Dan Bradley Interview

The most spectacular action sequences in the biggest summer blockbusters would be impossible without a highly skilled stunt team to bring them to life.

One of the most respected names in the business is Dan Bradley. He designed the stunts for Spiderman 2 and 3, coordinated the chase through the streets of Moscow that brought The Bourne Supremacy to a climax and has just signed on to do the next James Bond movie.

He is best known for his innovative style of filming, often using handheld cameras in the middle of the action, an effect that¹s so rough and raw it could never be created using computer generated imagery. He has also advanced the state of the art with technical innovations like high-speed camera cars and remotely operated vehicles.

Taking a break from working on his next film, the currently unnamed Indiana Jones sequel, Dan Bradley talks about life as a stuntman and his experiences on the The Bourne Ultimatum.

How did you become a stuntman?

I literally fell into it. I was trying to become a lawyer and I met a stunt guy who introduced me to a guy producing a low-budget movie. I went and introduced myself as a film student and a mechanic and told them I'd work for free. They snapped me up and before the show was over I'd rolled a Cadillac. So that was it.

What's the best way for someone to become a stuntman now?

It's getting very very tough. The best calling card into the stunt industry these days is being something like a world champion gymnast, world champion motorcycle rider, world champion fencer or a karate expert. Dana Hee [Nicole Kidman's stunt double, among other things], who is a very successful stuntwoman, got into it because she was a gold medal winner in Tae Kwon Do. The best way is to have some skill set, even an incredibly specialized one, that you're the best in the world at. And that's just to start. That's not even the way to guarantee that you're going to make a living. But that's the way to get doors open.

Also if you look identical to a major motion picture star, that tends to decrease the actual skill set you need to get a job because producers go 'This guy looks just like him. We need to use him. Can you train him?' That's what we did on Spiderman 2. This kid, he was working in Staples, and the producers met him in Chicago and flew him out to L.A. and he became sort of the stunt guy I'd go to if it didn't require a lot of skill. But he was willing and tough enough and I could shoot him face on. We didn't have to try and hide his face. That's sort of the crash-test dummy version of a stunt guy!

With car work, nobody's worried about you getting hurt. As a coordinator I'm more worried about the crew. You want to get a sense of a driver's mental state. 'Is he reliable? Will he do what he said? Does he get excited and just close his eyes and go for it?' Because you put a guy like that in a car and he could take out your camera crew.

I see a lot of young people spend a lot of money learning how to drive. And that's never the place you start at in the stunt business. Ironically enough, that's where I started but I worked with a producer every day in his backyard for three months and he had a really strong sense of who I was before they ever stuck me in a car. And they only did it because it was a low-budget movie.

What's the most technically demanding stunt you've ever worked on?

I'm always trying to do something I've never done before or never seen before so I'm always doing stunts that we're inventing from the ground up. On Bourne in particular, it was trying to figure out how to get the K-rail scene [the end of the final chase scene where Bourne, in a police car, slides along a concrete traffic divider] to look real and not too stagy. And it was how to control the car sliding on top of a concrete rail. That was really hard.

How do you ensure that no one gets hurt when performing a stunt? Or, conversely, how do people usually get hurt on a set?

I ensure the safety of the public and the crew by denying them access. It's hard enough to keep the stunt guys safe without having to worry about people on the sidelines. So, first step, a controlled set and then the stunt performers. We spend a lot of time problem solving. It's like 'Okay, we're going to be doing seventy miles an hour and we're going to hit this parked car. What do we have to do to ensure that the guy sitting in the car doesn't get hurt?' You go through all the potential catastrophes that you can think of and then solve them in advance. So it's very rare that stunt people get hurt on big stunts because there's a lot of focus put on them. Most stuntmen's injuries come from little stunts that they don't think that much about because it's assumed that they're going to be a piece of cake.

The type of stunt that has certainly killed, the most deadly stunt, is the high fall. That's what's killed most of the people in the business. Very few people have been killed in car work. Horse drags have killed a couple people too.

What are the first three things that you think of when planning a car stunt?

For me, I really want to have an understanding of the character. Is he timid? Is he bold? Is he smart? Does he fancy himself a driver? So each character, I think, brings to any car stunt its own kind of ground rule. Then there's location and the story. That's sort of it. Most of the stunt ideas I get come from driving around looking for locations. Something will occur to me because of a unique spot. I think 'Wow, I could do that here'. And half the time I hadn't thought about what that was. And that adds to the visceral nature of the work that I've been able to do because I do let things organically develop during the scouting phase.

How would you apply those three things, character, location, and story, to Bourne?

