How 'Fall Guy' director David Leitch changed movie fighting forever
THEY CALLED THEIR place in Redondo Beach, California, the “Stunt House,” and everything about it lived up to the name. The six early-20s guys living there all wanted to be stuntmen. They ate Ramen for every meal and watched 1970s and 1980s action movies on a loop, and the backyard … let’s just say it had eviction written all over it.
The group had no real CEO. But young wannabe stuntman David Leitch certainly was a key board member back then in the early 1990s. Leitch was a 24-year-old dreamer from Wisconsin who came to Hollywood hoping to be a stuntman or an actor or a stunt coordinator or director, or all of those things. “People will know my name someday,” he’d say.
For the time being, Leitch was a substitute teacher with a backyard that he’d turned into a sort of non-accredited Stuntman University. For three years, Leitch led the charge to turn their backyard into what looked like a scouting combine for the movie “Jackass.” A giant airbag to leap onto. Patches of yard to punch, kick and choreograph fight scenes in. Trees to practice climbing. Gymnastics mats. Motorcycles. And a massive trampoline to practice big jumps and landings.
“We were going to be stuntmen even if it killed us,” Leitch says.
The trampoline, especially, was a beautiful headache. They dug out a big hole in the ground so they could cover it with a tarp every night and keep the neighbors and landlord from spotting it. Most nights ended with someone asking, “Hey, did anybody cover the tarp yet?” In many ways, that tarp was the final, tired part of their daily dreams of breaking into show business.
Leitch had a philosophy that the entire house embraced: “Preparation plus opportunity equals miracles.” The preparation part certainly wasn’t an issue — the whole crew worked out constantly in the backyard, and they got quite good at all the skills they’d need to be stuntmen. The Stunt House guys started picking up a job here or there, and the house itself became a thing in the stunt community. In fact, after a year or so, stunt coordinators not only had begun to hire Leitch & Co., but they also sometimes rented equipment from The Stunt House’s backyard.
Those humble backyard beginnings launched Leitch on an unlikely trajectory. Over the next 30 years, Leitch did lots of preparation, which got him lots of opportunities, which resulted in a miracle. Leitch is at the forefront of the first generation of filmmakers who loved the 1980s action era but also learned what real fighting looks like, which has revolutionized the way combat appears on screen. He’s now one of the hottest directors in Hollywood, with a new blockbuster, “The Fall Guy” starring Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, about a stuntman who must become the star of his own movie.
And it all traces back to his trampoline tarp days.
THE FIGHT SCENES that Leitch grew up watching are not the fight scenes he puts on screen. There are certainly similarities and influences, and his movies do seem to have come from the kind of guy who cobbled together six hours worth of Jackie Chan fight scenes on old VHS tapes for the Stunt House.
He has directed eight movies himself, including “Atomic Blonde,” “Bullet Train” and “Deadpool 2,” and co-directed “John Wick” with fellow Stunt House alum Chad Stahelski. Those films Hollywood-up the fight scenes, with implausible action in implausible places. But they are also clearly the work of someone with martial arts experience who grew up watching Bruce Lee and later the UFC.
Those movies are a key part of the new era of fighting depicted on screen by storytellers who understand the increased audience aptitude for what actual fighting looks like. It’s hard to imagine a 2024 movie where a Mr. Miyagi-like figure teaches his pupils karate by having them wash cars and paint fences and do other household chores. We’re smarter, and so are movie directors like Leitch.
“The world got smaller when the UFC came along — people could see what real fighting looked like,” says Jeff Imada, a legendary Hollywood stuntman and coordinator. “You used to be able to pull the wool over people’s eyes about what fights looked like. But you can’t bulls— people anymore. People know what’s real now.”
It certainly helps that Leitch is widely regarded as a pretty badass martial arts practitioner himself. He grew up in Kohler, Wisconsin, a small town known mostly for the behemoth plumbing company that was founded there. His parents were both elementary school teachers and thought maybe he would be someday, too. But they also pushed him to try many different activities as a kid, from sports to music to acting. They were a little caught off guard when he came to them with a pile of martial arts books and a plan to turn their garage into what was essentially a prequel to the Stunt House. They went with it, though.
