[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Fall Guy.]

The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub hosts an IMAX Q&A with
The Fall Guy
director David Leitch and producer Kelly McCormick.
Leitch and McCormick discuss record-breaking stunts, the chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, the glam rock soundtrack, and more.
The duo also discuss what’s next for them, deleted scenes, those
Major
cameos at the end, and the campaign for stunt recognition at the Oscars.

After our advanced screening for The Fall Guy in IMAX, Collider’s Steve Weintraub sat down with filmmaker David Leitch (Bullet Train) and producer and partner Kelly McCormick (Atomic Blonde) for an extended Q&A. The duo discussed the behind-the-scenes of this ode to moviemaking, like nailing the glam rock soundtrack, finding the third act throughout production, record-breaking stunts, and tons more. They talk about the chemistry between stars Ryan Gosling (Barbie) and Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer), and the legacy series the movie is based on.

Having been a stunt performer for blockbusters like The Matrix and The Bourne Ultimatum, among countless others, and serving as a stunt coordinator, Leitch struck gold with his latest movie. The Fall Guy is a story inspired by the 1981 series that centers around a love story between a stunt performer, Colt Seavers (Gosling), and his ex, first-time director Jody Moreno (Blunt), encompassed by a Hollywood mystery. The director, along with the cast and crew, not only packed a punch with this one story-wise, but it’s full of serious stunts performed practically and a stellar cast including Winston Duke (Black Panther), Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso), Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once), and Teresa Palmer (Warm Bodies).

During the interview, Leitch had this to say:

“It’s been a real honor to actually celebrate the stunt community, and it’s also been a real pleasure to direct from a place of true knowledge of the world… This is our world, and we’re bringing it to life for people to see and enjoy, and it’s from authenticity, and that’s really fun.”

Check out the full conversation in the transcript below for more on that Taylor Swift tear-jerker scene, Gosling in full alien prosthetics, Easter eggs in the set design, and those cameos from the original Fall Guy stars, Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man) and Heather Thomas (Zapped!). They also discuss the campaign for stunt recognition at the Academy Awards, how Gosling has been a major player in the movement (his Oscar performance of “I’m Just Ken” actually kind of hinged on it), and so much more.

The Fall Guy A down-and-out stuntman must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend’s blockbuster film.Release Date May 3, 2024 Runtime 114 minutes Writers Drew Pearce , Glen A. Larson

Read Our ‘The Fall Guy’ Review

COLLIDER: David, you’ve been doing a million things. The stunt show with Ryan and you guys have been around the world. Do you know where you are right now?

DAVID LEITCH: Look, we’re really excited that we have the actual opportunity to really sell this movie. It’s fun to talk about it because we love it so much. So, yeah, I know I’m here. I know we’re at IMAX. This is the best format. It’s so amazing.

I keep saying that to people. Again, I want to give a huge thank you to IMAX for partnering up with the screening. I really do think that the public in the last year has really come to know what IMAX means with Oppenheimer, with Dune. I just feel like it’s turning a corner with public awareness. Do you guys feel that way?

KELLY MCCORMICK: I do. I think that if you’re gonna go to the cinema and go for the experience, and there’s a rise in people wanting to do experiential things, it’s definitely more of an experience than it is just going to a regular cinema.

I fully agree.

MCCORMICK: Or 4DX.

I did 4DX once, and it was once.

MCCORMICK: [Laughs] I have to agree with you. Fast & Furious was a ride.

LEITCH: Oh my god, that was a ride.

The Legacy of ‘The Fall Guy’ (1981)
Image via 20th Century Television

So, why The Fall Guy versus the other scripts and possible projects you could have done?

MCCORMICK: Well, the great thing about the IP is not that many people know [about the TV series], but also, the great thing about the IP is that some people do. It actually was in development at Warner Bros. for, like, 100 years and there were some actors coming in and out of it. Guymon Casady controlled the rights, and he came to us with the property. It is actually the television show that lit the fuse of many stunt performers of David’s generation, because it was about a stunt performer who was a bounty hunter on the side, and they were doing some of the biggest stunts practically of all television ever, including now. It’s bigger than what they are capable of doing to this day — jumps, rolls, high falls, you name it, they were doing some stuff. And so I personally thought it was a great IP to grab for David to talk about his legacy as a stunt performer, and now his filmmaking place, so we grabbed it.

