Quotes

[reflecting on his career as a stuntman] When I was doing it, there were maybe 75 stunt people in the business and we flew everywhere. It was great fun; the best job I could imagine.

The fighting was the hardest thing to learn because it's choreographed and you have to know where the camera is the whole time you're doing the fight so it doesn't show a miss. That was the most difficult part.

You're paid by the stunt, the danger of the stunt you're doing. You come in, if you're working one day, you come in on a daily. When I started it was like a hundred dollars, I think, just to be there. And then to do something, they'd pay what was called a stunt adjustment. And depending how dangerous it was, they'd pay more. And depending on how many times you did it; like if there's a problem with the camera and you have to do it again, they have to pay you. If you do something wrong, they don't have to pay you when you do it again.

When you fall off a running horse at 30 miles an hour onto baked, hard road, you can't fall like you're looking; you have to fall like you're shot off the horse. You can't be looking for a place to land; you have to just take it. Stair falls are another thing -- how do you learn to do that? You don't learn to do that, you just fall down the stairs because otherwise it looks like you're trying to fall down the stairs.

Kids were different in my day. You didn't go home and watch television: You played baseball, you played football, you climbed trees. You were physical. I was a motorcycle rider, car racer, and that kind of stuff. It was kind of a natural for me; to get paid for it was a bonus. It was great fun. Sometimes you were scared and then after it was over you felt like King Kong: "I did that! I was never scared!" You were petrified: Anyone who tells you they weren't scared is either stupid or they were lying.

[on performing stunts in the past] In those days they didn't have airbags; when you did a fall you fell into cardboard boxes that were empty and you'd put them together and stack them up and tie a rope around them so they wouldn't blow out when you [hit]. In those days the stunt guys did everything. Now there are specialists. The first really high fall I ever saw was a cowboy stunt guy, a guy named Terry Leonard, he went 10 stories -- a hundred feet -- into cardboard boxes. It was a hell of a stunt.

[on breaking into the stunt profession in the past] In those days it was a lot easier to get in because the stunt people it was all California, all Hollywood, and they went everywhere to do whatever action needed to be done. There was a small group, I think, in New York, but there weren't any other stunt groups.