10 stunts that deserved to win an Oscar
In recent years, there has been a concerted effort from many in Hollywood to push for a ‘Best Stunt’ category to be added to the Academy Awards. It makes perfect sense, too. Since exciting action and death-defying acts have been an important part of cinema from its earliest days, it’s strange that such a category doesn’t already exist.
Throughout film history, countless amazing stunts performed by dedicated professionals have wowed audiences worldwide. It’s almost too big a subject to narrow down to ten that would have won at an imaginary Oscar ceremony, though, so we’ve had to set some ground rules.
Firstly, this list will focus predominantly on films from the ’70s onwards, but that doesn’t mean the contributions of pioneers like Buster Keaton have escaped our notice. Secondly, this list will only feature Hollywood films, so stunt icons like Jackie Chan have been left off. People like Chan arguably deserve their own separate list.
Thirdly, only one stunt from the Mission: Impossible franchise has been permitted. Finally, don’t expect Keanu Reeves and John Wick to make the list, as Reeves himself has said he doesn’t do “stunts” as that avenging assassin. Instead, he executes fights and trains for gunplay, which are both in a different categories altogether.
Stunts that deserved to win an Oscar:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt – Rotating hallway fight – Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
At first blush, most audiences would probably assume some level of CGI was used to put together the trippy rotating hallway fight in Christopher Nolan‘s Inception. Those audiences would be wrong, though, because the sequence was actually achieved by building a 100-foot-long hotel corridor that was placed on a motor-powered gimble 20 feet off the ground. Seriously – the entire hallway rotated 360 degrees.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a stuntman entered this spinning set. It was a physical challenge, unlike anything the star had ever attempted before. He trained for weeks to learn the complicated fight choreography but also needed time to adjust to the rotating set. Basically, he didn’t want to throw up while running and fighting on the floor, walls, and roof of what was described as a “giant hamster wheel.”
Nolan told the Los Angeles Times, “It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for weeks. But in the end, we looked at the footage, and it looks unlike anything any of us has seen before. The rhythm of it is unique, and when you watch it, even if you know how it was done, it confuses your perceptions.” If that isn’t worthy of a fake stunt Oscar, I don’t know what is.
Wayne Michaels – Contra Dam bungee jump – GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995)
Sky Movies customers voted this stunt the greatest of all time in 2002, and it’s easy to see why. During the opening scene of Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond film GoldenEye, everyone’s favourite martini-drinking spy bungee jumps off a hydroelectric dam. The plunge is stunning because it looks too outrageously high for any sane human to have attempted it.
Stuntman Wayne Michaels was just the right mix of insane and technically proficient, though. He scored a new world record for the highest bungee jump from a fixed object when he shot the stunt, filmed at the Locarno dam on the border of Switzerland and Italy.
Michaels revealed, “It’s pushing the limits of what can physically be done. The loading on the ropes is extreme and the body is travelling at such a high rate of speed that it puts a great deal of strain on you. You’re trying desperately to hit a pocket of air that will take you away from the wall, and the winds that are whipping around the bowl of the dam toss you like a leaf.”
Tom Cruise – Climbing the Burj Khalifa – Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)
This list could be comprised entirely of moments from the Mission: Impossible franchise, as there are so many times Tom Cruise acted like an insane madman for the pleasure of cinema audiences. There was the time he hung off the side of a plane as it took off, the time he rode a motorbike off a cliff and the time he learned how to fly a helicopter so that he could perform a corkscrew dive better than most stunt pilots.
The single best stunt in the entire series, though, came in the fourth entry, Ghost Protocol. In arguably the most vertigo-inducing scene ever filmed, Cruise climbed outside the world’s tallest building – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – with only a few wires and the hopes of a terrified cast and crew keeping him from plummeting to his doom.
Watching the sequence in a cinema is genuinely awe-inspiring, and when the camera swoops out of the building and shows the audience just how high up Cruise is, it’s enough to make you lose your lunch. IMAX cameras were used for the scene, and director Brad Bird told IndieWire, “In the long shots, we could not only see the traffic in the reflections when he presses down on the glass, but you actually saw the glass warp slightly because of the pressure of his hand.”
David Leitch – Window Jump – The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007)
There’s a moment in this pulse-pounding scene in The Bourne Ultimatum where you simultaneously fist pump the air in triumph but then immediately think, “Wait, did that mean the cameraman did that stunt, too?”
The scene in question is the incredible chase over the rooftops and through the apartments of Tangier. It crescendos with Matt Damon’s amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne jumping from the window of one apartment building and through a window of the neighbouring building. The stunt was performed by David Leitch, a man familiar to action audiences now as the director of movies like John Wick, The Fall Guy, and Bullet Train.
The entire sequence is shot with director Paul Greengrass’ trademark kinetic, shaky camera style, and when Bourne leaps, it’s truly a “hold your breath” moment. It’s only after you watch it that you consider the fact that a camera operator also made the jump behind Leitch, as the camera doesn’t stay static on a rooftop watching events. Instead, it hurtles through the air after Bourne. Great stuff.
Jim Wilkey – Lorry flip – The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
Given that audiences have literally seen Thanos throwing a moon at Iron Man in Avengers: Infinity War, you could be forgiven for thinking the sheer universal scale of most superhero movies would have rendered more realistic stunts boring to most modern audiences. Thankfully, that isn’t the case, and this stunning stunt from The Dark Knight is proof of that.
In the middle of the movie’s showpiece action sequence, The Joker drives an enormous 18-wheel lorry, which flips over and comes smashing to a stop on Gotham’s streets. Flipping a vehicle of that size without the aid of CGI had never been done before, and special effects supervisor Chris Corbould wasn’t sure it could be accomplished. Ultimately, though, his team crafted a TNT-triggered piston which would propel the back end of the lorry into the air at the push of a button.
