THE FALL GUY PART II

DOUBLING KEVIN SMITH

Separated at birth: Kevin Smith & Matt Anderson.

CCF: One of the coolest things you’ve done, or at least I think so from just looking at your resume, you stunt doubled for Kevin Smith.

MA: I gotta tell you, I agree with you.

CCF: (LOL) Tell me a bit about that experience.

MA: Oh man. I tend to talk a lot anyway and I could talk ten times as much on that. That’s by far one of the coolest jobs I’ve ever had. I can’t say enough about how cool working with those guys was. Kevin Smith is a friend. He’s the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. Scott Moser is also a great guy. Both are total pros. Jay was cool as hell. What you see with Jay is what you get.

CCF: Oh yeah?

MA: He’s just cool. He was easy to work with.

CCF: Why don’t you get into talking about some of the specific doubling you did for Kevin Smith?

MA: Kevin isn’t incredibly physical and that was a physical comedy so there were many times, he was like, “Dude, I’m not doing that.”

CCF: (LOL)

MA: That’s exactly what he was saying, “Dude, I’m not doing that shit. That’s you.” As an example, you’ve seen the movie I assume?

CCF: Yeah.

MA: The part where we take the bicycle through the window... In the movie, you barely see it, but its in my online reel. It was one of the first days of shooting. It was gnarly. When the coordinator was discussing it with me, he’s like, “Look, this is going to be a wreck. There’s no special training for taking a big heavy bicycle cruiser down a ramp and through a window.” It was done in a sound stage and we basically built the ramp all the way across the sound stage so we could get up speed. We came down the ramp... It just led us up to the window, we crashed through, the bike was so heavy it dropped immediately. It was probably a four or five foot drop to the ground. So, we’re practicing with pads... We get all set up. Then the coordinator is all, “Okay, let’s pull the pads up.” Kevin just gets this shocked look on his face. He wrote it, but it’s like he never really thought about what the stunt meant and he goes, “Wait, you’re going to pull the pads out?” We respond back, “Well, yeah, of course we are going to pull the pads out Kevin.” Then he says, “You guys are going to the floor?”

CCF: (LOL)

MA: “Well, yeah.” It’s a concrete floor. There’s wood over it, but still… He put some carpet down because he felt bad. He’s all, “Oh, uh... Oh.” We’re like, “Kevin, it’s okay. This is what we do.” He felt bad that he had the two of us crash on to the floor. He’s like, “Crap! Shit!” I’m just, “Kevin, it’s okay.” Meanwhile, were both thinking, “Shit, if we get wrecked up here then we can’t work the rest of the show.”

CCF (LOL)

MA: We’re all, “Can’t we have at least done this at the end?” But that’s just where it fell on the schedule. We had rehearsed it out and Kevin really felt bad. The stunt director was like, “Stuntmen are supposed to get hurt. That’s what they’re here for.” That’s pretty much the attitude fairly decent sized directors have. They could give two shits. They don’t want to hear it. Kevin was different. He was great to work with for a number reasons. I was looking forward to going to work every day. I was on it for the entire run and I even went back to New Jersey with him. I grew up in Jersey, so Kevin was, “You gotta come back.” It was the coolest. He’s also totally professional and knows what he wants. And Scott, his producer... he’s pretty much established at this point and you’d see him out there in jeans and t-shirts and if the grip needed help pulling a cable, he’d be out there pulling a cable. I had a birthday on the set. I’ve been on four or five sets on my birthday before. Usually it didn’t matter. You figure, “Oh they don’t know about us.” They knew about me. It was just fun. The stuff you don’t see in film is as equally hilarious if not worse. The original script had stuff you can’t ever imagine. I still have a copy of the original script. Kevin had to know there was stuff in it that he was never getting through. I think he does that so he can get the stuff that he really wants. He gives them a bunch of shit that they can cut, so what he wants in gets to stay. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but he had Scooby Doo blowing a load on the windshield of the Mystery Machine

CCF: (LOL)

MA: They hit him, knock him off and leave him. As the Mystery Machine drives away, Scooby gets up and says, “Ruther Ruckers!” That didn’t make it. They didn’t even come close to filming it.

CCF: (LOL)

MA: There was lots of stuff like that.

CCF: You were supposed to do stunt work on “Clerks 2” as well, right?