LEITCH: I think what was great, like Kelly brought up, is that it was known enough to where you could be referential to it, but it was [unknown] enough to where we could really interpret it in the way we wanted to, to make the movie we wanted to make — have comedy, have this sweeping romance in the middle that is unexpected for this type of movie. That’s what was really exciting. And look, it’s been a real honor to actually celebrate the stunt community, and it’s also been a real pleasure to direct from a place of true knowledge of the world. Normally, you direct a movie — I’ve never been a ruthless assassin, I don’t know what that’s like, but I’ve directed several. But I know what it’s like to be a stuntman and I know what it’s like to live in the Hollywood world. It’s just this endless fount of ideas that you can really tap into when you’re directing or even producing. This is our world, and we’re bringing it to life for people to see and enjoy, and it’s from authenticity, and that’s really fun.

MCCORMICK: And in general, 87North is always looking for action projects where the action actually punctuates the character’s arc, and with a stunt performer, you can actually do really big practical stunts — and call them stunts — and then they still connect to the character’s arc. So, it was actually really special that way too.

Ryan Gosling Would Perform “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars Under One Condition

One of the many things I love about this movie is that you talk about stunts, Oscars, and awards. This is the first film with a new credit, which is a stunt designer.

MCCORMICK: Coordinator and designer.

My bad. Do you think we’re closer to the Academy recognizing the importance of stunts and stunt performers?

MCCORMICK: I do think closer. It’s not necessarily because of the movie or anything, although I do think maybe…

LEITCH: The movie’s furthering the process. It’s really helping.

MCCORMICK: There’ve been a lot of stunt performers who have been working really hard for an Academy Award for a really long time. In fact, they’ve recruited more memberships for the stunts department than any other department within the Production and Technology branch, which is a thing you have to do, and then the membership gets so large and then you start getting other things. Then what has to happen is that you lobby into talking to other various board members and governors and all that kind of stuff. One of the things that the Academy told us was what they didn’t understand about what stunt performers do, or anything stunt does, is who to give the award to and why? And is there any artistry behind it? So that’s where the title came from, Chris O’Hara’s new title, which is critical in educating the membership at large, as well as the public, that it’s actually a really artistic profession as well as a technical one.

LEITCH: You wouldn’t think you’d need to educate the Academy necessarily, but it’s confusing because stunt performers are members of SAG and they are actors — they perform — but the stunt department designs the action sequences. So, as a department head, the stunt coordinator’s like the hair or makeup design or production design or special effects, VFX. They’re artistically contributing to the film in a way that needs to be recognized, and I think that’s where the focus is now. There’s always been a question of, like, who’s gonna get the award? How’s the award gonna be given out? The department head gets the award, like any other department. That’s what we’re focusing on. Casting getting an award has now really given us a great path of how to get it done inside the Academy. There’s a real way to do it, and we’re following that path.

MCCORMICK: And actually, we produced the little stunt tribute that was on the Academy Awards televised event this year. Thanks to Ryan Gosling for actually standing up for it and saying that, to be honest, he was not really interested in doing [“I’m Just Ken”] unless he could actually do that as well, which is probably why we got the two minutes. Those two minutes are super valuable for other things that they wanna do. They also run over, and so how do they really use that air time? Then it kind of became one of the favorite things that came out of the show this year. I think that is actually probably a bigger deal than maybe the movie. That’s kind of the proof. It’s their sort of “action speaks louder than words.” They acted, and they allowed for the whole two minutes of the show to be given to the stunt community, and now they are probably gonna have to be super positive about moving forward with awards moving forward or else.

LEITCH: And they have been, really.

MCCORMICK: They’ve been really, really positive.

What’s great about this is that it is the first real movement forward that I have really felt. We’ve talked about it for years.

We Were Robbed of Ryan Gosling in Full Alien Prosthetics
Image via Universal

Anyway, Ryan and Emily in this movie, the chemistry between them is off the rails. When did you realize that, “Oh my god, they are gonna be fantastic together?