Leitch took over the garage. He constructed his own wooden dummy to kick and punch, plus he hung a heavy bag he ordered out of the back of a KungFu magazine. He taught himself entry-level skills in a slew of martial arts, and he played football and wrestled in high school. He also spent a ridiculous amount of time watching all the action movies that children of the 1980s would.
“I must have seen ‘Lethal Weapon’ and ‘Die Hard’ 100 times,” he says. “That was my film school.”
But he was also that kid who loved old foreign-language fighting movies that included subtitles that most teenagers didn’t have the patience to read. He feels influenced by all the big action heroes of that era, but when he talks about discovering Chan, he sounds like he is describing a spiritual experience. Chan, legendarily, had a reputation for doing all of his own stunt work (he later admitted to occasionally using a double), and Leitch couldn’t stop watching his movies.
“Everything else sort of faded away,” Leitch says. “Jackie is the master. He became my inspiration to become a stunt performer. He was reinventing action, and the action he was doing was so real and visceral and fun. He was so entertaining.”
So Leitch went off to the University of Minnesota in 1988 and got a degree in International Relations and Education. But really, he majored in Imagination.
During his time in college, he’d gone to Los Angeles a few times and crossed paths with another young martial arts aficionado, Chad Stahelski. Stahelski was a Massachusetts kid who’d gone to USC and caught the Hollywood bug. He’d been training at the Dan Inosanto Academy (Inosanto is an iconic Hollywood figure, primarily for teaching Bruce Lee at one point) and met some stunt people. Stahelski was immediately hooked. He got his first stunt jobs in 1992, then was called to double Brandon Lee in “The Crow” following Lee’s death.
Leitch went back to Minnesota with a plan to get his master’s degree while teaching second grade at Oxbow Creek Elementary School just outside Minneapolis. “It was a fun year — a great year,” he says. “But I knew in my heart I wanted to get to L.A. I didn’t want to stay in the teaching profession just yet. I thought I could come back to it in 10 years. But if I was going to try to be a stuntman and be in movies, I needed to go to Hollywood and go for it.”
He certainly went for it. After a year as a teacher, he packed up everything he owned — which wasn’t much — and headed west in 1994. He started training at the Inosanto Academy, too, and taught kickboxing classes on the side to make money. He moved in with Stahelski in Redondo Beach, and they founded the Stunt House.
Stahelski took a gig doing stunts for a movie called “Perfect Target” in Mexico. He brought Leitch along and put him to work doing odd jobs around the set. The star of that movie, Daniel Bernhardt, is an action movie veteran and longtime stuntman. He laughs thinking back to the first day of shooting when a wide-eyed Midwest kid walked up to him and introduced himself.
“He goes, ‘I’m David. I’m from Wisconsin,'” Bernhardt says. “He had this beautiful long blond hair down to his shoulders. He kind of looked like Brad Pitt in ‘Troy’ and he had these steely blue eyes. He was just getting into the business. But he was a natural from day one.”
Leitch went from lugging stuff around set to being a credited stunt performer in “Perfect Target.” That’s one of the coolest things about the stunt community — it truly is a collection of people who feel like scrappy, vital members of an industry that sometimes takes them for granted.
Both Leitch and Stahelski kept getting steady work on stunt crews of smaller action movies. In 1999, a few years after they moved out of the Stunt House, Stahelski landed his biggest job when he was hired to be Keanu Reeves’ stunt double in a little project called “The Matrix.” He forged a strong relationship with Reaves that would pay off in a big way in the coming years, and that happened around the same time Leitch got a phone call asking him a question that would change his life, too:
“Do you want to be Brad Pitt’s stunt double?”
PERHAPS NO ONE has helped more stunt people break into Hollywood than Imada, whose IMDB profile has about 300 credits during his 46 years in the business.
He had heard about the Stunt House gang and eventually found himself there. Almost right away, Imada noticed Leitch.
Imada, an affable, athletic guy who is also deadly serious about his profession, shakes his head and gives a hearty laugh talking about the trampoline. “I remember thinking those guys were geniuses,” Imada says. “I’d have loved to walk out the backdoor of my house and have dug out a hole to put a trampoline in to practice on.”
