Stunt performer turned director walks away mostly unscathed from fights, flipped cars

Two concussions. A broken ankle and wrist. A torn meniscus (... actually make that two). A lost front tooth. Former Hollywood stunt performer David Leitch is no stranger to on-the-job injury. He says pain tolerance and being "a little bit tough" can come in handy when you get thrown out of windows for a living.

Leitch has since shifted into filmmaking. His latest, The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling, is a tribute to stunt performers and the often unrecognized risks they take.

The film begins with a montage of action sequences: A man tumbles down a rocky cliff, rides a motorcycle over the roofs of several cars, gets thrown through a bus window and runs through a battlefield surrounded by explosions. Leitch says coordinating the stunts from behind the camera was actually more harrowing than executing them himself.

"It's harder because you have your friends that are doing the stunts and you're designing them and you are responsible for their safety," he explains. "Your heart goes through your chest."

As a stunt performer, Leitch doubled for Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Ocean's Eleven, and for Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum. His directorial credits include Bullet Train,Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde.

"You have to evolve," Leitch says of his transition from stunts to directing. "Being the physical double that's getting ratcheted back from explosions or falling down the stairs or taking the big hits — I'm so grateful I was able to transition out of it, because you don't want to be doing that at a certain age."

Interview highlights

On not wanting to reveal too many industry secrets in The Fall Guy

It is a little bit like magic. I think we're always reinterpreting the classic gags and the classic tricks. And so that's what we did with Fall Guy. We sort of reimagined the big car jump. We reimagined the high fall from the helicopter. And there is a little secrecy. … Because it was such a business where it was passed down. It's apprenticeships, it's passed down from family — usually to kids — and it's hard to crack in and find someone to teach you because they didn't want to share the knowledge so much.

I think in Fall Guy, we tried to pull the veil back just enough and not, give too much away. You see those fire stunts? We didn't really give the science behind that away. That's what's really amazing about stunts. I think people think it's a bunch of daredevils, and there's a little bit of that sensibility in stunt performers, but really, there's a lot of physics and math and legacy tricks that get you through the day.

On what goes through his mind right before a stunt

Ultimately a lot of stunt work is trusting your team. … You're hooked up to this machine and you're trusting the physics of it, and you've rehearsed it and you've seen the weight bags go down and up, but again, you're stepping off the ledge and you have to have this ability to calm your nerves, [to] trust in the process, [to] have the confidence that, you know, we've tested this over and over and it's going to go great. And so it's not unlike an athlete at the starting line: You really have to focus on the first step and then your body takes over. And you wait, you hear that cue "action" and you go.

On how his stunt work on the Matrix changed Hollywood

I was a fan of a lot of different Asian cinema, Korean and Chinese and Japanese cinema that had martial arts in the lead characters. Everyone just knew how to fight, and they could fight with a martial art style. Whether it was a police drama or a heightened sci-fi thing, every character knew how to fight. And it wasn't until the Matrix movies where the Wachowskis [directors Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski] had sort of said, "Hey, we want to have that same vibe in Western cinema." And I think after that first Matrix film hit the ground where you saw Keanu and Laurence Fishburne fight in this dojo, and there were the actors doing the fighting, I mean, that had not happened to that level in Western cinema before that, really. So it was like a light went off for myself and a core group of us who were sort of training together at the time. …

We started to take that opportunity with a lot of different films, and we were of up-and-coming stunt coordinators and we were really specializing in fight choreography. And we did something that we learned from that Hong Kong team on the Matrix films: We would shoot and edit our own fight scenes to present to the directors and the producers, and through that we built a name for ourselves, and we also learned how to tell stories. And we also learned how to technically direct. We were shooting and editing these sequences and presenting them as sort of finished ideas like moving storyboards. And now it's something that is like, standard.

On enduring the physical pain of stunts

The car stunts and cars and fire and things like that, they actually hurt less sometimes, I think, because you've built in all these protocols to protect the performer and there's a lot of science involved, but the meat and potatoes of stunt performing is just physical performance. And sometimes [it's] getting thrown down a set of stairs [for] multiple takes and how to protect yourself. And you know you're not going to break anything, but you're going to get a lot of bumps and bruises and twisted ankles and crooked necks, but that's just something that you accept.

On being asked to do more takes when you’re in pain

You hate it, but you're stoic about it. … The unwritten contract that you sign, like if you can get up, you should be going again. And the stunt coordinator expects you to do that too, because he's hired you and he doesn't want you to not make him look good in front of the director.

On not showing your face as a stunt performer so the audience believes it’s the actor

It was definitely part of the old-school mentality. You learned how to hit a mini trampoline and jump in the air and keep your head away from camera. … Like, I always try to give [the director] the back of your head. And you just got good at it. … It's kind of changed in the last decade or so, because the use of face replacement allows you to just let the stunt performer perform and then if it's a few frames where we see a face, we can use a digital still and wrap it around their face and with motion blur and simple visual effects, you can mask the stunt performer's profile or face or whatever. And it allows the performers more freedom in doing the action and not trying to contort their body to hide their face.

On whether visual effects will replace stunt performers

I know that that's where the world is heading, and I think that that's OK. For me, as someone who enjoys action films, I feel the difference in the stakes of what's happening on the screen with the characters when I feel that it's real. And so I think there’ll always be the want for that. I hope especially for action film lovers, but actually just really good storytelling. The visual effects and the CGI can't deliver the reality of really feeling the stakes behind it all, then it's always going to fall flat.

Heidi Saman and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.