Fresh Air - A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Filmmaker and stunt coordinator David Leitch says it's easier to do stunts himself than direct his stunt performer friends. "You are responsible for their safety," he explains. "Your heart goes through your chest." His film The Fall Guy is about the unknown performers who put their lives on the line. He spoke with Terry Gross about barrel rolling cars, being lit on fire, and doing another take when everything hurts. Also, Justin Chang reviews the new Wes Anderson film, The Phoenician Scheme.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Keeping up with the news can feel like a 24-hour job. Luckily, it is our job. Every hour on the NPR News Now podcast, we take the latest most important stories happening and we package them into five-minute episodes so you can easily squeeze them in between meetings and on your way to that thing. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast now. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, David Leitch, is a successful Hollywood director who got into the business in an unusual way as a stunt man, performing daring feats as stunt doubles for actors,

including Matt Damon and Keanu Reeves. His breakthrough was on Fight Club as a stunt double for Brad Pitt, who he worked with on several subsequent films, including Troy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Ocean's Eleven. He became an action coordinator and stunt coordinator, and eventually a director of big-budget films. He directed Bullet Train, Fast and Furious Presents Hobbs and Shaw, Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, and was an uncredited co-director of the first John Wick movie. Today we're going to listen to the interview Terry recorded last year with David Leitch when his film The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, was released. Inspired by the 1980s TV series The Fall Guy, it's about a stuntman who ends up having

to execute spectacular stunts in his real life to save the film he's working on and regain the love of the woman who's directing it. Terry's interview begins with the opening scene of The Fall Guy. It's a series of action sequences in which the stunts include tumbling down a rocky cliff, riding a motorcycle over the roofs of several cars, getting thrown through a bus window, and running through a battlefield surrounded by explosions and getting blown off the ground. The sequence is narrated by Ryan Gosling's character over plenty of gunfire, explosions,

and shattering glass. David Leach, welcome to Fresh Air. I really enjoyed the new film. And your working career is pretty amazing. Do stunt doubles have a code kind of like magicians do not to reveal certain trade secrets? And did that limit what you could reveal in the film? Can I just start by saying thank you for having me? Like I'm a huge fan and I'm very excited to be here.

Back at you. I'm a fan so. But yeah, it is a little bit like magic. I think we're always reinterpreting the classic gags and the classic tricks. And so that's what we did with Fall Guy. We sort of reimagined the big car jump. We reimagined the high fall from the helicopter. And there is a little secrecy. I think, you know, part of it

for years because it was such a business where it was passed down. It's apprenticeships. It's passed down from family usually to kids. And it's hard to crack in and find someone to teach you because they didn't want to share the knowledge so much, you know, because it didn't, again, like it can be a really fun and lucrative business and you want to share it with the people you want to share it with. I think in Fall Guy, we tried to pull the veil back just enough and not give too much away.

You know, you see those fire stunts, we didn't really give the science behind that away. And there is a, you know, that's what's really amazing about stunts. I think people think it's a bunch of daredevils and there's a little bit of that sensibility in stunt performers, but really there's a lot of physics and math and legacy tricks that, you know, get you through the day. The first stunt that Ryan Gosling does in the film is jumping from a ledge 12 stories high. And we see him wearing a harness,

as stuntmen do in scenes like that, and the harness will eventually be erased in post-production. When you do a stunt like that, and I'm sure you've done lots of those high falls, do you like say a prayer or meditate in the moments right before you jump? Like, what goes through your mind and how do you center yourself and prepare yourself?

You know, I had many conversations on the set of Fall Guy with Ryan about that because you're standing on the ledge and ultimately a lot of stunt work is trusting your team. Now we had an incredible, what we call, some rigging team on the Fall Guy. Keir Beck is an Australian stunt performer and I've known him since the Matrix years. He's now become one of the legendary stunt riggers in the business and you you know you're you're hooked up to this

machine and you're trusting the physics of it and you've rehearsed it and you've seen the weight bags go down and up but again you're stepping off the ledge and you have to you know have this ability to calm your nerves, trust in the process, have the confidence that you know we've tested this over and over and it's gonna go great and so you do find a little bit of a meditative state and really just focusing on performance that's how I do it it's not unlike an athlete you know at the starting line you really have to bit of a meditative state and really just focusing on performance. That's how I do it. It's not unlike an athlete, you know, at the starting line. You really have to focus on the first step and then your body takes over.