MCCORMICK: Pretty early on. Ryan had been on the project for a really long time. Then the movie was changing, and the script was changing, and the ideas were changing. We sold it as a noir, investigative… Sort of straight-up, he was a stunt performer who had this investigation going on on the side, and then it sort of turned into, like, “Let’s do more. That’s only one lane that, really, only Ryan can do. How do we make it for more people?”

The Jody Moreno role was a makeup artist, which, actually, they have really deep relationships with their stunt performers; they’re right in their faces doing their makeup every day, and they get really close. We had all these crazy ideas like she would put these disguises on him.

LEITCH: There was gonna be a scene where he’s in a full prosthetic alien mask, but they’re having this super romantic moment, and there was some great stuff in that.

MCCORMICK: It was really cool. But then we wanted to have her have more stakes, basically, and we switched the role into her being a first-time director. Also, it was my sort of, “Let’s go, ladies,” kind of contribution. Then the stakes of her dream are really what’s at stake when this guy shows up, who is probably the only thing that could have toppled her from this thing that really mattered more to her than anything else. Then we got that in a rough draft and gave it to Emily Blunt just for shits and giggles, honestly.

LEITCH: Like, are we really gonna land Emily with this rough draft? But we’d just flipped it from makeup artist to director, and we were sort of like, fingers crossed, “How is this gonna happen?”

MCCORMICK: “She’s too expensive anyway.” And then, for some reason, she saw through it, and she came on board that early. Then we were able to really tailor it to her, and she was able to work with Ryan to tailor Ryan’s part and work together with Ryan to tailor both of their parts to get to a place where it was really sizzling before we even got there. Then we got there, and it was like, “Oh, man!”

Related Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt Try (and Fail) to Keep Things “Profesh” in New ‘The Fall Guy’ Sneak Peek “Any time when people meet on set it’s called the ‘show-mance,’ but what they have is much more than that.”

LEITCH: There’s a lot of different types of actors. There are some that are great with that word on the page — they could read the phone book, and you’d be mesmerized — and there are other actors that are just great listeners, and they’re reacting in the moment. Ryan and Emily have the ability to do both, but in this context, they were both great listeners, and they wanted the best out of the scene in the movie. They didn’t want to win the scene. They were constantly trying to set up the other person for a home run, and it was beautiful to watch. You’re just like, “This is amazing.” So there was a lot of stuff that we would continue to R&D, from the script to the makeup trailer before set. Then on the set, we were riffing a lot the whole time and making it better and better and better, and they’re both game for that. I don’t feel the script is a bible. I feel like I know where the story has to go, and I know what I need out of the scene, and if we can make it better, then let’s do it. They’re both in it, making it happen, and it’s really beautiful to watch.

‘The Fall Guy’ Struggled to Find Its Third Act

I heard that while you were making the movie you didn’t have a third act and that the joke in the movie about them saying, “We don’t have a third act,” is a reference to this film. Is this true?

LEITCH: Yeah. I mean, kind of. Look, it’s a meta movie, right? It’s a movie about making a movie, and so we are in this position, struggling with the third act, and more about the choreography of the third act. We knew where the characters had to go, and we knew the bad guys had to be bested. We had stunts we wanted to achieve that we wanted to take place on the set. We didn’t have a location, so that was a problem. Then location was driving the choreography, and like, “How is the crew gonna help this whole thing?” So, yeah, we were struggling until we found a location. The way the movie was going anyway, we were rewriting. Thank god we shot so much in order that we would continually rewrite scenes, so we were getting all these great payoffs that were gonna end up in the third act anyway. I was really confident the third act was gonna land. We had a hiatus and Kelly was like…

MCCORMICK: Every day we were on hiatus for about a month, I was like, “Okay, how about this ending? How about this ending?”

LEITCH: “We should really focus on this ending.”

MCCORMICK: I’d go to David, and I’d be, like, stonewalled. Then I’d go to Ryan and I’d be stonewalled. Then I’d go back around and come up with something else. It was like, “You guys, we have to do something so that we can use the hiatus and actually shoot the third act when we get back from hiatus.” [Laughs] At one point, Ryan was actually gonna be in the silver costume in the car. We knew that there was gonna be the car jump, we knew that somebody was gonna have to take it over. We actually designed what his costume would be over Christmas break.