MA: Yeah, I was so bummed out. I was supposed to work it, but there were so little of stunts in it. I was supposed to be one of the cops. We were going to come hot and skid the cars when they show up for the donkey show. But they just ended up getting a regular guy that just pulled in. They don’t skid in or anything. If you look at the credits there were just a handful of stunt people and the ones that were involved were doubling specific people. I just can’t double a Hispanic female. I wish I could... Working on “Jay & Silent Bob” was just so much fun, I hope to work with Kevin again… Oh, I got to work with Luke Skywalker. You said you guys went and afterwards were swinging around... Dude, I remember waiting in line for “Star Wars” multiple times. And now I got to teach Luke Skywalker sword fighting. I’ve got video of behind scenes of just working things out with Mark Hamill, “Do this and do this, and then spin and do this.” Mark said, “Dude this is all the shit I wanted to do back in the day, but Lucas wouldn’t let us. The stuff they’re doing in the modern ones, we wanted to do back then, but he just wouldn’t let us.” I was like. “You can do anything you want here.” He hadn’t done any sort of sword fighting since the last “Star Wars” movie that he did. I didn’t have much time to get him tuned up, but it was supposed to be a comedy fight anyway. That was pretty cool for me. Yeah, that’s right, I worked with Luke Skywalker. I have a picture with him where we Photoshopped lasers over it later. So now it’s Luke and I with light sabers.

LOUIS GOSSETT JR., JACKIE CHAN & TONY JAA

Matt Anderson with Don “The Dragon” Wilson.

CCF: (LOL) That’s great. You’ve done some other stunt doubling as well. I know Kevin Gauge, Richard Greco and Don “The Dragon” Wilson are a few you’ve did work for. As far as stunt doubling, how does that work exactly? Do you follow them around on the set, “Oh they have to fall down on this part, so you’re up.” Is it that sort of thing? Is there this interaction with the actors or is it, “Here you shoot your stuff” and it’s separate? How does it work exactly?

MA: There’s always interaction. Some more than others. A buddy of mine doubled for Mark Whalberg. He’s doubled for Mark I don’t how many times. That’s his guy. It’s in Mark’s contract, “That’s who I want.” The guy that doubles for Stallone has done so for years. Even if you’re coming in, like Kevin Gauge didn’t have a stunt double, the coordinator looks at you and goes, “Okay, this is your guy now. So if I need him to do something, you will be the one padding him up.” You’re not going to hang out with him all the time. Somewhat, but the actors have their shit they need to do. He’s got to run lines, but sometimes you get to hang out. Very rarely do you hate the guy you are doubling and vice versa. It’s counterproductive. I’m sure its happened at some point, but most of the time even if you don’t necessarily care for the guy, you are still responsible for him. So you have to make sure he’s padded up. If he wants to do something, you are the go-between with the stunt coordinator. Theoretically, you already know when you are going to go in for him. Then there might be a time when say somebody has a bad knee or there’s an accident. We had a situation on a shoot that I worked on years ago where the lead actor during a fight scene blew his knee out. This was at the beginning of shooting, so basically we had a double come in. Billy Warlock was the actor. He had a guy, so we brought him in and he did everything that you could possibly imagine. Everything was shot around him. He’d go running over here, bring up the machine gun. Then we’d hobble Billy in there, he’d have the machine gun and then we’d shoot a close-up. In that case, we would have been completely devastated without having a double. The same thing with “The Crow.” But normally you know what you are going to be doing as a stunt double. I knew what my stunts were for Kevin Smith. I went in knowing, “Okay, I’m going to be doing this, this and this. This is an area where I’ll probably be doing stuff.” Kevin did do a lot of the sword stuff... There are occasions where you come in because the actor isn’t available that day of shooting, but that’s not the norm.

CCF: How does that work? Do you have to audition or is it just “Kevin Smith needs a stunt double, who on the crew most resembles him” or what?

MA: Normally, it goes through the stunt coordinator. He knows who his actors are. He gets photos, stats and usually meets the actors in person, so he knows, “Okay, I need somebody in this range.” Obviously, if they need a double for Lou Gossett Jr., I’m not the guy.

CCF: (LOL) Right.