And I think you wait, you hear that cue action and you go. Which made you more nervous doing stunts like that yourself or feeling responsible for Ryan Gosling safety when he did the stunts? See, Terri, I knew you were gonna ask these hard questions. No, I think absolutely as a stunt performer, when you move into being a stunt coordinator, it's harder because you have your friends that are doing the stunts and you're designing them

and you are responsible for their safety. And so, yeah, it's harder to see how someone else do it designing them and you're you know you are you are responsible for their safety and so yeah it's harder to see how someone else do it than it is yourself you know and especially with my experience of them doing them so long it's easier for me to do it and feel comfortable than to watch somebody else sometimes your heart goes through your chest so apparently Ryan Gosling is afraid of heights so there's a scene where he does the 12 story high jump But also there's a scene with a helicopter falling from the helicopter. So How?

It's kind of cruel With fear of heights in stunts like that. Like how did you blow that out? To be fair? He didn't necessarily bring it up when we were working on the script together, like he had a crippling fear of heights. And I think- So you didn't know that? I didn't know it until we were now having this negotiation about the first stunt and we had been designing it and rehearsing it.

You know, that, I went that cure back, that stunt rigger, we had actually simulated the high fall in a parking lot. We had a construction crane, we had built the same rig that we were going to be flying inside of that building, and we were rehearsing it at different heights and we had the winches that lower you at sort of free fall speed set up. And I'm like, oh, we're going to bring Ryan off for rehearsal. And it was that first day when we brought him off for rehearsal, he sort of confides in me. He's like, you know, I have a crippling fear of heights. And I'm like, well, we're- Now you're telling me?

Yeah, now. OK. And he's like, I'm sure there's a green screen version of this, right? There's absolutely. And I'm like, there is. But why don't we just take you up 10 feet and then 20 feet, and then you can kind of feel how the rig works and sort of, you know,

build the trust in the system. And then ultimately after that first day of rehearsal, he said, you know, I am playing a stunt performer and I know we want to celebrate the real stunt performers doing it in this movie, but I also think I need to do this so I understand the character and it's like we're opening the movie,, I'm gonna do it, I'm in. One stunt I think made it into the Guinness Book of Records, it was a car roll where the car overturned and rolled eight and a half times. And I think Logan Holiday was the stunt man.

So did you know that he would go for eight and a half rolls? Was that the plan or were you shocked when that happened? Well, we had a hope for it. So early on in production when we were working on the script you know I thought like if we're gonna do this celebration of the stunt performer it would be great if we sort of had aspirations to maybe set a record or do something that was like hadn't been done before. And so I wrote in the script you know and Colt Seavers

sets a world record for the number of cannon rolls. And I was kind of a little bit of like a tongue-in-cheek, like if we set the world record fine if we don't. But the stunt team took it to heart and they were like, how do we do this? Let's do it. I'm like, okay, go for it. And so I have a longtime collaborator and someone who I started in the business with as a stuntman way back in the day, Chris O'Hara. He was my stunt coordinator, second unit director on this film, and he took it upon himself, like, we're going to break the world record. So we got with special effects who were going to build the cannon inside the car and build the

safety cage. We got with picture cars to find the right car that the physics would work, we felt. And we went down the path of R&D-ing how to beat Seven Rolls, which was Casino Royale several years ago. And it took a couple takes. Take one was a really great crash. And in any other movie, you would say that was epic. The car flipped in a different way, and it kind of went end over end.