He pauses for a second and says, “And they were always worried about the tarp. ‘We have to put the tarp over it soon!'”
Imada says he immediately saw a fire in Leitch: He wanted to be a stuntman and maybe more, and he was going to bust his ass and smile his way to doing it. And yes, he looked a hell of a lot like Brad Pitt.
So when Imada got hired to coordinate stunts on 1999’s “Fight Club,” he called Leitch. Shocker, Leitch was ecstatic. He’d found work on smaller action movies, including four Jean-Claude Van Damme films near the tail end of the JCVD era. To now be working with Pitt on a David Fincher movie was a massive launch forward. “That kicked me off into a new career,” Leitch says. “It was a great time in my life.”
The underrated thing about stunting for someone is how overrated pure looks can be. A good stunt person — and Leitch was elite — has to resemble the man or woman they’re doubling in a way that goes beyond height and hair. They also have to morph their walk, their posture, their body language, their grunts, even their breathing. If Pitt flares his elbows out when he runs, Leitch must start practicing his elbow flares.
By all accounts, Leitch and Pitt hit it off right away. They talked a lot about their shared love of Jackie Chan, and the tricky dance between humor and action on film. Leitch trained Pitt, who ended up doing some of the fight scenes himself. But during one particularly difficult fight where Leitch stepped in for him, Pitt says he was standing behind the camera watching the scene and thought to himself, “Damn, I look pretty good there,” as Leitch fought.
Of course, “Fight Club” then became one of the more influential movies of the past 25 years. It also featured an early example of post-UFC fight scenes on film: real people throwing (mostly) real punches and ending up with (mostly) realistic injuries. There are no crane kicks or Seagal-ish patty-cake slaps. “Fight Club” probably wasn’t the first movie to openly acknowledge that audience IQs about fighting had skyrocketed since 1993, but it was certainly an early adopter.
Leitch was a sneaky sponge around set. When Pitt’s scenes were done for the day, Leitch would stick around and essentially double Fincher. He’d watch the director as he worked with actors, changed lighting, adjusted camera angles and did all of the takes and retakes that he is notorious for. “I could either watch David Fincher direct this scene, or I could go home,” Leitch says. “F— that, it’s David F—ing Fincher. I soaked it all in. I saw the opportunity and I didn’t squander it. I leaned in.”
When “Fight Club” was done, Leitch’s ascension had begun. Hollywood didn’t know what was about to hit it.
OVER THE NEXT 10 YEARS, Leitch amassed an incredible résumé of stunt work. He was Pitt’s double four times, Matt Damon’s in “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Bourne Legacy” and did stunts in both Matrix sequels.
He gained a reputation for being the ideal mix of contradictory things that great stunt people must be — a very safe daredevil. He had his fair share of injuries, including a horrific broken wrist that required a halo on his arm, multiple concussions, a torn ACL and two torn meniscuses. But he mostly took good care of himself, which is why his Wikipedia age (48) seems more believable than his actual age (54).
More importantly, Leitch took care of his doubles. He had trained Pitt well enough that he was able to do many of his own stunts in “Troy.” But during one sequence involving a fall, Pitt waved in Leitch, who did a long cable drop for him.
“Brad trusted David to double him and look out for him,” Imada says. “You have to trust guys with your life sometimes, and that’s a different kind of bond.”
Leitch continued to be a persistent presence on and around sets, devouring as much knowledge as possible from stunt coordinators, producers, directors and actors. He went through a significant phase where he tried chasing the acting dream, and Leitch ended up with small parts in 24 movies. Bernhardt made him the lead in “Fetch,” a 2007 movie that Bernhardt directed, and he thought Leitch showed the potential to be a star.
“When I met him, I thought he was the best stunt guy in the business,” Bernhardt says. “But David is a great actor, and he’s always had an incredible grasp on scripts and storytelling.”
Ultimately, though, Leitch gravitated toward being behind the camera. Stahelski had broken through the almost impossible path of stuntman-to-director, and Leitch liked what his old friend was doing. Leitch had gotten representation and made his intentions known that he saw expanded horizons in his future.