Well, Bourne is an expert driver but Bourne's strength, and I think what makes him interesting to watch, is that he's very smart. Things don't happen to him accidentally. And in Supremacy and in Ultimatum, Bourne will use skill to escape a situation. When all the skill he has puts him into a situation that he can't get out of, because luck hasn't been on his side, Bourne isn't above just diving in and going for it. He'll test fate when he has to. That's definitely something we see in Ultimatum when he's racing backwards on the rooftop. He's surrounded by agents with automatic weapons and he elects to take the car off the roof. He's rolling the dice. He thinks this is survivable but there's no way for him to know absolutely.

And then it's location. And that applies a great deal to Ultimatum because New York City wouldn't give me any streets. I had to start the car chase in a parking garage. The idea about driving off a level was born because I wound up at the Port Authority parking garage. I'm up on the roof and I walked to one edge and looked down. It wasn't a ten-story drop. It was only a two-story drop to the next level. Well that's survivable. We can do that. The stunts suggest themselves because of location.

Has there ever been a stunt you turned down because you thought it was impossible?

No. I don't think there's really any stunt that's impossible. As a stunt player, I turned down a stunt because of the way they wanted me to do it. I thought it was too dangerous. But since I've been a coordinator, I've never turned anything down. The flip side of that is since I've been coordinating, I've generally been the creative drive behind stunts. I'll often talk directors, producers and actors out of some of the fantastically huge stunts they put on the table because I don't think the story or characters support it. I am against stunt commercials. I think that stunts are far more exciting when they feel story driven and character driven. I've actually made a good living suggesting smaller stunts rather than bigger.

What technical features are most important in the creation of stunt car sequences?

The same thing that's important to car enthusiasts: raw horsepower. And frankly, after working with the Touareg, I wanted one in the worst way. It's a really nice car inside and has got massive torque. It handles great too. Since it was all-wheel drive we had no worries about traction on the icy streets. The biggest challenge was trying to find ways to defeat all the traction control and steering stabilization. They spent millions of dollars to make sure that the car drives like it's on rails and that's hard to get an exciting stunt sequence out of. We put a great deal of effort into trying to figure out how to defeat all that stuff.

Did you do that in the workshop or in the design of the stunt?

Sometimes you just have to choreograph the stunt so that it's possible with the car that you have. And sometimes you do try and get in there, with the help of the VW engineers, to deprogram the car, to find a way to turn off the ABS or the traction control. Mostly it's traction control. But you know, it makes it a great car for the public. It makes it a lot safer.

What technical features on a car can help you help suggest a stunt? Have you ever looked at a car and said 'We could really do something with that feature?'

With the Touareg we actually decided to use the air bags. Ordinarily, doing stunt work, we'll disarm them. But in Ultimatum I made them part of the story because they are so ubiquitous these days. To have them not go off in these crashes would take away the feeling of reality. The airbag going off made it more believable that the characters would survive this kind of crash.

That was how they were able to come back and still continue chasing Bourne?

They could both leave these vehicles and continue the action. You've seen films where the cars do these ridiculously huge crashes and the people get out without a scratch. I tried really hard to keep this based in reality.

The Touareg was picked specifically for the a bad guy. It's a large and powerful car that would put Bourne at a disadvantage. I picked a smaller cop car. I had a choice between a Crown Victoria or the Impala and I would have preferred the Crown Victoria for what I could do with its driving style but the Impala, being smaller, I felt, made Bourne feel more at a disadvantage against the Touareg.

What are the most expensive cars you've wrecked?

You know, tons of Mercedes, limousines, Caddies, Alfa Romeos. I've never wrecked a Ferrari. I've done Porsches but everybody has a Porsche so they're not that interesting to me.

You're going to get to wreck an Aston Martin if you do Bond.

I'm hearing that there's Aston Martin and GT40s in the next Bond. I can't wait.

Do you think that CGI [computer-generated imagery] will ever replace live action stunts?

No. CGI's getting better though. There's a shot in Children of Men that was excellent. And the only reason I knew it was CGI was because it was impossible. There are still real people doing real stunts but they blend it to make a more complex shot. So I don't think that CGI will ever completely replace stunts. It will continue to challenge the stunt performer to be more clever and more realistic but I don't think it will ever completely replace us. It will become a more affordable tool and you'll see more and more of it though.

What would you be doing if you weren't a stuntman?

Oh man, there's a scary question. Wow. You know what? I'd love to be a travel photographer, travelling to exotic lands and taking pictures. But I literally fell into the best job that I could imagine. My mother was crushed. She was convinced that I was going to be a lawyer, then a judge and then on the Supreme Court but I think I wound up in a better seat.