VicArmstrong

Oh yes, you're bound to get bumps and bruises. I've had a lot of injuries over the years, but I think in other sports you get hurt a lot more. We take a lot of care rehearsing to minimize that. I've broken a shin bone, a shoulder, a couple of ribs and an arm, but that's over many years over the course of my career. The worst things are sprains in ligaments, not broken bones. I had a horse fall on me in the 1970's in Morocco, which was dramatic because in the 1970's Morocco was not the best place to go for surgery, but I had a great surgeon who did a great job. I was a young man in those days, and Morocco was a different country.

They are completely alien to what I do. I have full admiration for them, but some of their stunts are just crazy. My work is film work and editing stunts together and creating abnormal, amazing stunts and situations, whereas on the Johnny Knoxville things it's more trying to do it for real and survive, which is completely alien to our approach. I have admiration for them, but I worry they aren't going to have long careers physically as they will get broken up so quickly.

They were WONDERFUL, I must say. In the early days, we were all young people. Everybody is very collaborative, we are inventing new ways of doing things. Indiana Jones was tremendous to work on. Nobody knew it was going to be such a huge film or a successful film, but by the time we got to Last Crusade, we knew what we had to achieve. We had a great sense of confidence going into the film. I have so much admiration for those guys, their brains are incredible.

It all depends on the situation you are in. I've had some wonderful times in Thailand, I've done 14 films there, i think. Some beautiful places there. I did On Her Majesty's Secret Service in Switzerland, I skied every day to and from work. I had some wonderful times in Manzanillo, where they shot "10", that was FANTASTIC - the pina coladas, the fruit, the sun and the sea. So many wonderful places around the world. It also depends on how the crew is, how the film is going, but there are so many great places. I went to South America for The Mission. I would like to go further to the South Seas, that's next on my list.

I was up in Alaska, years ago, on Bear Island, with Donald Sutherland and a lot of actors - Lloyd Bridges and Vanessa Redgrave - and we were working on a glacier, and I just skied to the edge of the glacier, and I looked over, and turned around to ski back and I saw a hole in the snow i just skied over - and we were very worried about the glacier crevasses - and I crept forward and looked in this hole, and it was as big as a cathedral down below, just an ice bridge over it that was only about a foot thick, you'd be gone if you fell down it, so we went back and RACED over it and got out of it.

I've been up in Alaska again when we landed up on top of the movie to test out a machine for a movie, and suddenly a storm came in, and suddenly our helicopter wouldn't start, and obviously we couldn't go anywhere, we were there for nearly 3.5 days with no food, no communication, and luckily someone spotted us with radar during the storm. We've had precarious moments, but flying around with helicopters around Thailand, we've had near misses where the engines stall out or you nearly crash. When you're living in the jungle in South America on the Mission - you're on the edge of a waterfall, you're one step away from disaster.

Obviously it's difficult when you go to some countries. Depending on the size of your film, you normally have permissions, but I've worked in Iraq in late 70's or early 80's, I've worked in Lybia in the early 80's, so there are going to be culture clashes. Some people object to filming in their cities, mainly because they're not the ones getting paid, their neighbors are getting paid...

So SO SO many. Every stunt is intricate! Even Jack Ryan - the fight in the bathroom lasts 2, 3 minutes, but we had weeks of rehearsal - even when he smashes his head on the bidet, it's probably 2 weeks of rehearsal to get the right texture for the ceramic of the bidet so when he hits it it doesn't crumble like eggshell but not smash his face - then we have to figure out what causes the fall - every fight is very very intricate, none more than others. Or the boat chase on Die Another Day, a boat going through London on the Thames, one of the busiest rivers in the world - or the chase in Iceland, where we did the chase across the ice - we had to drill the ice to make sure it was thick enough, we had to make all the cars all Four Wheel Drive, which cost 1.7 million dollars (1 million pounds), all stunts are very very intricate, but you have to have confidence and make it work. Imagine if we'd spend $1.7 million dollars and the chase had looked like nothing- that's where the pressure is, you have to deliver the goods in addition to the intricate planning.

I think the jump act in Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade was really amazing - there was a lot of difficulty in teaching a horse to run straight against the side of the cliff, for example, and the distance I had to jump and trust the horse to not duck out from under me in case I didn't make my jump. But they're all very difficult, I did a 100 foot fall into an air bag in The Final Conflict, that was quite exciting. I invented a piece of equipment called a fan descender - I jumped off a 400 foot building, and it lowers you at a given speed, it's a piece of equipment that I designed so you don't have to do a free fall, that way you could come down at any speed over any height, and I got an Academy of Science & technology award as a result. When you're first given a problem, it's quite a challenge to come up with a solution that will work very well.