I received a couple cards and gifts in the mail from readers last week. I’d like to thank everyone who sent ( or is sending) holiday greetings/gifts. Gift-giving is always cool, but I’d rather you use your resources to enhance your own resilience rather than sending some cool geegaw to some faceless dude you read about on the internet.
However…if you’ve already got the whole resilience angle all taken care of, well, by all means, send the Zero some love.
But…cards or not, gifts or not, I still think youre all awesome.
ETA: Some trivia – For the shot where Hans Gruber falls from the top of the building, Alan Rickman was really dropped 40-feet onto an airbag with a blue-screen cover; the background was later edited in. A stuntman held Rickman up with a rope. Mirroring Rickman’s line repeated twice in the movie, the stunt crew was to count to 3 before releasing, but to get a genuine reaction from Rickman, the stunt man released the rope on the count of two, not three. Rickman later said during a Q&A that the stunt was purposely done on his last day on set.
I’m really curious if P7 sales increased after that movie.
Most stunts are done on last days, for obvious reasons.
I lost track of how many low-budget movies I was called in to work on, for the final week of principal photography, because there were stunts and FX involved, rather than just walk & talk dialogue scenes. (Which is the low-budget producer’s way of telling the crew “We don’t give a shit if you get hurt, because you’re as replaceable as Home Depot Mexicans; only the actors are important.”)
It’s awkward and expensive when you break your actors with a month of work left. Not so much if it’s just a few shots, which can be replaced with over-the-shoulder shots with stunt doubles, wide scenes, etc.
Even with CGI and greenscreen magic (if they have the budget), you don’t want your actors hurt, limping, gimping, pissed off, or dead, and still have substantial amounts of movie left to shoot.
So the seriously hazardous potential bits are always at the end whenever possible.
And chiseling producers (that would be every single one of them, ever) know, like Longshanks noted in the middle of Braveheart, “…the dead cost nothing.“
I’m not sure if you’ve ever mentioned it and perhaps I just missed it, but was your role in the movie industry?
Oh, and dollars to donuts, the stuntman was told to drop Rickman early by the director, whether John McTiernan cops to that or not.
A) That’s what directors do, and
B) Stuntmen don’t make those kinds of decisions on their own, ever.
Hitchcock was infamous for f**king with his actors’ heads to get the reactions he wanted, and Spielberg had an animal handler drop a live snake onto Karen Allen in the Well Of Souls scene in the original Indiana Jones flick. The real scream that gag elicited from Karen Allen was lifted and dubbed into every other scene in the movie where he needed a scream from her, and it was an epic one, as Spielberg admitted later.
Alan Rickman was a great villain… RIP
Apparently, Die Hard was his first movie. He had only been in Hollywood a week when he got it. And he didnt want to do it for fear of being typecast as a villain.