Chris Stapp cut his teeth – and probably plenty more – making anarchic TV and films as part of Back of the Y. Perhaps most recognisable onscreen as determined but hapless stuntman Randy Cambell (who made the leap to the big screen with The Devil Dared Me To), Stapp’s performed more than anyone’s fair share of DIY stunts, making him our top pick to chat about the stuntwork of Kiwi cinema.
FLICKS: What are some of the stunts in NZ films that stand out for you?
CHRIS STAPP: Race for the Yankee Zephyr had some really cool speedboat stunts, and I think as a little kid I was very impressed by the idea of jumping speedboats, that being really cool. And there’s lots of cool helicopter chases and stuff. That’s one of those films shot down around Central Otago and Queenstown, where I used to live, and that was always really neat. But yeah, there’s a great gag where there’s a dude hanging from a rope from a helicopter and flying around the Remarkables, which is pretty awesome. And like I say, the speedboat jumps are cool.
What else? Shaker Run‘s got some good stuff in it. You were talking the other day about driving cars through cardboard boxes. There’s another great staple gag in that, that they used to do a lot in the 70s and 80s car chase films, where an innocent bystander will be getting in their car just as the protagonist goes racing by, and they jump in the car and the car chasing smashes the door off the side of the car just as this dude gets out of the way. And there’s a great one in Shaker Run where it’s like a priest getting in a car with three nuns.
Well, it lets them have swearing in the movie. And I was like, “Isn’t this a great way for someone to say ‘Jesus!'” But then like a minute later Leif Garrett swears anyway.
It’s such an odd one, that it’s a priest and he’s getting in a car with three nuns [laughter], and they’re just hanging out for the day.
I think that era perhaps couldn’t resist going to the costume shop.
Yeah, totally. It’s like, “We need this gag, so what fucking stupid costumes are we going to put on, people?” And they must have just had three habits and a priest outfit lying around. Very random.
Does that also help maybe mask that there are only a few people that were performing those gags?
Basically, yeah, because I guess, you know, you want it to look like a normal sort of unlikely person and not some stunt guy. And I guess a priest is the most unlikely dude they could think of to be doing the stunt. But yeah, there’s another great one in Shaker Run where they flip a panel van on its roof, which I’ve always loved, that stunt. And we did that once for a Randy Cambell gag. It’s quite a terrifying one to pull off, but they flip this panel van and then it slides half of Courtenay Place on its roof [laughter], which is pretty cool.
There’s some good street closures in that one. And you can kind of see a bit of a crowd watching in the back of the shot – not a typical day in Wellington.
Yeah, and it’s got that Goodbye Pork Pie feeling of a real seat-of-your-pants kind of guerilla aspect to it. You get the feeling there’s not much safety and traffic control, and that kind of shit going on, which is the cool thing about those old movies.
I’ve seen pictures from that new Pork Pie, when they film their stunts and they’ve got 10 dudes in high-viz vests safety-harnessed on to a trailer rigged with the car and all this bullshit. Whereas you see the originals, it’s actually those dudes driving a fucking Mini around a train station, and people kind of randomly jumping out of the way. It’s just got that real nice realness about it.
But yeah, Goodbye Pork Pie you can’t go past. There’s a lot of great gags in that. The traffic cop who drives his car into Lake Hawea, that’s a gag you can’t really do anymore because of the environmental concerns of putting [laughs] a car into a lake, essentially. Because we’ve looked into that when we were doing Back of the Y.
Wouldn’t it be great to just drive the car off of a wharf or something? But yeah, apparently it’s a big no-no now. When they do it, you have to basically take out all the gas tank and anything that’s got oil in it, and all this sort of shit. And basically make your car environmentally friendly, and then you can dump it in a lake.
There’s a lot of great stuff in Pork Pie. Like that whole car chase around Wellington, it’s just awesome. And there’s lots of funny little set-ups. Like there’s a car on the back of a tow truck that the Mini manages to drive under happily, and then when the cop car follows it gets the lights whipped off the roof. Lots of nice little set-up gags like that, just to make it zing.
My favourite Kiwi film – at least one of them – is Battletruck, which is otherwise known as, I think, Warlords of the 21st Century, which is a stupid name for it because it clearly says in the beginning narration that it’s set in 1994 [laughs]. But I just love those old post-apocalyptic movies that start with, “The year is 1994 after the oil wars”. Oh, yeah, I remember those oil wars. So there’s some great stuff in that as well.
There’s a really good one. It’s an accidental stunt, I think, with a V-Dub that’s got corrugated iron all over it – because in the apocalypse all panel-beating’s done with rusty corrugated iron for some reason. But I think it meant to be a little car jump off a ridge, and the car ends up going kind of nose down and does, basically, a whole lengthwise cartwheel, which apparently was completely accidental, but this thing flips right over nose over arse and lands back on its wheels and drives away!
That film was shot around Alexandra where I grew up, in a lot of places we used to go play and stuff. We went out one day and watched the shooting and sort of saw a good chunk of that scene being filmed so it’s one of my first experiences of seeing stunts, and squibs, and all this kind of action stuff, and it’s like, “Wow. This is cool.”
