A “high fall” is when you jump off a building that’s at least 10 storeys.
“You’re usually into an airbag,” says Kent, who produced an award-winning series on stunts called Stunt Dawgs in 2006.
“The trick is to get your landing right and not to go in feet first or head first, because they can result in a broken neck or a torn spinal cord. I know people who have done that, unfortunately. You go in flat on your back or [do] an ‘over’, where you go head down and at the last second you flip your legs over and go in on your back.”
“The old school method is box catchers. You use a big square cardboard box, three foot by three foot, they stack those one on top of the other, then stretch a tarp over top of all that.
“That’s old school. Sometimes if you’re out somewhere where you don’t have access to electricity and can’t use an airbag, box catchers are your only method.”
On the Schwarzenegger movie The Last Action Hero, Kent fell 18 storeys using a third method, a wire.
“It’s a free fall, but you have a wire on your back,” he says.
“The wire slows you down, so as you come closer to the ground the speed wicks off until you just touch down. But for the first 15 or 16 floors you’re in a free fall, right at the concrete.
“The luxury of that shot is you can look over the person who is falling’s shoulder and see the ground, there’s no airbag to give it away. They remove the wire on computer. It’s a pretty good rush. Especially knowing that if the cable breaks there’s nothing to stop you, it’s just splat, right to the pavement.”
A “stair fall” is when you go ass over tea kettle down some stairs.
“The trick is to try and keep your chin tucked in to your chest,” he says.
“If the director wants you to go head first straight down the stairs, that’s what you do. Otherwise, you ride the walls, like back and forth between the walls to take some of your speed off.”
A solo stair fall is completely different than doing one with another stuntman.
“The thing is, you want to get on top of them and ride them all the way down the stairs,” he chuckles.
“That’s why when you see a couple falling down a flight of stairs, it looks hairball as hell, because each guy is struggling to get on top of the other guy to ride him down the stairs, to take the worst of the beating.”
He laughs, but doing stunts can be painful.
“You’ve got to give credit to the stunt women,” he says.
“A lot of times the guys are wearing pads and stuff under their pants. [But] then you’ll get a woman in a skimpy dress doing a stair fall, and you can’t hide anything under that. I give kudos to a lot of the [stunt] women out there, because many times they take way more of a beating than the men do. ‘We want you to do this in a frigging negligee.’ ‘Okay.’”
Going through glass can also be tricky.
“They break [the glass] with what’s called a squib,” he relates.
“At the second of impact, a little charge goes off and smashes the glass. Back when I was in great shape, I had to do a Baywatch episode where I went out a set of plate glass patio windows onto the deck of a house in Malibu, landing in the glass, in my underwear.
“That cut me up pretty good – it’s not fake glass, it’s real glass. I landed in all these glass particles and sliced the hell out of my back.”
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