لخّصلي

The greatest stunt performer alive is Vic Armstrong, who has stood in for Indiana Jones, James Bond
and Superman. Yakima Canutt was the greatest, but he died in 1986. Vic sees him as ‘the daddy of all
stuntmen’ and he adds, ‘He found a way to make stunts better, safer and more spectacular. We owe
him.’ One of Vic’s stunts can be seen as a tribute to Canutt. As Indy in ‘Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade’, he leaps off his horse onto a moving tank. Although the stunt only took a few seconds to
film, like most stunts it took a very long time to prepare, in order to get the right speed and rhythm on
the horse to keep it exactly level with the tank. It was very convenient that Vic looked just like Harrison
Ford, was almost the same age, and had the same build.
Vic has now retired, at the age of 43, which is old for this job. The injuries, aches and pains were
beginning to mount up. But now he is a stunt coordinator, and when a film director like Scorsese or
Spielberg wants something dangerous done on screen, it’s Vic they call to make it happen. He misses
doing the stunts himself, though, especially the strange calm he used to feel just beforehand. And he
misses the bond with the horses, teaching them how to fall and not hurt themselves. He acknowledges,
however, that he saw plenty of deaths on the set. As stunting runs in the family, and his wife and
children are all involved, he is inevitably anxious about any form of stunt, new or old.
Vic, in his prime, would happily jump off viaducts and between tall buildings; he would crash buses,
drive cars through hotels, and do anything at all with horses, which was his speciality. But he hated
fire. He says, ‘There’s a trick to setting yourself alight, if you want to survive, but fire jobs can always
go wrong, leaving you scarred for life. They are the most unpopular of stunts performed by those of us
in the trade.’
He laments that things are not what they used to be in the movie business, and that stunting has
suffered and lost some of its magic. Computer-generated special effects have replaced many of the
kinds of stunts they used to perform, like having to fly on super-thin painted wires. The wires can now
be erased by computer, so they are much thicker. But he hopes there will always be a place for stunt
performers: ‘Audiences deserve something unique to each film, not a repeat digitally spliced in from a
previous movie.’ He describes a stunt as something which tells an important part of the story in mime,
without dialogue, as in the silent movies. ‘Like a circus act, a good stunt creates a sense of awe that
such a thing can be done; it’s a form of poetry.’
Vic thinks he was lucky to have got into the business in the golden era when one could take more
risks, experiment and make one’s own decisions, and feel a greater sense of achievement. He enjoyed
dicing with death and creating hair-raising sequences. He feels that nowadays audiences expect to
be shown the impossible and are not impressed by it. In the old days, the stunt team would be part of
the film set for weeks on end; now they are just called in for a few days. They used to make their own
devices, such as a kind of fan for reducing the speed of a fall, and now all the equipment is provided.
He says that, ironically, consideration of health and safety rules has actually made the job more, and
not less, dangerous.