MA: With Kevin Smith, the coordinator Gary Jensen, he is the one who did it. I knew his son. We were working on something else and one day he looks at me weird and then puts his hands up over my face. I’m like, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m trying to see what you look like with a beard. Don’t shave. You need to come meet my dad on this other thing we are doing.” There ended up being two people up for it and I ended up getting it. I think that was more of the stunt coordinator’s decision. “Die hard 4” the coordinator put in X amount of people. Say five people, I’m just picking that number out of a hat. From what I understand, the coordinator then presented those five people to Bruce Willis and he picked from those who he felt would best represent him. Usually the stunt coordinator makes the initial call and the final call, but some times it depends... Sometimes you will have production bringing people in and that’s sort of a sore point with us. If he gets brought in and they are, “Oh yeah, this guy does stunts and he has three credits,” well, I’m the one that is responsible as coordinator if something happens to him... I have physically watched a guy become a quadriplegic doing stunts. Nice kid. Didn’t have a lot of credits. He wasn’t doing anything particularly hard and it was during the rehearsal. It wasn’t my show and whether he should have been there or not is hard to say. It was just one of those fluke things. If you work with guys you don’t know and something like that happens you will be second guessing yourself the rest of your life. That’s why you like to work with guys you do know that you know you can handle what they are taking on. The coordinator that worked on that film is no longer in the business. It wasn’t because of that that he got out. But it may have had an influence. You also have coordinators that don’t care if they hurt people and that word gets around the community. Hollywood is actually a much smaller place than people think. It’s much bigger now than back and the day. Back in the day, everyone immediately knew what was going on in the stunt business. Now, it takes a couple of weeks. But the internet has kind of evened that up. Now, “boom” the stuff gets around quick.

CCF: The new “Die Hard” movie, what kind of stunts did you do in it?

MA: I was just there for one day. All I did was the fall down the stairs. It always just depends. “Jay & Silent Bob” I was there the entire run of the show. “G.I. Jane” I was there for three and a half months. “Die Hard 4” one day. It just varies. I really wanted to double Bruce Willis, but I wasn’t right for the stock. Bruce weighs a lot less than I do. The responsibility of the coordinator is to get the best person for the job. It doesn’t always work out that way. But that’s how its supposed to work.

CCF: Are you a fan of Jackie Chan, Tony Jaa and people like that that do their own stunts?

MA: Oh yeah. I’m a fan of that and I’m not a fan of people that say they do their own stunts and don’t. There are a few of them here and there. That’s a whole other way of making films that those guys are doing. Like Tony says he does that stuff because he didn’t know he couldn’t. Nobody ever told him he isn’t supposed to do that stuff without wires. While I’m a fan of them in general, I wouldn’t make films that way. I do like watching them. I’ve been a Jackie Chan way before he was popular. I thought the “Big Brawl” was genius. I said, “Oh my God, that guy is the coolest guy ever.” Having said that though, I don’t want to make films that way. A lot of those guys, they are expendable there. Jackie is willing to do it himself and when you are working with him, he does a stunt and then he tells you to do it, what do you do?

CCF: (LOL) Yeah, exactly.

MA: If you are in that mindset and in that culture, you go do the job. If you get thrashed, you get thrashed. Then you get up and do it again. You know, I did that. I thrashed my shoulder and didn’t tell anybody, but to a certain point it becomes stupid. It’s honorable and all that, but there’s not enough thought to safety. There’s some. It’s not like they are, “Go jump off that ten story building and kill yourself.” But they do, “Okay, go up to the second story and jump out. No, there’s no pad.” There’s no longevity there. The only reason there has been longevity for Jackie is because he is an actor as well and because he moved into producing and directing. He’s in pain all the time. The average stunt guy over there has five, maybe ten years and then that’s it. Over here there’s a ton of old stunt men that will tell you, “Put your pads on dumb ass. We didn’t. We all have plastic hips and knee replacements.” The old school guys have a lot of issues like that. So I love watching those guys and some of the stuff they do I think is amazing, but I wouldn’t want to work in that environment.

THE DEAD UNDEAD

On the set of “The Dead Undead.”

CCF: I remember when I first found out about stuntmen. It was “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I found out Harrison Ford didn’t do all the stunts in it and he had doubles and stuff. I kind of felt like I was cheated. I was able to get over it, but for you is the whole fantasy of movies kind of destroyed? Are you able to watch a movie and actually watch it without picking apart the stunts and thinking, “Oh, I could have did that better” or anything like that?