And it created the kind of carnage that you wanted for the film. And it really would have worked narratively. And I actually told the guys, we can walk away now. But they were really excited about setting the record and we'd had prepped for another car and so we waited till the next day when the conditions were a little bit better. Anyway, the next morning we had, closer to when the tide came in, we had firm sand and

we flipped the car and it went eight and a half rolls and the crew went nuts because the stunt team had worked so hard on it you know they had spent three months I'm saying R&D'ing that and you know figuring out the physics of it all. Can you explain in layman's language how you roll over a car make it flip and keep rolling over? Again it's physics so he going, let's say 80 miles an hour, he slides the car at a 90 degree angle and the cannon is actually placed in the path where the passenger seat is and there's a pole that gets shoved into the ground. What kind of cannon is it? A cannon is, it's a pneumatic press. So it's got a lot of

compressed air that's sitting in the trunk of the car and it shoves a metal pole into the ground that's in a cylinder that's into the ground and that basically stops the car in its tracks and flips it to where the where the car is like a light a catapult okay so as the car slides and he hits the button for that cannon and the pole gets shoved into the ground the car flips but it still has the speed the directional speed of the 80 miles an hour. So now it's flipping and traveling 80 miles an hour and they were hoping that obviously it would be barrel rolling. But yeah, it's like a catapult inside your car that you press the button and it stops you in your tracks and flips it.

So the car doesn't survive, but the driver has to. Yeah. How does the driver stay alive? So inside the car, we build a cage and the cage is built with steel pipe and welding and it's designed to create just a box that protects the driver. that protects the driver. And then the driver is in a what we call a suspension harness so they're saving their back. So they're really almost suspended above the seat and there's bungee system that's allowing them to take the shock. And then they're in a harness that's neck restraints and there's a lot of things that's just built in to protect the driver. That'm not going to say it's foolproof, but that

protection of the driver just gets better and better every year with more innovation and and and more stuff that's coming from the racing world and yeah, and there's just a legacy of that stunt and Information and how it's done that gets passed down generation to generation You mentioned you've been in unintentional car crashes while doing stunts. Can you tell us about one of them? I was doubling Brad Pitt on The Mexican, and I'd just gotten the call.

I was actually working in Vancouver, doubling for Jean-Claude Van Damme. And I got the call to do this movie, The Mexican, and I actually told Jean-Claude, I have to leave. I'm gonna go double Brad Pitt. He wasn't necessarily excited or happy about that, but I didn't want to lose the opportunity because it was I had just done Fight Club and I was you know excited to sort of build this relationship with that actor because as a stunt performer you you hope that you

get to double an actor and you get to do multiple films with them and like you build a career that way. So I fly down to Mexico. We're shooting in this really small town, real Decaturce. It's like one road in, one road out. And I get there and that morning, I wake up and they're like, we gotta get you to set right away.

We have this car thing we want you to do. And really simple, actually. They had, in the middle of the desert, they'd poured a black top intersection to make it look like an intersection and they were kind of doing a top shot over the street light. All I had to do was take the El Camino and drive it through the intersection fast. So I back up about 200 feet and I remember the stunt coordinator giving me the thumbs up and

it's like action action and I drive the car and the speedometer doesn't work in the El Camino. I mean we have these old cars you dress them up on the outside to film them but sometimes they're not in the best condition otherwise. I'm getting close to the intersection and I can hear the engine changing gears but I'm not really thinking about it because I'm so excited like I'm doubling Brad Pitt this is amazing like my career is on the rise this is gonna be. And I hit the intersection and where the blacktop, they had poured the blacktop, there was a bump and I launch and I launch up a couple feet and I hit the pavement and my suspension loosens up and

I'm starting to drift and I'm like oh god and I can see the stunt coordinator on one side like you know what are you doing? He's putting his hands up in the air and I'm kind of heading towards Video Village where everyone is filming it and I'm like drifting there and everything's now slowed down in time. So I just crank the wheel the other way and I start drifting towards the other El Camino. And I hit it, you know, I T-Bone the other El Camino. But I saved Video Village and I'm just sitting in the car and I'm basically destroyed both cars in one morning. It was not my greatest day on set. Were you hurt?

No, I wasn't. I'd scrubbed off enough speed where I was fine. And they let you keep working on the film? For a couple days until they decided, you know, maybe you should go home. Really? So how did you keep working with Brad Pitt after that disastrous beginning? I think he found it endearing and, you know, I think everybody knows that when you're working on a set there is a bandwidth for things to go wrong. But long and short he I think he just found it funny and endearing and he knew that you know maybe cars weren't my specialty and that fights were and so I got called for Troy pretty quickly after and he's like we got a great fight movie you don't have to drive a car.

