After the trials and tribulations of Mohammad I was back home barely a week before I was off to Austria, training horses and doubling Richard Chamberlain in the saddle for The Slipper and the Rose. My first wife Jane and my new son Bruce came along, and it was Bruce’s first plane trip of many. Not long after that I did a few days doubling for Richard Harris on Return of a Man Called Horse.
Then along came a film called The Copter Kids, hardly a blockbuster, but for me a big moment in English stunt history. It was a Children’s Film Foundation picture about these kids living on a farm and a nasty motorbike gang rustling their cattle. Marc Boyle and I were playing the two heavies and hoped to supplement our wages by hiring out our own bikes, because we both used to motocross together. ‘No,’ the director said. ‘We’ve got the world champion motocross rider Dave Bickers supplying the bikes.’
In our first scene we had to round up some cattle on our bikes into a horse truck, then ride inside and drive off. ‘I’ll go and get your bikes,’ Dave Bickers said and we heard these machines screaming flat out, with clouds of smoke coming up through the trees. Basically his way of tuning the engine was just to open it up and blow all the shit out of it. Then out he came, doing a few jumps and it was like, oh my God I’m embarrassed to get on the bike in front of this guy. But he was very sweet about it and I quickly found I’d an affinity with Dave. From our first conversation I realised he was very smart. He might have talked like an old farmer, but he had an amazingly clinical way of analysing things, which I guess is why he won all those championships.
So Copter Kids, a tiny little film, was the introduction of Dave Bickers into the film business and today he’s renowned all over the world. I started using Dave’s talents as a driver and brilliant mechanic because I was being constantly frustrated by the industry’s old guard, who seemed resistant to any sort of change. Whenever I wanted something done or built that was to my way of thinking more practical, sensible, safe, a new way of doing it, they said, ‘No, can’t do that, you can only do it this way,’ which was the way they’d been doing it for a hundred years. I got so pissed off with it all that I thought, no, I’m gonna change it and bring my own man in, which was Dave, whether it was making breakaway lances for jousting, or building treadmills, or preparing cars. I’d say to him, this is what I want and he’d do it, or if he couldn’t he’d find someone who could.
I had a lot of battles over this for years and trod on a lot of toes from prop people through to special effects because they thought I was taking their jobs. I had to keep saying, ‘Guys, he’s not instead of you, he’s as well as you.’ Now everybody uses Dave, he’s never stopped working and all those departments that resisted him in the early days are the ones that employ him and made him the millionaire he is.
The stunt industry especially resented my using Dave because he was an unregistered stuntman. I said, ‘For Christ’s sake – he’s the world champion! I don’t want somebody who’s average at ten things. I want somebody that’s fantastic at one thing.’ That’s the problem today in the British stunt business: we’ve got all these tests that don’t necessarily make a good stuntman, they just mean you’re very average at a lot of things. You still need specialist ability to do a job, whether it’s riding, swimming, fighting, or driving, you don’t want to be Joe Average.
In the days when I started you were brought in because you had one specific skill. Mine was riding, and then it was up to me when I was on a film to learn other disciplines, so that I could earn a living on other types of movies. I taught myself fencing, fighting and high falls. I remember Alf Joint and I built this thing we called ‘the blob’, it was a great big hessian bag twelve foot square and five foot deep, full of cut-up foam cushions. I’d practice falls into it day in, day out from the roof of my barn. That was before airbags had been invented. So you learn as you go along, but you still have to have a specialist capability to get you the one job that you can do better than anybody else. Then it’s up to you to learn the other disciplines.
The next couple of jobs I did were with the great Joe Dunne. The New Spartans was an action thriller shot up in Nottingham that despite a good cast, including Oliver Reed, Susan George and Toshiro Mifune, never got finished. Still, it was important for me because it was the first time I ever saw and used an airbag. They brought one over from the States for me to be thrown off this castle and land on. Inexperienced and over exuberant, I launched myself off far too much. The cameraman, my friend Jimmy Devis, saw me disappear from the shot and feared I was going to hit the cement behind him. I actually landed right on the edge of the airbag, bounced off it onto my feet and did a running fall. Eventually they pulled the plug on the film when they ran out of money. The producer used to turn up on a Friday with a bag full of cash and pay everybody out of it, but it got less and less as time went on, until one day he didn’t show up at all!