MA: Mmmmm.... I don’t usually watch going, “Oh, I could have done that this way.” But my girlfriend sometimes will punch me and say, “Shut up.” I’ll watch it and say things like, “Yeah, that’s ridiculous,” or “God, that’s so stupid.” Then later I will talk about it with my buddies. We were watching “The Guardian” the other night and a boom mic dropped into the frame and I said something and everybody was all “Shut up.” I was all, “This is a big feature film and the boom dropped into the frame, how can you miss it?” I can usually enjoy movies, but I can’t watch them without noticing things. I also know that when you shoot somebody with a shotgun they don’t go flying. They would mean due to physics you would have had to have been flying when you shot them. I directed a film at the end of last year and I’ve got bodies flying through the air. You know what? That’s what people want to see.

CCF: (LOL)

MA: I’ve got zombie vampires coming at you and they need to go flying.

CCF: Right. That’s the “Dead Undead” film your taking about, right?

MA: Yeah. You know, people flying through the air is half the fun.. We called in all our favors. I had an amazing stunt rigger that came in with all this great equipment. He did all the rigging on “Transporter 2.” So we have bodies flipping through the air, spinning through the air. So many that we can’t use them all because it would be too stupid. But we have plenty to choose from. When people get shot for real they don’t do that. Generally, they just kind of curl up into a ball and fall over. We made sure to get a big weapon so we could justify some of the things we do. We got a 50 caliber sniper weapon and just blew body parts off. We’re all, “Let’s blow a leg off then blow the guy backwards.” That’s what people want to see. If we were doing a more serious film I would have tried to make it more realistic, but this is a zombie/vampire movie.

CCF: What’s going on with that film?

MA: We’re still working on it. We’re going to be doing some pickups over the next few months.

CCF: And you produced and directed?

MA: Yeah.

CCF: Who are some of the people you have involved with that project?

MA: We have a couple of decent names. Nobody huge. But we have Vernon Wells who was Wez in “Mad Max 2.” We also got the bad guy from “Blade 2” Luke Goss. We also have some younger stars that are popular with the kids, but I don’t know who the hell they are.

CCF: (LOL) How did that project come about?

MA: You know X amount of people in the business... There are some that are happy staying in the same place being a stunt guy. There are other guys that move into coordinating. Some move into being a second unit director from coordinating. It’s not the norm, but there have been a lot of guys that have moved into directing. I love what I do, but you can only make so much money. Producing is where you make the money. I’ve got X amount of scripts that I’ve written and tried to get off the ground and been close to doing. I’ve done some shorts, some trailers. So it’s something I’ve had an interest in for awhile. Then another stunt guy (Edward Conna) and I were setting around, saying, “Oh we should do our own movie.” You always hear people talk about that. Well, we said, “Let’s stop talking about it and just do it.” He said, “I’ve got a guy that has a little bit of money. I’ve got a script for him that he really likes, let me flush it out.” The guy really liked it, we moved forward with it, then the guy bailed. Several of us got together and said, “Screw it, we’re going to do it anyway.” Everybody pulled whatever money they could pull. A lot of these guys are A-list stunt men and stunt coordinators. Money was thrown in. It was very low budget, but it doesn’t look like the budget it is. We’re still not done. We got a rough cut of it and have taken a look at it and figured out what we need to finish it off. We did a short of it for “On the Lot,” but trying to make a feature into five minutes is kind of difficult. We were shooting a lot of it just here and there. We gave parts to a lot of stunt-actors that we know, who would come out and work for 18 hours if we needed them to. We’d call them up and be all, “Oh, hey can you shoot on Thursday?” They’re all, “Yeah, yeah, you bet.” The problem is now a lot of them are starting to get jobs. We’re like, “Oh, fuck!” One of the actors, he’s getting ready to go work on “Iron Man.” Let’s see, our little movie or “Iron Man”? I just got hired as an actor to do something with one of the “Blair Witch” directors. I’m leaving for Moracco at the end of March.

CCF: Cool.