Can you come to London and prep? There's a line in your film in which Ryan Gosling says, it all hurts getting thrown out of a window, getting set on fire, it all hurts. So what is like the typical kind of pain that a stuntman experiences when they're not like injured exactly, but it's just like the standard pain of doing that stunt. I have a lot of experience with that. You know, you talked about specialties and like, you know, the car stunts and

cars and fire and things like that. They actually hurt less sometimes, I think, because you know, you've built in all these protocols to protect the performer and there's a lot of science involved but the The the meat and potatoes of stunt performing is just physical performance and sometimes it's like you know getting thrown down a set of stairs and you know multiple takes and You know how to protect yourself and you know multiple takes and you know how to protect yourself and you know you know you know you're not gonna break anything but you're gonna get a lot of bumps and bruises and twisted ankles and crooked

necks and it in but that's just something that you accept and so having been a fight guy that was sort of my life. Like you're doing fight scenes, you're getting whiplash from doing reactions and you're smashing through breakaway tables or you're getting thrown out a window. And part of it is like the ability to be a little bit tough and have some pain tolerance and know that you're okay,

that they're just bruises, but you know, you get back up. Okay, so you're in a little bit of pain and then the director says, let's do another take. How do you feel when that happens, working as a stuntman? You hate it, but you know, you're stoic about it and it is sort of the contract that you sign in the sense of like the unwritten contract that you sign. If you can get up, you should be going again. The stunt coordinator expects you to do that too because he's hired you and he doesn't want you to not make him look good in front of the director.

I think for myself now being in the director chair, I have a lot more appreciation for, you know, the performers and it's really like if we get it on one take, why not, you know, check the gate? Like, why are we doing it again? You know, there is a great story from Fight Club, you know, and this is not to, you know, throw David Fincher under the bus who's like one of my mentors who I love, but we did that stair fall 12 times. 12. 12 takes and I think the stunt double for Edward Norton was in boxer shorts and, you know, we had figured out a way to pad the stairs and, you know, the art department had

faux painted it look like concrete there were some safety things but it's still launching yourself down a set of stairs and it's like I don't want to ask him to this day like David which one did you use and he's like oh take two so that's ten takes that were not necessary yeah yeah like what were you looking for and again like I just know as a stunt performer, if it looks like a wreck and it was really compelling and painful and you got it on film, why are we going again? It's only going to get, the stunt performer only gets more cautious and tries to protect themselves even more.

It's just instinct at that point. David Leitch is a former stunt man who now produces and directs films. He spoke to Terry last year when his film The Fall Guy was released. We'll hear more of their conversation after this short break. And Justin Chang reviews the new Wes Anderson film The Phoenician Scheme. I'm Dave Davies and this is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. At a time of sound bites and short attention spans, our show is all about the deep dive.

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You were part of a new generation of stunt performers when you started working. One of the things that you're credited for bringing more reality to fight sequences, particularly martial arts fight sequences. You studied martial arts when you were like college age or just after. What were some of the most unreal things that you didn't want to include in the fight scenes that you were part of and what did you want to include? It's less about making them more grounded. In my opinion, I think it was more about figuring out a way to bring that martial arts feeling and integrate it into Hollywood cinema.

I think for a long time, I know, I was a fan of like a lot of different Asian cinema, Korean and you know, Chinese, Japanese cinema that had martial arts and the lead characters, everyone just knew how to fight and they could fight with a martial art style and whether it was a police drama or a heightened sci-fi thing, every character knew how to fight. And it wasn't until the Matrix movies where the Wachowskis had sort of like, hey, we wanna have that same vibe in western cinema. And I think after that first Matrix film hit the ground where you saw Keanu and Laurence Fishburne fight in this dojo and there was the actors doing the fighting.