His career took a massive step forward when he met Kelly McCormick. She worked at his agency securing film rights, but she had an interest in repping clients, and Leitch thought she had the right imagination for the leap he was hoping to make.
Over the next three years, from 2009 to 2012, McCormick relentlessly kept Leitch’s name in conversations about stunt coordinating or directing movies while he got steady stunt work (“The Hangover,” “Angels & Demons,” “Tron: Legacy”) at the same time. Leitch had an impressive reference list and a background of understanding violence in a way that few directors can.
Around that time, McCormick played a pivotal role in connecting Leitch and Stahelski, whom she also repped, with Reeves about a project he was attached to — an action movie about a former assassin who comes out of retirement after his dog is killed.
“I knew that they would love the genre and I knew they would love ‘John Wick,'” Reeves said about the 2014 movie. “And I thought the worlds that get created — the real world and then this underworld — would be attractive to them, and it was.”
“John Wick,” of course, was a mega-hit that has spawned a decade’s worth of Wick sequels and offshoot projects. Stahelski has directed all four Wick movies thus far, with big plans to keep the Wick-verse expanding, and is also slated for a remake of “Highlander.”
It’s impossible to do justice to what a breakthrough “John Wick” was for Stahelski, Leitch and the entire stunt community. The jump from stunt double to director is extremely rare, and the pathway usually takes people from doubling, to stunt coordinating, to second unit directing (which usually involves a second part of the crew shooting scenic shots, crowds or some action). But director?
“Everybody in the stunt community is blown away,” Bernhardt says. “There have been some guys over the decades who have made the jump, but not many. But I think now the business is discovering that stunt people can move all the way up.”
Wick gave Leitch considerable juice in Hollywood, and people liked the story of the stuntman who had grown into an auteur. He and McCormick had built a strong bond, and he appreciated her voice in his head about films. He could often find the pulse of scripts, and she would locate the heart, and together they’d figure out how to meld those two things.
It wasn’t till they’d been working together for three years that Leitch surprised her by asking her out on a date, and McCormick surprised herself at how fast she said yes. They got married in 2014, and their careers — and lives — started to take off together.
Leitch next took on “Atomic Blonde,” starring Charlize Theron. The 2017 movie had a $30 million budget and made $100 million, with strong reviews.
The movie is also a very good early example of the convergence of real fighting with movie fighting into something we’ve never seen before. Leitch doesn’t try to capture the technical precision of a high-level five-round UFC bout, and he also avoids the preposterousness of the roundhouse kicks of the 1980s action era.
“You have so many more people who understand what is real in fighting and what’s fantasy,” says longtime MMA practitioner and legendary UFC ref John McCarthy. “The fantasy stuff is still fun to watch so I think it’s not a bad thing. But people know the difference now.”
McCarthy remembers sighing in relief when he saw “John Wick,” thinking, Thank you, finally someone put something realistic in a movie. He’s not alone: MMA people have always chuckled about how pretty much nothing Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme put on screen has ever happened in an actual fight. That makes many of their fight scenes more laughable than respectable in retrospect. Even watching a double feature of “Rocky” and “Creed” back-to-back can be tough after seeing Sylvester Stallone absorb 15 straight punches, flailing his body in a way no boxer actually has, and then contrasting that with Michael B. Jordan’s boxing.
Leitch has been a game-changer in that evolution. After “Atomic Blonde,” he next did “Deadpool 2” and “Hobbs & Shaw,” two massive franchise sequels that have to stay within the lines of the previous and future projects. But those movies also add in a snark and humor that “John Wick” and “Atomic Blonde” didn’t aim for as much. Reviews were solid for those two sequels, but they’re essential viewing to see Leitch’s next chapter of filmmaking, where he begins to merge action and humor.
“He matches the brutality of the fight scenes with this incredibly sleek ’80s style of marrying violence with a sense of humor,” says veteran critic Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com and the Breakfast All Day podcast. “Clearly it matters to him that we see that he cares about making his movies a ballet — a really brutal and elaborate ballet. That makes him distinct in a world of action movies where there are constant cuts and shaky camerawork to try to create kinetic energy. He does it organically through the actual punching and kicking.”