LEITCH: It was gonna be one of the aliens from the other side, so it was gold and silver. Then, really, right when we came back from hiatus, I was talking to him, and it’s like the light bulb went off pretty instantly. It was like, “You should be in Space Cowboys, like the double, and the actor should be in the same thing. That’s the shot. That is the essence of the movie in a visual.

MCCORMICK: It is. He had already been in a gold costume, so that was part of my sales tool. I was like, “You can be in this costume! We can make you look like a Kiss character.” So stupid. [Laughs]

LEITCH: Well, we didn’t land on it. There were a lot of ideas that went around.

Is Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s ‘The Fall Guy’ Character Based on a Real Actor?
Image via Universal

One of the jokes in this film is that Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Tom Ryder has a huge entourage. Was this based on an actor in Hollywood?

MCCORMICK: [Laughs] All actors.

LEITCH: It’s so funny that Ryan and Emily don’t. They really don’t. They’re very, very trimmed down. They’re just there working with the people, the essentials that they need. Yeah, it’s fine. There’s a lot of those Hollywood cliches that are true because they are true. “I do all my own stunts.” I’ve been lucky to double some great actors, and they don’t say that because they’re super confident, huge Hollywood stars. They don’t need to do that. But there are these levels of actors that are insecure and feel like they have to project something, that they do all their own stunts, and it does sort of grate on the stunt community. You’re like, “But you don’t do all your own stunts…”

What’s great about this movie is we get to celebrate it, and it’s inherent in the film. It was Ryan’s big idea, like, “We should be celebrating stunt people in this movie. This is awesome. When we got to press, let’s just pull the curtain back. It’s a meta movie. Let’s just be meta, and let’s just go for it.” It’s been great. It’s been so fun to bring Logan [Holladay] and Ben [Jenkin] out and celebrate them, and talk about the stunts they did and the records they broke. All of that is cool. And not every movie should we do that. I think Kelly’s made this point a lot in the press that we’ve been having lately — we wanna keep movie magic alive, and you wanna keep the illusion that James Bond is James Bond, and that’s great. But for this movie, it’s perfect. It’s time to celebrate them, and it’s really fun. We’ve been having a blast.

The film has a lot of Post-It notes in Tom Ryder’s condo. Did you approve everything that was written on a Post-It note? Are there are a lot of Easter eggs on these Post-It notes?

LEITCH: Producer, did you approve?

MCCORMICK: I did not approve. [Laughs] Our art department went wild, and there are so many good ones that you can’t see. I would just go around… I can’t even remember. One was better than the next. They’re all geniuses and they should be screenwriters. [Laughs]

LEITCH: I know. They should get writing credits. It was those funny moments, like, “We gotta dress the set over here.” Then the art department would come in, like set deck people, and would just be writing stuff and putting it up, and we’d be laughing.

MCCORMICK: The “Why is Chinese chicken orange?” was Ryan. “Momoa/Mamoa,” that’s Ryan. [Laughs] The 2% breast milk is also Ryan.

LEITCH: So people were allowed to write them and we had them all around. It was just a fun thing to do on set.

Ryan Gosling Was Too Good in His Emotional Taylor Swift Scene
Image via Universal
DO NOT USE

One of my favorite scenes in the film is not an action scene. It is the scene of Ryan crying in the car and Emily reacting. I know originally that scene had more of Ryan crying, and the thing that I’ve learned talking to Ryan and Emily is how much they would improv in a scene. I guess Ryan was super crying, and then Emily came over and didn’t realize he was gonna be crying this hard. Take us through that scene because it’s a great scene, and it’s also to a musician who is incredibly popular right now.

LEITCH: The great thing about Ryan and Emily is because we were managing tone in this movie, they were both really aware, whether I directed it or not — oftentimes I directed it, but not always — they knew we had to have, “Okay, here’s the earnest one, here’s the stakes version, and then here’s the broad version.” They were sort of giving it to me in scale so I could, in post, really curate the movie tonally, because it could go off the rails. They were fully aware. We had conversations, and they were doing it. When he started crying it was funny, but it was also, like, oddly emotional because he’s so good. I was confused. I don’t know. I’m laughing, but I’m also feeling for this guy because he’s broken-hearted. It’s this really complex scene. But Emily, I don’t think she saw it coming. When she came up to the window that first time, she’s like, “Oh my god, it’s like waterworks.

