Stunt Icon Vic Armstrong on His New Memoir and Saving Spider-Man From CGI

You now do a lot of directing. Was that just an organic development along the way, or did you maybe subconsciously realize that after you began writing about your career?

It was subconscious and organic, and then the more I thought about it the more I really craved it. I love the creativity of stunt coordinating -- writing stunts, breaking them down, working out how to shoot them, picking the locations, editing them. And then the natural progression from there is directing them. There's nothing lore frustrating than breaking a stunt down into all the different cuts, making it look realistic, and having it shot badly. And there are some greats second-unit directors out there, and there are some bad ones who have done things wrong. As a stuntman, I would see this: I would do a stunt and people say, "Oh, that was great." And I'd go and see it in dailies the next day, and it would look nothing. And I'd do another stunt that looked absolutely nothing, but I'd go to dailies and it would look fantastic. I started thinking, "Well, why is this?" Well, it's because of the camera angle and the speed and everything else.

To direct, it's all yours -- it's your whole baby. You've written it, you've directed it, you've edited and worked on it. And to me, it's the whole creative process I love. I didn't start out thinking of being a director, but pretty soon, after two or three years when I started coordinating, that was always going to be my next goal. And I started directing in the early '70s. I just wanted to get into it as quick as I could. When I directed in those days, you used to coordinate as well, you doubled as well -- you did everything. Jack of all trades -- which is not a bad thing at all. It teaches all aspects of the job.

You just completed some directing on Spider-Man, and you admit in your book you weren't a big fan of the preceding Spider-Man trilogy. What makes the new film different and, hopefully, an improvement?

I think the trilogy up until now was starting to lean far too heavily on CGI for the flying and the action and everything else. It was starting to get away from... it's silly to say "realism" of Spider-Man, because what kind of a man can stick on to a wall and spin spider's webs? But, there's a certain amount of reality to it, like there is with Indiana Jones and like there is with Bond. And I just felt like it was getting a little too CGI. My brother Andy and I -- we work together all the time; he's a stunt coordinator and director as well -- we've been working very, very hard to work out the flying process. We've gone back to the basics -- more basic flying. You see Spider-Man flying for real, and I think it gives the movie a whole new grounding really. It is more grounded than the others were.

Andrew Garfield is a very good actor -- he is very much in the Daniel Day-Lewis method of getting totally into it, so we've integrated him into as much of the flying as we could, and as much of the action, the poses and the body movement. So you've got all of these really organic movements. When you see somebody flying for real, it's far different than a CG one. You see the G-force come on as they change directions, and their arms straighten out, and then their legs flex, and then they pick up and swing again. It's got this whole rhythm to it.

How game was Andrew Garfield to do his own stunts? Could you break it down to a percentage of what's him versus a double?

Andrew's very, very game. We've done a lot of different actions on this -- some that he's not capable of doing. We've had to have specialists for movement -- for parkour and various things that we've been doing. But Andrew is 100 percent game, and if he's not shooting on the main unit, he'll be on my unit. Even if he's not called! He'll be on my unit looking at what we're doing. We discuss it, and we talk about the Spider-Man poses and thing. Percentage-wise, I'd say it's probably 60 or 70 percent of Andrew in the movie in the action moments.

How common is that? Particularly with young actors who might be game but on whom a studio is pinning an expensive, long-term franchise?

Nowadays it's becoming more of a thing because with the CGI -- and I'm the first person to try to do it for real -- but with CGI we do have the advantage of being able to use much more safety equipment that you can then erase with a computer. In the old days, like on Superman, we had to use piano wire -- the thinnest wire we could to keep it out of the shot, painted to match the sky and what not. Nowadays you can have a bit of Tech 12 that's as thick as your finger -- tremendously strong. The harnesses are better nowadays; we can put pads underneath, we can put airbags, we can put landing pads. You've got all these other benefits you can use, and therefore you're taking away some of the risk you had before.

Also, I think the newer breed of actor -- following the likes of Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise -- they want to be as much of that character they're portraying as possible. It's a very professional attitude. Chris Hemsworth did 99 percent of his action Thor. They manage to get their character across as much as they physically can rather than have somebody else portray it for them. It's just a different approach nowadays, I think.

[Photos: Copyright © 2011 Vic Armstrong]

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