The Fall Guy’s loving tribute to the film crews behind the scenes
The film is executed so superbly that it’s elevated above its silly premise. Plus, the cast with more chemistry than Christopher Nolan’s latest Oscar winner.
The Fall Guy is the dumbest smart film of the year. Dumb because it is, after all, a reboot of the schlocky 1980s Lee Majors prime-time action television show about a stuntman turned bounty hunter, and it’s filled with pyrotechnics and jaw-dropping jet ski stunts and never tries to be anything it isn’t.
It’s smart because it’s executed with such precision and love that it’s elevated above its silly premise. It has a winning script, ingenious visual hooks and a cast with more chemistry than Christopher Nolan’s latest Oscar winner.
It tells the story of Colt Seavers, a stunt master played with gusto by Ryan Gosling. Seavers is sidelined after an on-set injury damages his back and derails his confidence. When we meet him, he’s hiding out in Los Angeles and working as a valet (where the first of many delectable car burnout scenes takes place) for a Mexican restaurant.
Seavers is called back to Hollywood by a big-gun producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), to work on the Australian shoot of Metalstorm, a Comic-Con-leaning sci-fi flick that cheekily pokes fun at two of Universal Studios’ big-budget offerings of this year: Dune and Mad Max. He is reluctant, but swayed when Meyer mentions that the film’s director is Seavers’ former flame, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), who wants him on board.
There’s a problem, though; the film’s star, Tom Ryder (a wink to Tom Cruise), has gone missing. Ryder (played by British actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who is rumoured to be the next James Bond) is an egomaniac and a liability. It’s as much Seavers’ job to track him down as it is to execute stuntman derring-do.
The Fall Guy is directed by David Leitch, the filmmaker best known for Bullet Train and his work on the blockbuster John Wick franchise. Before he made films, Leitch was a stuntman – his first job was on Baywatch, and he would go on to become a body double for his future collaborator, Brad Pitt, in Fight Club.
Leitch pulls off a tricky balancing act with this film, which pokes fun at and celebrates show business. “It’s a love letter to the people behind the scenes that make movies and how much they love it,” Leitch says from a hotel suite soaked with Sydney sunshine, hours before the film’s premiere at the State Theatre. “We were just having fun making fun of our lives.
“Hollywood truth is stranger than fiction. We all have these anecdotes from inside the business because we’ve spent so many years of our lives on set. Anyone who works in the movies loves making movies. They love it or they wouldn’t subject themselves to the crazy that it is.”
It is an interesting time for a film such as The Fall Guy to come out. The Hollywood machine has returned to its full, glitzy glory and the prolonged succession of awards ceremonies has rendered the five-month labour strikes a distant memory for most of us. But not for Kelly McCormick, producer of The Fall Guy, and Leitch’s wife.
“It’s the perfect time to have a movie about the making of a film, with the strikes that affected the whole world,” she says, explaining that at its core this is a film about labour and “the struggles that a lot of people have all over the world”.
“We’re coming in through this story of a guy who is a stunt performer, whose whole job is basically to risk his life and never be seen,” she says.
Though the film was finished before the strikes, Leitch says it’s more poignant now.
“We’re shining a light on the crew; they’re the heroes in this story. It has a little bit more resonance.”
He says they wanted to make sure there was no cynicism in the film because there isn’t any in the movie business, “from the blue-collar workers that are making it, I mean”, he quickly clarifies.
So why choose to shoot The Fall Guy, which famously shut down the Sydney Harbour Bridge at 5am on a Sunday in January last year? For starters, “there’s great film incentives here”, Leitch says.
Universal was paid $30m by Australian governments to bring the film here and a reported $14.4m by the NSW government to ensure it would shoot in Sydney, not Brisbane or Melbourne. Add in the appeal of working with an Australian crew with whom Leitch and McCormick were well acquainted, having worked here before on The Matrix and Wolverine. “We have such a history with Sydney … You come to Sydney because you know the crew and they’re so good.”
And, as McCormick says, it served the plot. “The truth is, if you live in LA and you’re in the film business, you never actually make movies in LA. So the idea that Colt Seavers had to go someplace else for the movie made a lot of sense.”
For years, Leitch and McCormick have gone to bat for stunt workers, relentlessly campaigning for there to be a category at the Academy Awards that recognises their work. Yet McCormick previously has said she and her husband do not make the kind of films that awards institutions recognise. Does that grate on them?
“It’s a complicated thing, right? Because we’re making art, but it happens to be commercial. And because it’s commercial, sometimes it’s not allowed to be appreciated in the same way that art house films are lauded, ” McCormick says.
“We are proud of what we make. We are proud that they are super commercial films. We want to entertain people throughout the world, and if it’s not recognised in some kind of awards forum, it’s OK, we don’t have to be everything for everybody.
“But I do think that our films are amazing, and I do think they should at least have a chance.”
Ahead of speaking with Leitch and McCormick, The Australian jumped on a Zoom call from Los Angeles with two of the film’s cast, Waddingham and Stephanie Hsu. They were to take part in a press junket day for the film and were glammed to the max but swaddled in fluffy white hotel robes.
Oscar-nominated Hsu, 33, who broke out in the A24 mind-melter Everything Everywhere All at Once, plays Tom Ryder’s put-upon personal assistant in The Fall Guy, while Waddingham, 49, essentially plays a version of her rock-hard character in Ted Lasso but without the redemption arc and with the evilness turned way up.
Waddingham’s character is, as Hsu puts it, “an exaggerated and way too realistic of a big-time Hollywood producer”. Waddingham chimes in: “There’s too many of them around.”
Hsu and Waddingham are from the same stock: before they became overnight celebrities, each spent years slogging it out in musical theatre. Was this something they bonded over?
“I think you can kind of feel it off each other,” says Waddingham.
Feel what, exactly? “You have an immediate shorthand and you’re from a similar tribe. Because you’ve done all that grafting.
“People that have come from stage life … none of this is lost on us, you know, the privilege of what we’re doing.”
They agree this was a film where there were “no egos on set”. “It was totally palpable, playful, just, digging the living shit out of each other,” Waddingham says.
Hsu chalks up that environment to Leitch and McCormick but also, crucially, to Gosling. “He is such an incredible team player and that sets the tone for everybody who comes on set.”
“It has to come from the top and filter down,” Waddingham adds. “These are big-time, proper movie stars, but when you’re on set there wasn’t an actor that came first. There was no starriness, no ‘I’m a superstar, stay away from me’. It was getting into the meat and the potatoes of the words, and that’s why the jokes land because everyone has been given a moment to show their comedy chops.
“I think people will love it and not see it as just a blokey movie. Because there is a ball bouncing so beautifully between every cast member and everyone picks it up and gives it a good flippin’ chew.”
The Fall Guy is in cinemas now.
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