I mean, that had not happened to that level in Western cinema before that really. So it was like a light went off for myself and you know a core group of us who were sort of training together at the time Chad Stahelski who co-directed John Wick with me. We decided like we want to take that model and apply it to all the films that we're working on. Like we want to train the actors to do the fights and we want to bring martial arts to any sort of genre it makes sense. Like these characters know how to fight instead of like it's just a messy sloppy dramatic thing. It's like there will be a level of skill with these characters.

And so we started to take that opportunity with a lot of different films and we were sort of up and coming stunt coordinators. We were really specializing in fight choreography. And we did something that we learned from that Hong Kong team on the Matrix films. We would shoot and edit our own fight scenes to present to the directors

and the producers. And through that, we built a name for ourselves and we also learned how to tell stories and we also learned how to direct, technically direct. We were shooting and editing these sequences and presenting them as like sort of finished ideas, like moving storyboards. And now it's something that is like standard. There are jokes in the film about how the stunt double isn't allowed to show their face,

because you're not supposed to be thinking, oh, that's a stunt double. You're supposed to be thinking it's the film's leading man, or whoever the actor is that the stunt double is doubling for. And the audience needs to keep thinking it's the character, not somebody else stepping in to play that character, you know. Yeah. So, there's jokes about you not allowed to show your face, your face has to be down. What was that like for you as a stuntman,

making sure that your face wasn't going to be seen. What was that like for you as a stuntman, making sure that your face wasn't going to be seen? You're gonna be in awkward physical positions as it is. There's so much to focus on to keep yourself safe and to keep the stunt going in the way the stunt is supposed to go. And to add to that, don't show your face. Well you do, you know, it was part of, it was definitely part of the the old-school mentality. It's like do, you know, it was part of, it was definitely part of the, the old school mentality. It's like you, you learned how to, you know, hit a mini trampoline and jump in the air

and like keep your head away from camera. And like you constantly, you know, it was a whole art form of like how to keep your head away from camera. Like I always try to give them the back of your head. And you just got good at it and you thought about it and it was really sort of, you know, in the whole protocol of how you approached any physical stunt. It's like, how am I going to hide my face and make it feel natural? Like my hand is up at this point just blocking my face. Now, it's kind of changed in the last decade or so because the ease of face replacement allows you to just let the stump performer perform

and then you know if it's a few frames where we see a face we can use a digital still and wrap it around their face and with motion blur and simple visual effects you can you know mask the performer's profile or face or whatever. It allows the performers more freedom in doing the action and not like trying to again contort their body to hide their face. As a former stuntman and current director, do you worry at all that all the computer special effects and CGI are going to make audiences or have already made audiences kind of numb to all the risks that stunt performers

actually take because you can now assume that it's all done in post-production or most of it's done in post-production with a green screen. So you're not so worried, as you might have been in the past, about the risks and the technique and the art of stunt performers. I know that that's where the world is heading, and I think that that's okay. You know, for me, as someone who enjoys action films, I feel the difference in the stakes of what's happening on the screen with the characters when I feel that it's real. And so I think there'll always be the want for that, I hope, and especially for action film lovers, but actually just really good storytelling. If the visual effects and the CGI can't deliver the reality of really feeling the stakes behind it all, then it's always gonna fall flat.

I would like you to give us a list of injuries that you sustained over the years as a stump performer. Well, I have torn my meniscus in both knees. I have broke my ankle. I have broken my wrist in four places and it was pinned back together. That's a crazy story. It was actually my first day on the Batman live show at Magic Mountain and I was just rehearsing. I had not even gotten in the best Batman costume and I was so excited and I got hired for the job and you know sometimes that's when it happens. We were rehearsing this simple stunt where the car is sliding under a catwalk

and I had to jump off the car and grab the bar and the car drives away. And then I would do a backflip and land down. And I went to do my backflip and I under rotated and I put my hand down and I broke my wrist in four places. I had two concussions and I have knocked out my front tooth. So that's pretty much comprehensive list of my injuries. Have you seen a lot of like the early Westerns like movie and TV Westerns where stunts included just like jumping from a rocky farm formation onto a guy riding by in a horse,

or jumping onto a moving stagecoach, or just tumbling down a hill, falling off a horse. Sword fights in a lot of MGM kind of movies. Yeah. And I'm wondering what you think about that. With the state of the art now, when you look back on those Westerns or on the sword fight scenes, what do you think about?