MCCORMICK: I was a little emotional.

LEITCH: I was emotional and chuckling.

MCCORMICK: I thought it was a perfect place because he is jetlagged. He’s exhausted and he feels like it’s all fucked. It’s just a perfect loss of the opportunity that he came to. I think I certainly would have been crying, and I think it was just kind of this perfect moment that he chose that. And I do think she’s a little more sick [laughs], so she’s like, “What the fuck?” That’s kind of Emily, but it just really felt right to me, and I think that’s why it works so well is because he is exhausted and it’s a really bad day.

LEITCH: She burned him a lot.

MCCORMICK: Even at the end where it’s like one more chance, she burns him again! [Laughs]

‘The Fall Guy’s Soundtrack Is the Movie’s Connective Tissue
“It makes me feel like David was completely manipulating us the whole time.”
Image via Universal Pictures

I really like the song choices. The Taylor Swift thing is great, but also the Phil Collins…

LEITCH: That’s Kelly, by the way.

So let’s talk about getting Taylor Swift in the film. You obviously did this before she entered the zeitgeist in a whole different way. And also, Phil Collins, that choice, and the choice of Kiss.

MCCORMICK: And The Darkness.

You’re right.

LEITCH: Let me start with Kiss in The Darkness really quick. The Kiss song had been in my head since the first draft, and I actually put it in the first draft. Ryan, he made a Kiss playlist. He was into it.

MCCORMICK: He was trying really hard. Emily was like, “What’s up with this Kiss thing?” The studio was like, “Kiss? They’re not a good band.”

LEITCH: Easy, easy!

I was gonna be like, “Wait a minute…”

MCCORMICK: That’s what they thought!

These are fighting words.

LEITCH: They’re a great band.

MCCORMICK: They are a great band. We did hear from the studio that they aren’t that great of a band.

LEITCH: Long story short, what I liked about Kiss was it was a love song, and for me it was equal parts camp and cool. That was sort of what I was thinking of Ryan’s character. You can see he’s frazzled, and he’s this guy who’s in over his head, but also, when he self-actualizes into the hero of the story, he’s cool and he’s full of wish fulfillment. That song to me rocks, by the way…

MCCORMICK: It does rock, okay?

LEITCH: So long story short, they all were like, “I don’t know about Kiss.” There was a moment in the montage with Taylor that I was hoping they would wear Kiss T-shirts, when they’re by the trailers and they were kissing.

MCCORMICK: You should see the number of Kiss T-shirts that we had.

LEITCH: Costume made probably 20 vintage Kiss T-shirts. They were trying them on, and they never chose to wear a Kiss T-shirt the whole time. I was so broken-hearted.

MCCORMICK: It’s true. We all were very mean about it.

LEITCH: And we start to cut the movie together, and the only glue that’s holding this thing together…

MCCORMICK: The only glue.

LEITCH: …is this Kiss track. It opens the movie, it closes the movie — that was working like gangbusters. And then I worked with Dominic Lewis to take the theme from that and deconstruct it and use it as Colt’s theme. So if you watch the movie again, you’ll hear it, or maybe you recognize it. The riff is playing all over the movie. It was the only thing that tonally kind of worked.

MCCORMICK: It’s really true. It makes me feel like David was completely manipulating us the whole time because we all really did go, like, “I don’t know about this Kiss thing.” Then, without it, it plays like three totally different movies, which you can probably tell. There’s the set, then there’s the movie, Metalstorm, and then there’s the investigation. They have very different tones, and without a musical tie-in, in some way, you’re actually kind of jarred into these almost episodic different situations that you go into but you’re not really connected to in the same way. So it truly was the only thing that worked to tie it all together.

