Two of Hollywood’s leading stunt coordinators revealed the elements that make for a great stunt sequence during the inaugural Contenders stunt panel.
“The script. The script. The script,” emphasized Brian Machleit, who oversaw the stunt sequences in filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, said during at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event Saturday. “For me as an audience member, when I read the script for the first time, I first highlight all the action, then I’ll go back and actually read it as if I’m sitting watching the movie.
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“Then you have conversations with your director and you start picking apart his thinking and think about what’s going to paint that picture –how can we help the audience be vested into it?” he continued. “So for me, it’s fooling the audience that the actor did everything, or they did do everything because we trained him the right.”
Sinners stunt coordinator Andy Gill explained that he likes to zero in on nuances that make the stunt sequence sing over spectacle. “Everybody can go bigger, better, bad, bigger explosions, jump apart further, turn it over more times,” he said. “But what I like is when you’re seeing a sequence, either a fight sequence or a car sequence or anything where all these different things have to come together at the right time to make that sequence work.”
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Gill, who also has staged several complex stunt sequences for the Fast and Furious films, said that car work in particular requires an especially nuanced touch. “A lot of times on Fast we’ll have 12 cars all crashing at different times, but all in the same shot. So if one thing goes wrong, then your shot’s ruined.
“So you rehearse it, you do a lot of timing runs,” Gill explained. “You start out with the little Matchbox cars, and work your way up to just what I call a walkthrough, which is just driving your cars at five miles an hour, so everybody knows where they have to be, at what time, camera knows where it has to be, the drone knows where it has to be, and you’ll do a half-speed.
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“And if the half-speed goes good, then what we usually do is what I call a three-quarter speed,” he added. “We’ll go through it but not do the crashes and the hits. Now the drone knows, the speed camera on the ground knows the speed; all the players have done it multiple times to shoot it. And you do this one big master shot of a lot of stuff happening. And when it works, it’s a pretty incredible feeling.”
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