I love it. I mean, I think when, you know, I look, again, I'm always looking at those movies when I'm prepping for a new film to find inspiration because it is sort of like, how do I reinvent the gag and make it my own? And you know, it's a magic, it's how do I reinvent the the the gag and make it my own and you know It's a magic. It's how do I reinvent the magic trick? How do I reinvent reinvent this dance and make the choreography my own? You know the swashbuckling pirate Choreography would be a fun experiment like if I had a pirate movie

I would go back and watch you know Captain Blood and I would go back and watch Errol Flynn and I would go back and watch, you know, Captain Blood, and I would go back and watch Errol Flynn and watch all of that choreography, and then, you know, take that, expand on it, and make it my own. You look at the old westerns like, that's what Indiana Jones is, right? You know, the dragging under the, you know,

dragging under the stagecoach by, which was Yaka Makanook, who did that first stage coach gag and then it's you know Spielberg repurposed it in you know Indiana Jones and so I love going back seeing what was done finding ways to reinterpret it you and you know, Jackie was the master of doing that too, Jackie Chan. You know, he really studied Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and he applied it for all his films from, you know, the mid-late 80s till today. You know, he's doing reinterpretations of a lot of their physical gags and a lot of times besting them. We're listening to Terry's interview recorded last year

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Listen to the State of the World podcast from NPR every weekday. When you were just getting started, and you weren't even getting started yet, you were hoping to get started. You had graduated college, I think you taught elementary school for a year, then went to LA. And with some friends who were also aspiring stuntmen, you lived together in a house that was nicknamed Stunt House. And it became kind of famous in the world of stuntmen and some directors because you had your backyard outfitted to practice stunts on.

What did you have in the backyard? So we had rented this house. It actually was a, I think a family was living in Florida, or the landlord was living in Florida. And I was, I actually moved into this house. There was a friend of mine, Tim Rigby, I think, who actually had the lease. My friend was Brad Martin at the time, and another friend of mine, Brad Simonson, who's now a visual effects producer. And what we did in the backyard,

we had bought a trampoline, an Olympic-sized trampoline. And we were learning trampoline skills because it actually helps you for a couple reasons. One, for high falls. When you're falling off of something, you wanna be able to understand air awareness and get your head under and fall to your back, into the pads.

You always wanna get to your back. So your trampoline allows you to train that skill and that instinct at constant repetition. Like you're jumping up, you're doing a header, we call it, where you're just like landing on your back and bouncing, landing on your back and bouncing, and your body gets used to,

you fall off of something, you get to your back. That's why trampoline is so crucial to the stuntman's training. So we had this in the backyard and we just decided, why don't we dig it in the backyard and we just decided, you know, why don't we dig it into the back? It should be great if we had like a flush with the ground. So one afternoon we just got the shovels out. We didn't ask the landlord and we dug a hole and sunk the trampoline into the ground.

And then later that month, I think we bought cinder block and we made it perfect and we sort of really dressed it out. And it was funny that we stayed in the house for four years, three, four years, and the landlord never said anything. And then we've always paid our rent on time. And we would train at this house in Redondo Beach, we'd fall off the roof, we would use the air ram, we would bounce on the trampoline. It was just fun times. It was really, really fun times, training ourselves to be stunt people. When you moved from the house, did the landlord notice that there was a big ditch for the trampoline? It's funny that

house stayed in sort of the stunt world for a long time. So we didn't want to, I remember when Chad came back from the Matrix movies, he just made some good money and he's like, I'm gonna buy the house. And we're like, what? You're gonna buy the house? And so he got someone in real estate, I think his brother was doing real estate at the time, and they reached out to the landlord

and they made an offer on the house and then Chad ended up just to keep the trampoline. That's our mindset. Like we wanted the trampoline more than the house. He's like, I'm gonna buy the house. I had already moved out. I was renting from Chris O'Hara and living in a different place,

but he's like, I'm gonna buy this. So then Chad bought that house and then he remodeled it over the years. And then he moved out and he sold it to another stunt performer from our generation, Hank Amos. And he kept the trampoline in the backyard. And I'm quite sure, I think it's still in the stunt community, I'm not sure who was bought in the house from Hank, but I think that house still exists and I think the trampoline is still in the backyard.