LEITCH: I wanna answer The Darkness thing. It was a glam rock. It was a sci-fi epic glam rock. Metalstorm was gonna be inspired by glam rock, so Kiss and The Darkness all made sense for all that stuff. That’s why the costumes were metal and the boots were high. It was a little more glam rock when we first designed the costumes and then the studio made us tone it down. But if you notice the helmets have the star, like Kiss, the alien guys. If you go back and look at it, you’re like, “Oh, I get it.” That was my genius. Kiss was my genius. But the Taylor Swift cue is all Kelly McCormick. On the night, we were actually playing Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” which is a beautiful song that is highly emotional and super cinematic. That was getting Ryan and Emily in the mood, but it was certainly not right. The minute we got into post, Kelly was playing Taylor on a loop, trying to, I think subliminally, tell me this should be the track.

MCCORMICK: For me, I think the love story is super modern. It’s really messy and free and funky, and they’re just kind of chaotic and very beautifully not super set and scheduled and planned like old movie romances are, in my opinion, which I also love. But in our case, we had this kind of free, kind of spazzy, kind of beautiful, messy love story, and because it was so modern, some of these other ideas didn’t really fit, in my opinion. And to me, Taylor’s song is probably the best heartbreak anthem in the last decade, if not longer than that. But for me, it was really a very special song that way. I think, also, the fact that it’s a woman’s voice, and he’s in the car, and she’s out there, I think it really is connected in that way. Then, I think the fact that there is a comedy to it, which is also true for Taylor — Taylor is really hard to put in a movie because her songs are so evocative, and she’s such an incredible storyteller, and you can’t put images on top of that. But because what she’s talking about is so much what they’re feeling, what he’s feeling, and what that moment was… We couldn’t really go anywhere else after we tried it.

The Darkness… David has tried to put The Darkness in every single movie we’ve ever made.

LEITCH: I have.

Related Ryan Gosling Is Crying to Taylor Swift in New ‘The Fall Guy’ Trailer Gosling leads the star-studded project from David Leitch in May of 2024.

What were you gonna do if Taylor said no?

LEITCH: Wow. Ask Uni for more money to pay her. I don’t know. [Laughs] No, it was perfect.

MCCORMICK: I don’t know what we would have done, to be honest. I feel really thankful. She’s really game for that kind of stuff. I didn’t even know. We’ve never approached her before or anything, but yeah, she was really cool about it.

‘The Fall Guy’ Stunts Broke World Records
Image via Universal

Metalstorm allows you to put in any stunt you want because it works for Metalstorm. How did you guys decide what stunts you wanted to just go bat shit crazy and put in this movie, because there was no anchor? It was a free fall.

LEITCH: Totally. I mean, they still had to resonate with Colt’s character, but that being said, we could reverse-engineer it. If you look at the high fall in the beginning and the high fall at the end, they bookend his journey as coming full circle with his trauma. But that being said, we wanted to do old-school stunts and blow them out in a big way. So, we started to make a list of the classics, like high falls, which has sort of gone away. We do high falls with descender rigs and wires and things, but we don’t really fall into airbags that much anymore. We wanted to maybe break a world record, or break some records, so we looked at the car jump and the cannon roll, which are classic stunts, and we wanted to do them practically. The car jump across the crevasse probably would have been done in most movies in visual effects. Cars are easy to make and light, and in those worlds, they look pretty good. But we knew for authenticity we would have to do it for real, and we did. It was awesome and scary and all of that. Then, the cannon roll, which was probably the most amazing stunt we did in the sense that it won a world record, was just a feat by the stunt team. It’s really exciting. It took them four months to test and rehearse. How many times did they test it?

MCCORMICK: Two, and then we shot it, and we screwed it up.

LEITCH: So we flipped the car four times. We did two rehearsals with cars of a similar size, testing the rig on the beach.

MCCORMICK: Then we shot it, and they flipped the car four and a half times, but it went trunk over instead because they were learning that sand is organic and moves a lot with the tides.

Like what they say in the movie.

MCCORMICK: That was what was screwing up their rolls. So then they thought that they could figure it out, and the weather was kind of right, and they kind of knew what the tide was gonna do because they had tested it so many times. Like, “If the tide works the way that we think it’s gonna work, and we think we can do it…” We actually had one extra car, and so the stunt team came to us and was like, “If we could find some time to do this again, we’d really like to try because we think we know what we did wrong.” Our AD, Paul Barry, found some time the very next morning, and we went for it again, and we got the eight-and-a-half rolls, and so then we broke the record. It was pretty crazy.