MA: Our DP is going to work on another film. It’s not a big film, but (Conna) is going to work on an A-list project. So we’ve been scrambling to get some things done. Then hopefully in May when everything calms down, we have some big flashback scenes that we need to spend some time on. We also have a lot of close-ups we need to do. A lot of blood stuff with zombies getting their brains blown out and things like that. We’re a little short on that right now. People want to see brains.

CCF: (LOL) And this movie has zombies and vampires?

MA: Yeah, well we actually sort of crossed them. The story is that these were vampires that didn’t drink human blood. They just sort of live out in the boonies and they drink animal blood. But the animal blood gets infected and that creates these zombie vampires. You can’t kill them by shooting them in the head. You can’t kill them by staking them in the heart. They don’t walk around going, “Errrrrr.” They run really fast, leap through the air and try to fuck you up.

CCF: (LOL)

MA: Which it all sounded pretty cool till we had to start paying for everything. Then we were all, “Oh my God. Son of a bitch “ It’s so much easier when they go, “Errrrrr,” you shot them in the head and they go down. That’s an easy effect. Now suddenly we need to dismember them with machine guns. If you shoot them in the head, that sort of scrambles them for a second. You get like ten minutes, but then they rewire and come after you again. So you have to rip the spine apart with a machine gun. Fortunately, we had a lot of people that had connections and we got a ridiculous amount of weapons. We have weapons we shouldn’t ever be able to have on this budget. No one with our budget can get these weapons. Movies with budgets a million dollars more than us probably don’t have these weapons. We can’t get anything else, but we can get a lot of different weapons. So we have people running around shooting the shit out of everything. We just didn’t have a lot of time during principle to get a lot of cool zombie shots. I just did a zombie movie where I was a stunt guy. I didn’t get a huge amount of makeup, but it was pretty cool. Anyway, it took an hour and a half in the chair to put the makeup on. We just didn’t have that kind of time on this shoot.

Guns, guns and more guns on the set of “The Dead Undead.”

CCF: What was that other zombie movie you worked on?

MA: “Mutant Zombie Vampires from the Hood!”

CCF: (LOL)

MA: I shit you not. A buddy of mine was stunt coordinating it. He asked me to come out and do his film and now he’s going to get blown off a horse in mine. The makeup was real nasty looking. We just didn’t have that kind of time on our film. But now we will get the close-ups. You’ll see some gooey vampire zombie going “Arrrgh!” and then the next shot will be something we filmed in principle of a tons of them coming over the hill and then cut to something else and your mind’s eye will never register that they don’t all look like that.

CCF: Sounds cool. I’ll be looking forward to both of those projects. Lastly, I noticed “La Bamba” was one of the first movies you had done stunts for?

MA: Yep.

CCF: What was it you did on that film exactly?

MA: I did a fight scene. That was early, early. I wasn’t even in the union at that point. I got hired on as a special business extra. I was a greaser. It was in the earlier parts of the movie when he was in high school. It was some kind of dance and there was a fight between the cholos and the greasers. I don’t remember how much of the fight is in the movie.

CCF: I saw that and was just kind of stunned, like “What stunts are in that”?

MA: You’d be amazed if you just picked a few random movies that you thought had no stunts in them and go look at the credits. Nine time out of ten you’ll be saying, “What the hell? There are 15 stunt people listed for this movie and there was nothing there.” Keep in mind, just because it isn’t on screen doesn’t mean we didn’t do it. Also, just because you don’t think its a stunt doesn’t mean it’s not. You might use a double to just have somebody fall on the ground. I did some things for the movie “Peacemaker” with George Clooney and none of its in the movie. There were a bunch of car chases through the streets of New York. We were ripping through New York. None of its in the movie. They just said, “Oh we don’t have time for that. We don’t need it.”

CCF: Alright, well, I think that about wraps things up. I appreciate you talking to me. It sounds like you are keeping busy.

MA: Yeah. The end of the year was slow and so far this year it has been busy. The thing I’m getting ready to do may be nothing, but it’s with Daniel Myrick of “The Blair Witch Project.” So it could end up being a big deal. I’m coordinating it, but I am also one of the lead roles in it. It was kind of cool to get called in it to begin with. But to actually end up getting a role in it, that’s was... shit... really, really cool.

CCF: Well, good luck with that project and make sure to keep in touch.

MA: Will do. Thanks.

- CCF, March 2007