Oh, that's so great. If you hadn't become a director, could you still be doing stunts? I don't know how old you are now, but at some point, like, your body really can take that. You can, you have to evolve. I mean, there's a lot of great stunt performers that are my age that still perform, but they have to move into the things that weren't my specialty.

I think I would have had to move into vehicles. There's some great drivers that are in their 60s and 70s that can still maneuver a car, you know, they just the years behind the wheel of just the precision of all of the fine, you know, motor skill it takes to like hit your marks in that world. And it's not so hard on your body, but being a fight double and being like the physical double that's, you know, getting ratcheted back from explosions or falling down the stairs or, you know, taking the big hits, like, yeah, you can.

I'm so grateful I was able to transition out of it, because you don't want to be doing that at a certain age. Yeah. So my last question to you, what is the first action film that you remember seeing? And do you have a favorite? I feel like the first one that really connected with me was Lethal Weapon. And I don't know why that crazy character that Mel Gibson played Riggs, like the classic trope he's a live wire, he's a loose cannon. You know, as a teenage boy in the 80s, like that just was like so fun and exciting for

me and I remember seeing the action and watching it on HBO. Another one that was really impactful for me obviously in my martial arts world is I watched Kung Fu theater as a kid on Channel 18 and I remember there were a couple of my friends in high school we would watch it on Saturday night and would come on at midnight and we would like someone would come over to walk over to somebody's house and we would all watch it together until like two in the morning and drive our parents nuts. So Kung Fu theater was a TV series that showed a different Kung Fu movie every day? Yeah, they would show these classic like Shaw Brothers movies or like, you know,

dubbed movies from Hong Kong and it was on the local sort of station, you know, and was called Kung Fu Theater and I'm sure they got the rights cheap so they could air these, you know, and was called Kung Fu Theater. And I'm sure they got the rights cheap so they could air these, you know, sort of Kung Fu movies from the 70s. And it was the best. And I remember trying to like the next day, you know, play fight, you know, I build a, put a heavy bag up in my garage and my parents are like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm going to teach myself Kung Fu.

I love it. Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. It's really been fun and very informative. Thank you. Thank you. David Leach spoke with Terry Gross last year when his film The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, was released. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews Wes Anderson's new movie The Phoenician Scheme. This is Fresh Air. You're listening to the NPR Network. Live from NPR News, I'm Lachie Sena.

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Or one of the 41% of young adults who think financial well-being means having multiple streams of income? On It's Been a Minute, I'm investigating how young people are turning to OnlyFans, sports betting, and Klarna to stretch every last dollar. That's all month long on the It's Been A Minute podcast from NPR. In Wes Anderson's new movie, The Phoenician Scheme, Benicio del Toro plays a wealthy European tycoon trying to lock down partners for a big infrastructure deal abroad.

The film is set in the 1950s and features an ensemble cast that includes Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, and in a major role Mia Threpleton. The Phoenician scheme opens in theaters today. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. It's become customary to describe a new Wes Anderson movie as more of the same. But it says something about the sheer richness of his visual imagination that he can make two movies set in roughly the same era that look and feel nothing alike. His previous film, Asteroid City, was a gorgeous, warmly nostalgic ode to the American Southwest

of the 1950s. His new movie, The Phoenician Scheme, takes place in the same decade, but it's a chillier, more globetrotting affair. It follows an obscenely wealthy businessman named Anatole Zsa Zsa Korda, played by an excellent Benicio del Toro. Korda is the latest of Anderson's dashing scoundrels, the titan of industry as international man of mystery. He travels the world in private jets, making money, deals, and enemies at every turn, and destabilizing governments and exploiting local workers along the way. Now Corda wants to establish a lasting legacy.

