Airbags are fine. However, in the case of a fall from a height, a stack of cardboard boxes may be all that is needed to land safely.
That’s one of the takeaways from the Roundtop Film Festival’s “From the Jump: Film and TV Stunt Designers in Conversation” panel held Nov. 9 in Roundtop, Texas, which featured veteran stunt coordinators and second unit directors Chris O’Hara, winner of the festival’s Maverick Stunt Award, and Vic Armstrong, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award.
“If he comes off the deck and lands in an alley, you can shove a cardboard box in a little corner there,” Armstrong said. “It has an airbag, but it won’t fit in there.”
“If you hit the edge of the airbag, that’s not good. … You’re going to fall right to the ground,” O’Hara added. “If you set up the box correctly, you can hit the edges of the box, but it still slows down the fall and allows it to do what it’s supposed to do. … A general rule of thumb is one 2-foot by 2-foot box is good for a 10-foot (height).”
Also appearing on the panel were Nate Boyer (former Green Beret, NFL player turned film director), Shane Haberstad (stuntman, stunt coordinator, second unit director), Crystal Fuchs (motorsports expert, precision driver), Noel Therese Mulligan (stuntman), and Tom Struthers (stunt coordinator, second unit director). The show was hosted by Variety Editor Todd Longwell.
Prior to the panel discussion, O’Hara was presented with the Maverick Stunt Award by Variety magazine. The 25-year industry veteran won the Taurus World Stunt Award for Best Second Unit Director/Stunt Coordinator for his work on 2024’s The Fall Guy, an action comedy about a stuntman (Ryan Gosling) searching for a missing movie star. The presentation was given by last year’s Maverick Stunt Award winner RJ Casey (“Inception”, “Dunkirk”, “Extraction 2”).
“‘The Fall Guy’ just nailed it,” Casey enthuses. “It’s one of those movies where you can’t stop watching it, you can’t wait for the next sequence, the next stunt. …Everything about that movie was magical.”
He went on to praise O’Hara for helping to create a new Academy Award for stunt design that debuts in 2028, saying, “Thanks to generations of stuntmen, we finally have a stunt at the Oscars. And here we are, the last one to put the ball in the end zone.”
In “Fall Guys,” O’Hara and his stunt team broke the Guinness World Record with stunt driver Logan Holladay’s eight-and-a-half car roll, double Gosling’s. This surpassed Adam Curley’s record of 7 rolls in “Casino Royale.”
“Personally, I didn’t go into this business to break world records. That’s not my goal,” O’Hara said, noting that the number of rolls is written into the script. “I said, ‘If we can accomplish that, that would be great.’ But I think in Bondo we had the terrain that helped that and gave us some roll. It was downhill, so it gave us more energy to keep going. We had to do it on flat (ground) sand, so I wasn’t sure if we could accomplish it. … We did two tests on the beach, and we shot one. It didn’t go as planned. Everyone was fine, but it wasn’t the effect we were looking for, so we had a chance to get a different effect. So the final scene that you see in the movie was everything coming together.”
This stunt is a “cannon roll” and uses an ignition device, in this case a pneumatic device mounted under the chassis, usually near the rear axle. When triggered, it fires into the ground and flips the vehicle. According to O’Hara, the stunt’s beach setting is a subtle recreation of the first on-screen cannon roll performed by driver Gary McLarty during the climactic beach chase scene in the 1974 cop film Mack Q, starring John Wayne.
The cannon roll was developed for “McQ” by stunt coordinator Hal Needham (who directed his first meta-stunt film in 1978’s “Hooper” starring Burt Reynolds) and stuntman Ronnie Rondell. This is a modification of the less flashy ramp flip, in which a vehicle is rolled onto a hidden angled ramp, a technique used since the early days of cinema.
Armstrong, a Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, is a 60-year stunt veteran whose credits include Christopher Reeve in Superman (1978) and Harrison in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In addition to acting as Ford’s double, he has also appeared as a second-unit director on numerous films, including the James Bond film trilogy, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and The World Is Not. ‘Enough’ (1999) and ‘Die Another Day’ (2002). He also contributed to the advancement of stunt technology, winning the Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1986 for his fan descender, a device that uses air resistance to control the high-speed descent of stunt performers.
Many of the new technologies being used in the field of stunts in recent years have come from visual effects artists, who use CGI to extinguish safety wires, composite dangerous elements like fireballs, and sometimes construct action sequences almost entirely from digital cloth.
“I have a love-hate relationship with visual effects,” Armstrong said. “I always think of it like morphine. The right dose of morphine for the right disease is a godsend. When used and abused, it’s a killer. And I feel the same way about visual effects. When used the right way, it’s amazing.”
Struthers agreed, but noted that while he sometimes objected to the heavy use of CGI, there were some stunts where it would have been wise to have more help from the visual effects department, most notably an aerial sequence in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises in which stuntmen entered and exited a plane flying at 6,500 feet.
“If I was given that opportunity again, I would probably do a lot of it digitally, because there’s an element of danger with four people jumping out of the back of a C-130 aircraft at 120 knots,” he said. “I don’t want to have the same heart attack that I had.”
It is impossible to discuss the entertainment industry in 2025 without mentioning AI. Many believe this is the digital bogeyman that marks the end of an era, but when the topic was brought up at the stunt panel, the reaction was surprisingly optimistic.
“At some point, there’s no reason to run someone over with a car,” said Haberstad, a second-generation stunt professional. Haberstad says in his biography that he got the idea on a movie set. “There’s already very little reason to do certain stunts where a person could get hurt. You have to do something very specific. And if at some point a computer can do it better and you don’t have to ask a friend to stand in front of your car, I don’t think you’re going to do it.”
Variety hosted this conversation in partnership with Round Top Film Festival.