It was very sweet that the stunt team wanted it so badly. I think that’s one of the things that you can feel coming out of this is that these guys, and the whole team, we’re having moments in a career or making world records that are really hard to do, and you could feel those personal records and the world records happening. The euphoria from that was just so crazy that it really made the whole, I mean, we really like to have a happy set, but it was kind of a crazy happy set.

LEITCH: It was a celebration of stunts, and when your stunt crew is that happy, it was a huge part of the crew. It was amazing.

Related ‘The Fall Guy’ Has Three Stunts That Just Aren’t Done on Movie Sets Anymore Director David Leitch & producer Kelly McCormick detail the epic practical stunts performed in the movie & more.

When everyone found out you were making a movie like this that’s celebrating the stunt world, did you all of a sudden get a lot of people saying, “David, I need to be in this? Kelly, let’s talk?”

MCCORMICK: There were a lot of people who wanted to be in it, for sure, from the stunt community, but we were in Australia so we couldn’t bring too many, to be honest. Specialists, for sure. That’s what we had to prioritize, and then a giant group from Australia that David had worked with on Wolverine and The Matrix and lots of other pictures.

LEITCH: I had a huge stunt family that I knew. What’s been great about my career is that I’ve worked all over the world. And again, I love telling stories in this world because being on a movie set, it’s like you’re in the carnival for six months, and you become really close to these people. So when you leave and come back three years later, it’s like you never left. It’s like that type of brother/sisterhood. So the stunt community in Australia I’ve worked with on several films, and they’re great. I mean, look at the movies they’ve done down there — The Matrix, Mad Max, Wolverine. They’re doing huge Hollywood films, and the stunt performers are great, and it was great to reconnect with a lot of them.

Which is the stunt that you guys came really close to putting in this movie that, for whatever reason, you couldn’t do?

MCCORMICK: We can’t tell you that, Steve. That’s for The Fall Guy 2.

LEITCH: We gotta keep that a secret. The Fall Guy 2 — I like that.

What Is David Leitch Directing Next?
Image by Jefferson Chacon

You’ve been promoting this for a little while. How close are you to picking the next thing you’re going to do? You guys get offered scripts, and on top of that, there are sequel opportunities. There’s a whole bunch of stuff.

MCCORMICK: You want to pick a movie that continues the story of David’s career, and we want to continue to do something different every time, which you have but in the action space. It’s actually really hard.

LEITCH: I think you hit it. Wanting to do something different every time, I think, and finding something that feels challenging and original for you. Here’s the problem — opportunity, it’s not a problem — I directed second unit for so many years that I can find my way into a lot of material. I really can. You didn’t have a choice when you’re a second unit director, you just wanted the job. So it’s like, “I got a job. Oh my god, now I have to understand this movie, and I gotta look at that, and I gotta give my point of view on the action.” And so when I get a script, usually I’m already interpreting it when I’m reading it, like, “Oh, I could find my way into this. But is it right for me to direct this? Do I want to spend two years of my life on it? I don’t know.” So sometimes I have to let go of that legacy of my experience of that part of my job.

I love movies so much, and I could jump into a movie and want to tell that story and figure out my way in, but I want to find things like this and like Bullet Train. The movies that we’ve made feel like a great expression of us as artists, and we made some good choices that allowed us to really shine. And so I’m not sure. We’re getting close, very close, and you’re going to get the first call. [Laughs]

I commend Donna Langley at Universal because the slate she puts forward is very, very original. I’m very impressed with what she does, and I believe you guys have a deal over there. I’m sure she’s saying to you, “Is there an IP at the studio that you’d like to play with?” But she also might be saying, “You can do something original because that’s what we do.”