He plans to develop a massive infrastructure project in a place called modern Greater Independent Phoenicia. To pull this off, Korda decides to reconcile with his estranged daughter Liesel. She's the oldest of his ten children, and make her his heir and partner. Liesel, played by a terrific Mia Threpleton, isn't sure she wants any part of it. Dumped in a convent when she was five, she's now a novitiate, and she scorns her father's dishonest business practices. Also, there's a rumor going around that, years ago, Corda killed Liesel's mother. Murderer or not, Corda fits snugly into Anderson's ever-expanding gallery of bad dads, from royal Tenenbaum to Steve Zissou. The Phoenician scheme

is a reconciliation story, and so Liesl reluctantly goes along with Corda's harebrained plan, hoping she can do some good along the way. But it won't be easy. In this scene, aboard Corda's jet, Liesl gets some insight into her father and his grandiose view of himself. We're starting our descent. Prepare your documents before we de-plane so you never delay my schedule. Passports. That's yours.

I don't have a passport. Normal people want the basic human rights that accompany citizenship in any sovereign nation. I don't. My legal residence is a shack in Portugal. My official domicile is a hut on the Black Sea. My certificated abode is a lodge perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sub-Saharan rainforest accessible only by goatbath. I don't live anywhere. I'm not a citizen at all. I don't need my human rights."

Much of the busy, preposterous plot follows Korda as he tries to get various business associates and family members to help finance his scheme. Anderson, who wrote the script with Roman Coppola, keeps updating us on how much each character has invested. At times, the Phoenician scheme feels perilously close to math homework. It's not too hard to follow, though, especially compared with the more densely layered

Asteroid City. The infrastructure deal is basically an excuse for the director to squeeze in as many of his favourite actors as possible. Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston play a pair of basketball-loving businessmen. Mathieu Amalric turns up as a nightclub owner, Jeffrey Wright as a sea captain. And there are other Anderson alums in the mix, too, like Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, and Hope Davis.

The first timers, though, make the strongest impressions. Riz Ahmed plays an endearing Phoenician prince, and Michael Cira is delightful as a nerdy Norwegian entomologist named Bjorn. The most moving performance comes from Threppelton. Her lesal has the radiant self-possession of the French icon Anna Carina, who gave one of the all-time great nun performances in Jacques Rivette's 1966 classic La Religieuse. Although Anderson's films are often suffused with themes of spirituality, morality, and grace, he seldom engages the subject of religion as directly as he does here.

In a way, the father-daughter relationship is a metaphor for God and money, in which Corda's endless pursuit of riches keeps bumping up against Liesl's strong sense of faith and social justice. The Phoenician scheme may present itself as a fabulous piece of stylized escapism, but it's hard to watch it and not think about the oligarchs of today. Anderson's style is often described as whimsical, but here he's made a movie about the literal whims of tycoons. The film has his signature visual touches, full of symmetrical compositions and exquisite textures and details, but there's an uninviting coldness to the backdrops themselves. A rich man's fortress, a half-built railway tunnel, a fancy but dim nightclub. It's as if we're seeing the hollowness of extreme wealth.

In some ways, this is one of Anderson's darker, angrier, more violent films. One of the first things we see is a man being blown in half by a bomb intended for Korda, who's the target of multiple assassination attempts. Whenever he's in danger, Korda says, myself, I feel very safe, which is hardly reassuring to those around him. The Phoenician scheme is well aware that men like Korda make life worse for everyone else, The Phoenician scheme is well aware that men like Corda make life worse for everyone else, which is why I'm still puzzling over the movie's happy ending, which at the last minute engineers a fateful change of heart. The conclusion Anderson leaves us with could be read either hopefully or cynically, for

the Ja Ja Cordas of the world to do the right thing might well require an act of God. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Wes Anderson's new film The Phoenician Scheme. On Monday's show we talk with Todd Purdom about his new book on Desi Arnaz. Arnaz became a star playing Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. Behind the scenes though he created what became standard procedures for producing, shooting, lighting, and broadcasting TV sitcoms. Purdom's new book is Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on

Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Charlie Kyer. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by

Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Theda Challener, Susan Yakundi and Anna Baumann. Our digital media producer is Molly C. Vinespur. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross, Antonia Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.