Falling Stars
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 12, 1998
The car speeds along the Westgate Freeway. It's an early '70s XJ6, chocolate brown. The woman passenger is struggling with the driver. As they battle, the Jaguar careens out of control, crashing through the guard rail near the Kingsway exit. It lands on two cars on the road below.
There is not a murmur from inside the wrecked car. Both the occupants are dead.
Or are they?
Let's replay that scene. This time, we see that the Jag pulls over before the crash. Driver and passenger step out and another man takes the wheel. Zev Eleftheriou, stuntman, puts his foot on the accelerator and powers through a gap where the railing has been cut away. He drives up a heavy steel ramp that alters the car's trajectory. For a moment, the vehicle soars skyward. Eight movie cameras record its fall.
The stuntman takes stock. The film crew seems satisfied. The car has hit the road near the target area. He's unhurt. The job is done.
"Everything we do is dealing with illusion," says one stuntman. "Nothing is real." But the danger - and the battering "stunties" sometimes take - is real enough. Stunt performers do get killed or seriously injured. In 1995, one of the most recent cases, Gold Coast stunt performer Colin Dragsbaek, 38, died after a 29-metre fall from a wheat silo during filming for the Victorian comedy satire, Love Serenade.
In March 1996, 33-year-old Victorian stunt performer Trevor Welsh, who had worked in film and television, died after sustaining head injuries during a routine training fall.
The coroner is investigating both deaths and an inquest is due soon.
Sue Marriott, industrial officer with the Actors' Equity section of the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance, says the two deaths were the first in the industry since the making of the 1982 movie Turkey Shoot.
Zev Eleftheriou, like most stuntmen, plays down the danger: "Sometimes when you get home at the end of the day you're a bit sore or you've got a few bruises that you didn't really want. But as a rule, we don't have a lot of injuries."
Reg Roordink, 45, agrees. "I've never gotten injured doing a stunt whatsoever apart from a lot of gravel rash," he says. Roordink started out as a plasterer, but gave it up for something with a higher thrill component. "From the day I was born, the higher the tree, the higher I climbed," he says. "I've always been into horse riding, racing motorbikes and water sports. Yeah, I'm a bit of a thrill seeker from the year dot."
He used to do live stunt shows - riding his motorbike through balls of fire - but turned to film and television work in the early 1980s.
"One of the riskiest jobs was when I had to ride a motorbike between two semis at about 80 kilometres per hour. I only had an inch on each side of the handlebars. If something went wrong there, I'd be crushed.
"Sometimes the smallest gig can be the riskiest," he says. "You can do a 60-foot fall, but your preparations are pretty good. You might just do a simple thing like a staircase fall and get hurt."
Team work is essential. "When we're doing a stunt of any sort, there's always someone there to back you up. And if it becomes major, you can have six or seven stunt guys helping each other out and we're all rooting for each other to make that gig work best as
possible."
Chris Wilson, 38, is another stuntman with a matter-of-fact approach to pain. "I'm not a specialist driver or a specialist parachutist," he says. "I take bumps.
"One of the things I try to tell the young people who come into this industry is I've probably lived with more pain in a day than they live with in a year. I just don't feel it. It's like anything else. Your tolerance level increases."
However, Wilson was "pretty sore and sorry" after four months filming the TV mini-series remake of Moby Dick at Point Cook last year.
"We had tanks dumping supposed waves that were coming up and hitting us," he says. "All the things that you can imagine would happen in a storm at sea. And then we had the end bit where basically everybody gets killed. After we had killed ourselves, we'd change clothes with other people and go back in.
"To do that day after day you have to be fit. I train once or twice a day, anything from rock climbing to gym work to running, martial arts, bag work."
He has received more injuries doing martial arts or playing football or in training than in stunt work.
"We're not daredevils," he says. "I like to think of us as illusionists. If you watch a film that I've done and you go, 'Ooh', then I've done my job."
Wilson's riskiest role was in Mission Impossible. "I did a bike scene on a catwalk which culminates with me throwing the bad guy over and he drags me over. I catch the railing and hold on. If I'd let go, by the time I got to the bottom there'd be no air left in the air bag."
Scary stuff? "That's why we do it. I'm an adrenalin junkie."
When Chris Anderson, 41, was called upon to double for Patrick Stewart as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, he was able, he says with irony, to save the producers an "awful lot of money" in computer graphics. The stuntman was already one-legged.