So that movie especially sticks in my brain. That was definitely the talk of the town for quite a while down around Alexandra. But, yes, a lot of the places I used to hang out as a kid are in that film, which is really neat.
My other favourite stunt is not actually a stunt but is in Bad Taste when Peter Jackson’s character falls down a cliff. There’s this really amazing dummy that’s kind of locked into this crouching position, and it just makes the gag – it just looks hilarious, and wrong, and stupid, and it’s obviously a dummy but at the same time it looks kind of real. And I thought that’s quite a genius little gag. Not that it’s technically a stunt but it’s still pretty awesome.
When you were planning something to execute, is there much information out there on how to do it, or did you just watch things and copy them?
I think we’re sort of mainly watching things. Like I was watching a lot of Jackie Chan movies and just trying to come up with those kinds of gags, just stuff that looks real and impressive. And yeah, just kind of ripping off that whole sort of attitude, I guess.
So most people just kind of reverse-engineered stunts here.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I was watching tons of stunts docos and movies, stuff like The Devil at Your Heels. A lot of the old Randy Cambell stuff came from watching the show When Stunts Go Wrong, I think it was called. And it was basically ripping it off shot-for-shot, and coming up with our own stupid stunts and ways for them to go wrong. A lot what we were doing is you’re telling the audience you’re going to do one thing but the whole thing’s all set up to go completely wrong. So you’re actually kind of doing something else.
Obviously, it’s still work, but I think we don’t realise, actually, how fun it is for everybody on the set when they do those gags. I remember seeing how exciting it was for the crew and cast setting off squibs on ‘Slow West’, something that is pretty standard, really.
Yeah. It’s always fun on set because you got loud noise and the anticipation of “I hope this works” and that sort of thing. It is, yeah, really exciting when you’ve got guns, and squibs, and explosives, and all those kind of things. So they’re real fun things to shoot.
Is that what makes it such a compelling line of work, that it requires planning and preparation, and it’s a bit dangerous but it’s also fun all at the same time?
I mean, I guess filmmaking’s kind of unique like that. Yeah, that whole idea you’re doing different weird shit every day, and most days we’re getting to do those kinds of gags, stunts, and stuff. It’s really fun.
I just finished working on Ash vs Evil Dead and I was working on second unit. I worked doing a lot of the stunts and the gore gags and that kind of stuff and watching the stunties work is so much fun. They’re these dudes just tied onto wire rigs and they’re being thrown against walls and flipping through the air and all that kind of stuff and it’s really cool to watch and be a part of.
Access to finding out how these things work seems like it would now be much more widespread through behind-the-scenes footage and info online.
It used to be more underground, I think, that kind of knowledge. Underground filmmakers would swap tricks and stuff.
I remember a dude teaching me how to do homemade bullet squib effects with torch lightbulbs and black powder. He had these effects really down and I remember maiming one of my friends one day with my ill-thought-out bullet squib effects. I made these squib effects that were basically sardine cans full of black powder, way too much powder, and he had this loose-fitting costume on, and I had a detonation box – which was basically a beer crate with a broom handle on it – and these two squibs on him.
The first one went off and it didn’t blow through his costume. All the smoke and stuff was trapped under his costume and it burned his chest fairly horribly and he freaked out and started running and the wire was still attached to the detonation box, and so when he ran off the detonation box flipped upside, landed on its handle, and the second went off, and it’s really funny watching the footage. You hear the scream off-camera when the second one goes off.
It’s fucking hilarious.
Man, I felt bad.
The stuff that you’re talking about in terms of your favourite moments, it’s all from a pretty loose time, right? How much has increased diligence or increased care affected stunts?
Often the stunts feel sort of faker I guess, they don’t have that real rawness, but I mean there is some of the best stuntwork that still goes on. It’s done under watchful eyes and a lot of safety and that sort of thing, which is great for the performers and everyone on-set, because when someone gets hurt when you’re working, it does totally suck.
Stunts don’t seem to have really suffered that much. You’ve just got to be smart about what you’re doing and I guess good stuntwork is always about your preparation and safety anyway. So I guess ultimately it’s a good thing and there’s still a lot of movies done with great stuntwork in them.
But definitely, those older films feel more visceral – they aren’t necessarily shot on controlled roads and stuff. My dad has this story he loves telling about one of his mates when they were shooting Goodbye Pork Pie.
My dad was a traffic cop in the South Island, and one of his mates was out on the road looking for speeders, and this yellow Mini goes racing past and he takes up the pursuit and pulls these dudes over. A guy gets out of the car and the door falls off. They said “Oh, no. We’re just shooting a movie. There’s a camera truck down the road there”, and this cop had no idea what was going on.
I just love the idea that they’re shooting this stuff with no official kind of seal of approval or anything like that and they can actually get pulled over by the cops in the shoot and talk their way out of it. It’s very much like how we used to shoot our stuff. We’d go around to abandoned parts of town and just film car chases on empty streets in the middle of the night kind of thing.
This story is part of our month-long celebration of 40 years of NZ film. Follow all our daily coverage here.