MCCORMICK: You’re right. Donna is amazing. She runs an incredible company, quite honestly, and we feel very lucky to be there. I think they’re torn, to be honest. We see all of their IP, and at the same time, they’re always like, “It’s really hard for us to think that you might go into this IP because you are some of the few who can do originals and at a few different levels.” A lot of our projects are 30 and under. We’ve got With Love with Ke Huy Quan going on right now in Winnipeg, and we’ll do a Nobody 2, and we’ll do a Violent Night 2. Those are like their action version of what they do with [Jason] Blum. They’re really, really important for the studio because they’re easier and they’re cheaper to just roll and move. They’re important to us because we wanna make more action stars as we go.

As far as what David goes into, we do have our pick. As you know, we did flirt with Jurassic because we could find our way into that for the right reasons and the right ways. And to make his version of that could be really exciting, so long as it also matched Steven [Spielberg’s] and so long as we had time and money enough to do it. There’s those kinds of things to think about along the way, as well. But it is a great studio and we feel very lucky to be there.

AUDIENCE: What’s your favorite stunt you’ve ever done?

LEITCH: Wow. There’s actually a stunt with me in the movie, which is in the opening clips, and it’s when I doubled Matt [Damon] on The Bourne Ultimatum. It inspired the moment of Colt showing up the first day and walking and having to get in the car and roll it. That’s what happened to me on the set of Bourne. I show up, literally off the plane, driven to set, and they’re like, “Here’s what’s gonna happen. This car in front of you is going to explode.” “Oh, awesome.” “You’re capped to this wire, and we’re gonna pull this pin and all this weight’s gonna drop, and it’s gonna pull you into this car.” And I’m like, “Awesome. I can’t wait.” I’m jet lagged. I just showed up. So that’s actually in the opening montage, and it’s a fun stunt, actually. I mean, it’s not fun but it’s fun. So that’s probably one of many. I’ve done a lot of fun things, but that one is sort of related to the movie and that’s a memorable moment, which is why I put it in there.

Are there any other musical inspirations that you’ve taken for any other films that you have?

MCCORMICK: Well, Atomic Blonde, David had a playlist before we started.

LEITCH: And a lot of it I wrote into the script, like when we did our director’s tests. We played it on set and we knew the songs, probably like nine of the 12 tracks.

MCCORMICK: Well, we didn’t know because we were making the film independently. Normally, when you make an independent film and then you show it to a studio, you shouldn’t be showing the needle drops if they’re not something you can afford. We had saved some money, like to cover $300,000 at the time, and the soundtrack was a million dollars. I was working for a guy at the time, and I was producing it for that guy, and I was like, “Can you please just let it fly that we put all the needle drops in, and if they don’t go for it then we’ll take them out? But if they do it really ties it all together.” [Laughs] And he let me screen it with them in, and Universal went for that $700,000 more. So, that was a pretty crazy story.

But also on Bullet Train, that was supposed to be a ton of needle drops, and what ended up happening is Dominic Lewis, our composer, just started composing before we even were in production. It just was such compelling music, and just really took you away that we started playing it on set. Then it just kind of took over for all the needle drops that were planned, which is pretty cool.

In the end, there are Lee Majors and Heather Thomas cameos. Can you talk more about that?

LEITCH: We felt we couldn’t end this movie without paying respect to the OG. We called him early on in production and asked. We were already shooting.

MCCORMICK: We were worried because he’s, like, 80-something and we were in Australia, and we didn’t know if he would fly over, or where he was at in the world, and health-wise, and just desire to travel.

LEITCH: Oh my god, he’s like, “Yes! I’m on it. I’ll be there. Where do you need me?”

MCCORMICK: He’s so game.

LEITCH: He was so into it.

MCCORMICK: He made a bet with David.

LEITCH: He did make a bet with me, and I owe him $1,000, so you can print that. We shot another scene in the movie — it was a quick scene with him and Heather in the car — and when Ryan is surfing on the bridge, they pass a car and then they react, and they’re like, “Oh, I couldn’ve done that.” It was some joke, like, “That looks a lot like me.” There were a bunch of risks we took, and none of them really felt totally right in the movie because the stakes were too high, so we just kept with the coda. But he was filming it the whole time. He was like, “You’re never gonna use this. I bet you $1,000 you’re not gonna use this.”

The Fall Guy is in theaters now. Click below for showtimes.

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