The movie's watery scenes brought back grim memories for Anderson. On 11 March, 1991, he lost a leg during the making of Francis Ford Coppola's movie about the America's Cup, Wind. That accident, he says, "basically broke me in half". While he was eating lunch, a 30-foot yacht ploughed into Anderson's jet boat, which was being used as a marker during filming. It hit him in the pelvis and forced him beneath the water. An artery was severed. Three days later his leg was amputated below the knee.
Anderson runs stunt agencies in Melbourne and Queensland and has worked in a variety of films including The Man From Snowy River II and Mad Max movies. He says Stewart did most of his own stunts in Moby Dick. "It wasn't unsafe. It's just that the memory came back," he says.
"I've spent my whole life being in dangerous situations and evaluating them and getting out of them," Anderson says. "The only difference now is that I have a bigger equation. I can't feel what the right foot's doing, so to speak."
Industry consultant Peter Culpan, 56, is concerned about getting the right person for the right stunt. "We don't want egos. We don't want somebody coming on set saying, 'Ah, I'm the stuntman, I can leap off tall buildings.' We don't need that.
"Anybody wanting to come into the industry doing stunts has got a long, hard road ahead of them. They've got to show dedication and commitment. They've got to be the right sort of personality."
After the death of a camera assistant on the set of Matlock Police in the '70s, stunt performers lobbied for a safety code for the film and television industries.
"These days we put the right performer into the right job," Culpan says. "So if it's a wild and hairy thing, you get somebody who knows how to do that well and therefore you're reducing the risk."
Culpan specialises in car stunts and has helped co-ordinate Kiss Or Kill, Road To Nhill and The Well. His career has forced him to face one of his own biggest fears. Heights. He turned it to his advantage in a scene last year for TV's Good Guys Bad Guys.
"I actually motivated myself all day by telling myself how much I hated heights because I was acting a part in which I had to show fear. They were outside the building on a cherry picker doing shots of me. And they were close-ups. So I had to show fear in the eyes. I kept telling myself all day, 'I hate heights. God I hate heights.'"
One person in the stunt business Culpan particularly admires is Amanda Buchanan, 28-year-old kickboxing champion. "She's an ideal stunt person. Focused, trained, attentive," says Peter Culpan.
Buchanan, who was dragged behind a tram in the TV series Mercury, doubled for local actress Gabrielle Fitzpatrick in the latest Jackie Chan film, A Nice Guy, and appeared in Simone De Beauvoir's Babies, Riverstreet, Raw FM, Feds, Halifax F.P., Blue Heelers and Neighbours.
"I was a tomboy," she says. It's maybe an understatement for this stuntwoman, who has held Australian and Hawaiian women's kickboxing titles and a world Muay Thai-style kickboxing title and who last year defended her Commonwealth Women's Lightweight boxing title.
During one bout, Buchanan - who already had a collapsed lung - broke a toe, injured her knuckles and forearms, received two black eyes and had her nose bloodied. She was back on the set the next day.
Zev Eleftheriou, 41 - the man in the chocolate-brown Jag - has contributed driving sequences or hand-to-hand combat to Mad Max II, Dead Calm, Gallipoli and The Lighthorsemen.
"I've never had a producer willing to sacrifice a person's life for a piece of film footage," says Eleftheriou. "It's not as ugly as a lot of people perceive it.
"I've been at it 22 years and I've been knocked out once. I've never broken bones doing stunts."
Much preparation went into the XJ6 crash sequence, filmed for the ABC mini-series, The Bite. The car had a racing car fuel tank, to ensure it wouldn't explode on impact, and a roll cage in case it overturned. Eleftheriou wore a $400 motorbike helmet with baseball catcher's mitts in lieu of padding on his knees. Seats were braced in so that they wouldn't rip out of their mounts. A five-point racing harness held Eleftheriou's torso in place, and his arms were strapped to the harness with rope.
In the film, the car seems to be travelling at 100 kilometres per hour or more. But Eleftheriou did not exceed 70. Any faster and he would have ploughed into a Mercedes Benz dealer.
"I love to do big crashes and big falls, fairly major fire stunts where people are burning from head to toe," he says. "But if they're out of context with the storyline, to me that's a stunt for the sake of a stunt rather than a stunt for the sake of the story."
Stunt performers, says Actors Equity industrial officer Sue Marriott, "are the safety eyes and ears of the (film and television) industry". Progress has been made on safety issues but has "always grown out of tragedy". The bottom line? Stunt work is even more challenging than it looks. Young people are always keen to get into what they think is exciting movie work, but it's actually very dangerous. "Not just anyone can be a stunt actor," she says.
© 1998 The Sunday Age