Legendary stuntman/action director Vic Armstrong (pictured on the left of Harrison Ford in the photo on the left) recently talked to Movieline about his memoir
The True Adventures of the World’s Greatest Stuntman: My Life as Indiana Jones, James Bond, Superman and Other Movie Heroes. While they discussed almost everything he has seen and done in his storied career, it was what was said on the topic of
The Amazing Spider-Man that caught my attention.
From Movieline...
You just completed some directing on Spider-Man, and you admit in your book you weren’t a big fan of the preceding Spider-Man trilogy. What makes the new film different and, hopefully, an improvement?
I think the trilogy up until now was starting to lean far too heavily on CGI for the flying and the action and everything else. It was starting to get away from… it’s silly to say “realism” of Spider-Man, because what kind of a man can stick on to a wall and spin spider’s webs? But, there’s a certain amount of reality to it, like there is with Indiana Jones and like there is with Bond. And I just felt like it was getting a little too CGI. My brother Andy and I — we work together all the time; he’s a stunt coordinator and director as well — we’ve been working very, very hard to work out the flying process. We’ve gone back to the basics — more basic flying. You see Spider-Man flying for real, and I think it gives the movie a whole new grounding really. It is more grounded than the others were.
Andrew Garfield is a very good actor — he is very much in the Daniel Day-Lewis method of getting totally into it, so we’ve integrated him into as much of the flying as we could, and as much of the action, the poses and the body movement. So you’ve got all of these really organic movements. When you see somebody flying for real, it’s far different than a CG one. You see the G-force come on as they change directions, and their arms straighten out, and then their legs flex, and then they pick up and swing again. It’s got this whole rhythm to it.
How game was Andrew Garfield to do his own stunts? Could you break it down to a percentage of what’s him versus a double?
Andrew’s very, very game. We’ve done a lot of different actions on this — some that he’s not capable of doing. We’ve had to have specialists for movement — for parkour and various things that we’ve been doing. But Andrew is 100 percent game, and if he’s not shooting on the main unit, he’ll be on my unit. Even if he’s not called! He’ll be on my unit looking at what we’re doing. We discuss it, and we talk about the Spider-Man poses and thing. Percentage-wise, I’d say it’s probably 60 or 70 percent of Andrew in the movie in the action moments.
Hawksblueyes: There is much, much more to this interview. Click on the link below to read it in it's entirety at Movieline.
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