feet into nothingness. All these other stuntmen looked at it and suddenly got terribly ill or received frantic phone calls about going back home. Turning to Joe the producers said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ And he just said, ‘No problem.’ By the time they were ready to shoot, the whole edge of this gorge was lined with every tribesman in the vicinity. They had all come to watch this white man commit suicide, so they thought. Cameras rolled, they cut the bridge; Joe whistled down and crashed into the boxes. Getting up he said, ‘Was that all right everybody?’ Just completely laid back, an amazing guy.
Another tough thriller was Hennessy, about an Irish revolutionary, played by Rod Steiger, out to blow up parliament. I was fighting on a roof opposite veteran stuntman Joe Dunne (Joe’s son Mathew is now an assistant director I work with a lot in the States) over at Twickenham Studios and we had to crash through a skylight and fall 20 feet onto a pool table. We replaced the pool table with two layers of cardboard boxes, put mattresses on top and covered it all with a carpet, just so the boxes didn’t explode and we didn’t fall through gaps between the mattresses. Doing a fall with someone else it’s important to lock bodies tight together or you’ll just smack into each other when you land at different times. And you’ve got to land as level as you can, not head first otherwise you’ll break your neck. So both of us were hugging together like a couple of lovers as we burst through the skylight and WHAM all the air came out of our bodies, we might just as well have landed on the stone floor. That incident always flashes through my mind whenever I build a rig for anybody, so it obviously taught me a lesson.
So what went wrong? The layers of boxes were fine, but putting a carpet over the top, which has no give in it, just made it as hard as an oak table. It’s all about lamination. You can poke your finger through a piece of paper, but put several layers of paper together and it gets harder. The same with a wafer thin piece of wood; laminate several together and they become solid. It’s basic stuff when you think about it; we didn’t think about it hard enough, I guess. But you only make painful mistakes once, and then you remember. And you can still learn. Every day I learn something new, whether it’s about on-set diplomacy or how to rig things.
I learnt something years ago from Hal Needham, one of the greatest stuntmen that ever lived. He jumped out of a second floor window and broke both his ankles but still got up and ran off as though nothing had happened in order to finish the shot, that’s how tough he was. After that accident he came up with a solution. As with all stunts it’s not the falling that hurts, it’s the stopping. So the slower you come to a halt the better. Hal showed me this trick of digging a hole and putting in upturned polystyrene cups every foot or so. Then you put a layer of cardboard boxes folded flat over the top of it and replace the earth, and when you jump those cups collapse and it absorbs a lot of your impact without it appearing that you are landing on a pad. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.
When I was second unit director on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Jim Dowdall, the stunt co-ordinator, came up to me one morning asking, ‘I’m going to pick your brains Vic. John [Madden, the director] wants Nic Cage to fall backwards flat on the ground when he’s shot. I don’t know what the hell to do. The ground’s not soft enough and I can’t use pads because we will see them.’ I explained how to do it with these cups, that Nic could do a pratfall into it and wouldn’t hurt himself. Jim tested it and showed John who said, ‘That is unbelievable. I would never have thought of that.’ So you can still learn, and Hal did it donkey’s years before.