After all, the collected anecdotes and testimonials from Armstrong collaborators including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Angelina Jolie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martin Scorsese and numerous others affirm both his longevity and skill in front of and behind the camera. (He just finished second-unit directing on Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man.) But he is also humble and appreciative about the career he's sustained in a dangerous, competitive field compromised further by the advance of CGI.
Armstrong spoke to Movieline this week about what finally compelled him to tell his story, his advice for up-and-comers, what we're missing about George Lucas, Oscars for stunts, and making Andrew Garfield fly.
I was surprised to hear you had your memoirs coming out, if only because I thought you'd written them years ago. What took so long, and why now?
To be quite honest, I never wanted to write because I thought, "Who the heck would want to read them?" I've been approached by lots of people over the years to sort of write them; you know, you meet someone at a party and they say, "Oh, you must write a book." I've had a lot of people approach me, and I just didn't like the approach they were taking -- all that crash and burn, all the accidents, all that sort of stuff. That's not what I'm about, you know? But then I met Robert Sellers. He came to see me, and I looked at the work he'd done before, and I just thought it was a very honest approach to it all. So I sort of succumbed.
The World's Greatest Stuntman? Did you choose that title? How do you feel about it?
I certainly did not. I'm a little embarrassed by that; I wouldn't have picked that. That was the publishers, I think.
Well, it's probably appropriate?
Enh. I don't like it.
What was the process of writing this? How many memories just stuck with you versus the ones you had to be reminded of?
I was astonished. I had nothing at all written down, and Robert's approach was that he'd come round, get his tape recorder out, and he'd say, "OK, we're going from '65 to '70." And he had a list of all the films I worked on. I did have a list of films; years ago, I started keeping a list as a young man just to keep track of what I was doing. And he'd say, "OK, such and such film," and it all came back to me every time he mentioned a film. The anecdotes in the book just cropped up in my mind, and I could visualize doing it exactly like that. I was astonished, actually. It was really easy.
Do you ever watch your older films, or did you ever watch them for this project?
Very rarely, very rarely. I've got lots of copies of the Indiana Joneses and the Bonds. I always buy copies now that they're coming out on DVD. I used to get them on tape, but now they're on DVD I keep them just for posterity or whatever. For grandkids, that kind of thing -- so they can look and say, "Oh, look, there's granddad!" And also, I've done a lot of voiceovers on the making-ofs on the special editions of the DVD. It's always nice to have those -- just sort of a record as it were.
Things have changed over the decades, I imagine. If you could give aspiring stunt professionals one bit of advice for breaking into films and TV today, what would it be?
It's basically perseverance. You must have a specialty that you're great at, and then try to sell that specialty to someone, somewhere, sometime. And if you're lucky, you'll get your break. But it's mostly perseverance, and I'd hate to be starting nowadays. There's just so much competition -- and good competition -- out there. There are some fantastic young people, and it's a tough world to break into. Perseverance is the only way you'll get through it.
How do contemporary stunt professionals match up against those from your era? Are they as bold? As ambitious? As visionary?
I think they're ambitious, and nowadays it is viewed as a profession. I looked upon it as a profession when I got into the business, but it wasn't really looked upon [that way] by lots of other people in those days. It was a great job that they did, as well as something else in those days -- especially in Europe. But people look at it and see the success people have had. It's also become much more publicized these days. When I did it, you never heard of stuntmen. But then were people like Harrison Ford and guys like that talking about us and praising us. We have our own awards and things like that. It's very much in the public eye. I think kids are aware of what it is, and they know what it is, and they've got any athletic talent or whatever, they tend to channel it toward stunt work now.
Should stunt performers have their own Oscar category?
I think 100 percent we should. It's ridiculous that we don't. Having said that, I don't think we ever will get accepted. I'm in the Academy, and we keep having petitions and votes and everything, but it doesn't seem to get anywhere. I think it is ridiculous when you have two categories for editing, two categories for sound, you've makeup separate, you've got wardrobe separate -- all these things that are all deserving in their own way. In the old days they used to lump visual effects in with special effects, and I think they can find a way to put us in there. Because whenever you see a movie that wins a special effects award, it's not a visual effects award. It's an award where 99.9 percent it's all the action in the movie. It's all the stunts! So I think we should be recognized. But we're not, and I don't think we ever will.
You've worked for years with George Lucas, who catches a lot of flack culturally for reworking his films, for re-releasing them, messing with their legacies, etc. As a colleague, what do you think people don't get about him and his creative ambitions?
I think that's it: They don't see the creativity there. They look at Star Wars as though it's always been there -- as though it's been plucked out of the sky. They seem to forget that this guy visualized this, wrote it, and started off in the middle of these nine episodes. The guy is a visionary, and he's one of the sharpest guys you'll ever meet, and one of the most generous as well. I have a wonderful relationship with the man. He's been absolutely wonderful to me; been very generous, having given me my first directing job. And he is a visionary. He's reworking the movies to make them better, I feel; it's not because of the money, because he's got enough of that. He's doing it to improve the movies -- do things to them that he didn't have the technology to do to them in the olden days. He's far ahead of his time; he's the one who really pushed the boundaries of visual effects, and he did it in a very, very good way. I think it's been abused since by other people, but George has a great approach to it. I think people just take it for granted that Star Wars is there, and therefore this person is tinkering with what they think is their legacy. But really, they're his baby. He's totally entitled to it, I think.
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]