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The Fall Guy: The Stunt That Broke a World Record – IGN

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Stunt performer-turned-choreographer-turned-director David Leitch is no stranger to high-octane action, having co-directed the original John Wick with Chad Stahelski before going on to helm memorable moments such as Atomic Blonde’s eight-minute staircase escape oner, and Bullet Train’s non-stop frantic fights. Now, in The Fall Guy, Leitch and his team of stunt aces are breaking world records.

The Fall Guy follows stunt performer Colt Seavors (played by Ryan Gosling) on an adventure to rescue the star actor of the movie he’s filming after he suddenly disappears. Naturally, a film about stunts is going to contain quite a few, but with his latest, Leitch wanted to push the limits of what is possible with movie stunt-making.

The target? Break the record for most rolls in a car, a record previously held by 2006’s Casino Royale as James Bond rolls seven times mid-air in a memorable crash sequence. Doing this would be no easy feat, though, as Gosling stunt driving double Logan Holladay explains: “Normally when you’re doing a cannon roll, you’re just looking for a really big wreck”, he says. “So you build a cannon and do a car with your special effects team, you set up where you’re going to do it, and you just make a really big wreck. Whereas this stunt, we’re trying to get the most rolls possible. So it’s much more technical.”

With a specific goal of more than seven rolls in sight, every aspect of the stunt needed to be worked out to a tee as any one of the multiple factors not being executed as they needed to be could result in failure.

If you go and stay in the turn for maybe another second longer, you have a different stunt.

“There’s the balance point of the car”, Holladay explains. “Tire pressure goes into it. There’s the way you drive in right as you’re going to hit the button on the cannon to flip it over. If you go and stay in the turn for maybe another second longer, you have a different stunt. You have to be really strategic where that cannon – which is the device that flips the car over – where it gets placed in the car, what kind of car you use, your surfaces, there’s so much that goes into it.”

Luckily, rehearsal time was afforded as well as a couple of trial runs, which is something of a luxury when it comes to some stunts of this scale that involve completely destroying expensive vehicles. “Normally it’s a type of stunt you don’t rehearse, you just go out there and you’ll just go do it and make a massive wreck and it’s great”, Holladay continues. “On this one, we had to have the rehearsals because we would need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do it better, you know, and the two rehearsals that we had the second one, I actually did seven rolls in that one.”

Seven wouldn’t be enough though. Equalling a record isn’t breaking one, after all. When it came to the day of the shoot itself, things weren’t made any easier either, as new variables were thrown into the mix that threatened to put much of the prep work to waste.

“When we finally went to the on-camera days, the beach was different”, recalls Holladay. “The tides came in, they flattened it out, they made it firm, they made it better, but it was different. So it was much different than the testing. So I came in and we did slow mode. The video played back and we watched it all and the way I came in was exactly how we had rehearsed, but with a completely different outcome.

“Instead of it going sideways and rolling, it did a full 180-degrees turning in there before it landed and went in over and down the beach, which is a much more radical thing on the person inside the car. But it’s not as many rolls. So then you got to go back, you got to figure out exactly what to do.

I talked to a lot of people who are very good at this for advice and came up with a conclusion. Try to see what I’m thinking, what everybody I know is thinking, what Chris O’Hara (The Fall Guy’s stunt designer) and Dave are thinking, and what the special effects team is thinking, and then try to gather the most common thoughts in there and put that together and execute it in a slightly different way.”

A few late adjustments led to Logan spinning a full eight and a half times when filming The Fall Guy’s landmark cannon roll. It’s an impressive feat and one that has seen Holladay and The Fall Guy enter the record books, something they’ll undoubtedly be happy with while they await awards ceremonies to honor stunt performers with their own categories – a recognition all too long in the waiting, especially when you consider the amount of different factors at play and the number of people working expertly together to put some of cinema’s most thrilling scenes on screen.

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