Jim Wilkey, the stunt driver tasked with performing the insanely dangerous manoeuvre, actually triggered the piston himself and then hoped for the best while belted into the steel-reinforced cab. Wilkey emerged unhurt after performing the stunt twice, and stunt coordinator Paul Jennings couldn’t get over how cool as a cucumber the old-school stuntman was about the whole endeavour. As long as he had his chewing tobacco and knew when to push that button, Wilkey was golden.
Terry Leonard – Truck drag – Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
The truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a sequence that leaves action fans vibrating with excitement because of its sheer entertainment value. However, it also contains one of the most impressive stunts ever put to film, and it would’ve certainly been awarded a stunt Academy Award if such a thing existed.
At one point in the chase, Indiana Jones is thrown through the windshield of a speeding truck. Instead of falling to his death, though, he somehow manages to crawl underneath the truck before hanging on for dear life to his whip while he’s dragged along the ground. Eventually, our hero makes it back into the truck and hurls the driver out the front windshield.
It’s mind-boggling to describe, let alone execute, but stuntman Terry Leonard managed to pull off the impossible. The production dug a trench in the road underneath the truck to give Leonard extra clearance to pull himself along the bottom of the vehicle, and if you’re an eagle-eyed viewer, you can probably spy it on your next watch. But who’d want to ruin the fun by looking for that?
Zoë Bell – Clinging to the car bonnet – Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
Zoë Bell was Uma Thurman’s stunt double on Kill Bill, and she impressed Quentin Tarantino so much that he wrote a substantial part for her in his grindhouse slasher homage Death Proof. The film is best remembered for the anxiety-inducing car chase in which Bell finds herself sliding around on the bonnet of a 1971 Dodge Challenger as it hurtles down the road at 90 miles per hour.
Amazingly, though, Bell claims she was more scared of trying to act than she was of the stunt. In 2013, she told IndieWire, “The car stuff we do as stunt people. I feel like the more comfortable you are with something, the more terrifying you can make it look or the more painful you can make it appear.”
Of the sequence, in which Bell only had two belts strapped to the doors to keep herself from flying off the car, she told RogerEbert.com, “There’s no double, there’s no CGI, it’s all practical, and you’re seeing that the person crying is the same one falling off the car. I think, on some deep, subconscious level, it triggers as ‘real’ to the people watching.”
Simon Crane – Plane transfer – Cliffhanger (Renny Harlin, 1993)
If someone offered you $1 million to zipline between two planes flying at 15,000 feet, would you do it? This was the exact dilemma posed to British stunt maestro Simon Crane by the people behind Cliffhanger, the superbly silly 1993 Sly Stallone vehicle.
Amazingly, the stunt was deemed so dangerous that the film’s insurance company refused to cover it. In addition, it was illegal to perform it in Europe, so the production had to do it in the US. $1m was Crane’s price to risk life and limb for the stunt, and Stallone reportedly cut his own salary by that exact amount to facilitate it. It was enough to make the stunt the Guinness World Record holder for the most expensive aerial stunt.
Ultimately, it was money well spent because the sequence is truly astonishing and would be a shoo-in for our imaginary Oscar. It was every bit as dangerous as everyone feared, too, with Crane almost meeting a sticky end when he found himself only six feet away from the engine’s propellers after bouncing off the door of the second plane. Yikes.
Burt Reynolds – Waterfall dive – Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)
Burt Reynolds was the Tom Cruise of his day – a star so insistent on performing his own stunts that people began to fear for his safety. Unlike Cruise, though, the people around Reynolds had even more reason for worrying about him. You see, he got hurt a lot while performing stunts, such as when he developed a hernia shooting a fight scene in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and when he was struck square in the face with a metal chair on City Heat. That one left him on a liquid diet and with a crippling painkiller addiction.
Reynolds’ most famous stunt came in John Boorman’s harrowing thriller Deliverance. Boorman shot a scene of a canoe going over a waterfall with a Reynolds-esque dummy inside, but Reynolds wasn’t having it. He insisted the scene be shot again with him in the canoe for real. All attempts to talk him out of the idea were futile, and he bravely went over the side of that raging waterfall.
When Reynolds woke up, he was in the hospital with Boorman at his bedside. He remembered whacking his head and shoulders on rocks on the way down, and the strong currents tore all his clothes off as he floated downstream. Still, the quality of the shot was all that mattered to him, so he asked Boorman, “How’d it look?” The director reportedly deadpanned, “It looked like a dummy falling over a waterfall.”
Bill Hickman – Car Chase – The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
This stunt was so legendarily hairy that even William Friedkin admitted in later years that he was foolish to sanction it. However, its palpable sense of peril is what makes it so darn exciting to watch, so I do not doubt that stunt driver Bill Hickman would’ve landed an Oscar for his efforts.
The setup is this: Gene Hackman’s ‘Popeye’ Doyle is chasing a drug dealer named Nicoli, who manages to get onboard an elevated New York subway train. The villain thinks he’s escaped Doyle, but the maniac cop simply chases the train from below in his car.
Friedkin had no official go-ahead from the city of New York to shoot the chase, so he took matters into his own hands by bribing the head of the Transit Authority to let him pursue one of the trains. Then he cajoled Hickman, questioning whether he’d be good enough to pull off the chase, and talked him into a showcase of his abilities. Hickman drove like a bat out of hell at 90 miles an hour through Brooklyn to prove he could do it – and Friedkin used most of that footage as the actual chase in the film’s final cut.