The New Spartans. Luckily there’s an airbag underneath me, which I almost missed!
One night we were with Oliver Reed in this hotel and the local rugby club came in. When he’d had a few drinks, Oliver wanted to fight everybody. The bar was getting very noisy and boisterous and this small older guy, in his 50s, out with his wife, was getting really wound up. Oliver bumped into their table, knocking some glasses over, and this little guy jumped up and confronted him and his rugby mates. ‘I don’t like this behaviour in front of my wife,’ he said. ‘And if you want a fight I’ll take you all on.’ And these hefty guys all folded up like a bunch of pussycats and cleared off. It was great seeing somebody call their bluff.
Later I heard that Joe Dunne was co-ordinating the stunts on The Pink Panther Strikes Again over at Shepperton and wanted a lot of stuntmen for a big fight scene in a gay nightclub. You’ve never seen anything so funny in all your life as dozens of butch stuntmen dressed up as transvestites, ballroom dancing. It was actually quite surprising the number of stuntmen that wanted to wear dresses. ‘Is my lipstick smudged?’ they were saying. ‘Are my seams straight?’ It was absolutely hysterical, like a pantomime. Opened my eyes a bit, I can tell you. As for me, I spent the whole time trying to keep my face away from the camera so no one recognised me.
That was the first time I saw Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers. There was always an aura that came on the set when Sellers arrived, a negative aura for me. As for Blake Edwards, everybody had to leave the set while he walked round and decided what to shoot. It was like, God is here. Nobody was allowed in. Nobody was allowed to talk. With Sellers, if he got bad vibes off somebody or they were looking at him and he didn’t like it he’d whisper to his minion, ‘Get rid of that guy. I don’t like him.’ He was also totally paranoid. With some stars, people (and I guess we are all guilty of this) let them get away with this kind of behaviour and pander to them, and it gets worse and worse until they don’t know which way is up any more; very odd.
From the mega-millions of the Pink Panther films to another comedy series of the more bargain basement variety. Confessions of a Driving Instructor was a really cheap film. My old mate Rocky Taylor was doubling Robin Askwith, I was doubling Windsor Davies, and with Rocky driving, we were both in this Rolls Royce which had to crash through a brick wall. The prop department had built a fake wall from plaster, but like they always do, they got carried away with authenticity and it was just like the real bloody thing. When you hit a wall with a car at 60 mph the nose will plough through it, but then you’re left with this lump of wall, a solid object, which at speed is like a ten-ton weight, hitting your windshield. And that’s exactly what happened, it ripped the windshield straight out and smacked Rocky in the face. Luckily I ducked down in the back. ‘I can’t see a fucking thing,’ he yelled. ‘I’m blinded.’ But the car was still careering down this road and now heading towards the camera team. ‘Go left, left!’ I’m screaming. ‘Now right, right!!’ Finally we stopped and Rocky leapt out wailing, ‘I’m fucking blind.’ In the end he was fine, but oh my God, I tell you, for nothing little films you get the most drama. You get paid peanuts and nearly get killed.
All stuntmen at times have done things when really we shouldn’t have, when your instincts are telling you to back out. But it’s such a macho job that, especially when people are expecting the stuntman to say no to something, you think, to hell with it, I’ll show them. There’s a lot of ego, of not wanting to lose face involved in stunt work. Rocky got smashed up badly on one of those Death Wish movies. He had to jump off a burning building and during the fire test it was decided to make the fire bigger and bigger. So Rocky jumped, and because the fire was so big he had to jump that much faster and harder. He missed the crash boxes and smashed his pelvis. He had to have operations for months.