After “Atomic Blonde” became a modest hit, Leitch acknowledged interest in a sequel. But it was right around then that he got another unexpected call about Pitt: How would Leitch feel about directing the guy he used to stunt double for?
THE STUNT DOUBLE-ACTOR power dynamic is complex. The actor is the star, and the stunt person is there to protect the star. The actor makes big money and is the focus of the movie poster, and the stunt person’s ideal performance is to not show his or her face at all.
But stunt people also have a certain gravitas to their roles. They’re ass kickers who also are good at getting their asses kicked, and those usually aren’t core classes at Juilliard. From their first meeting on “Fight Club,” Leitch stepped forward and led when he was supposed to, then had the humility to stand back when he needed to. And vice versa with Pitt. He and Pitt were close after that. Not exactly best friends, but they had a strong professional relationship, and Pitt seemed to appreciate the way they could mind and body-meld on projects. They ended up doing four movies together, which was a long shot after what happened during filming on the second one.
For “The Mexican,” Leitch had to do some wild stunt driving in an El Camino. Producers had gotten two of the same custom-painted El Caminos in case one broke down. For an early car scene, Leitch was instructed to drive 25 mph and “Don’t go nuts.” When he got in the car, Leitch realized the speedometer was broken. He figured he had a pretty good sense of what 25 mph felt like, though, so he didn’t say anything.
But once the scene started, Leitch’s adrenaline kicked in. He got the car going much faster, probably north of 50, and various crew members began screaming into his ear to slow down. When he hit the brakes, the car’s tires couldn’t grip the sandy ground and started to slide directly into video village, where most of the whole crew was standing.
Leitch tried to pivot the car away from everybody as he watched them scatter. He managed to slide the car away from crashing into any people. Instead, he barreled directly into the other El Camino. Physically, he was fine. But when he pulled himself out of the wreckage, he saw nothing but steaming car parts and steaming people. He went back to his hotel that night assuming he was going to get canned.
When he got to his room, he found a note from Pitt. “I heard you had a great adventure today,” Pitt wrote. “See you tomorrow on set.”
Leitch didn’t get fired and finished the movie. Luckily, the production team was able to secure a third custom El Camino. “Every stunt performer has a moment where they realize the stakes of what you’re doing,” Leitch says. “You can get excited and amped up and it’s dangerous. That was a great lesson for me to learn.”
The El Camino incident was a key moment for the Pitt-Leitch dynamic, and a sign that they’d be OK flipping their roles years later. They worked together on “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and “Troy.” Then Leitch went off and started directing for a few years before finally getting a call about possibly directing “Bullet Train,” starring Pitt. The two talked it out, and it wasn’t a long conversation. This would be a new era for their relationship, where Leitch was formally the boss.
But in reality, they’d flip-flopped on the direction for scenes many times before. So “Bullet Train” was just an extended, formal version of the way Leitch used to guide Pitt through action scenes as a stuntman. “I’m serving him; he’s the boss,” Pitt said during the press tour for “Bullet Train.” “There’s a beautiful symmetry between two old friends.”
Right before Leitch opened production on “Bullet Train” in October 2020, he and Gosling were announced as working on an unnamed stuntman movie. Eventually, word leaked out that that movie was “The Fall Guy,” an idea inspired by the early 1980s TV show about stunt people who worked as bounty hunters in their off hours.
The project had been kicking around Tinseltown since 2010. At one point, The Rock was attached to star in it. But Gosling and Leitch ultimately plowed the project forward, with co-star Emily Blunt coming in later. “It was obvious and undeniable to us,” McCormick says. “It was the perfect opportunity for David to have a meta-movie that is about what I really care about, which is his legacy.”
The premise of the reimagined “The Fall Guy” is that a good-looking, charismatic stunt double must become the hero of the movie while falling in love with a woman who works behind the scenes. Hmm, sound familiar at all?
Leitch has called “The Fall Guy” a love letter to stunt crews. It is that, and it also feels like a full-throttle tribute to the hundreds of people in video village who make movies happen and, you know, sometimes have to dive away from stray El Caminos. The comedy really works, and the Blunt-Gosling dynamic is so strong that it seems like they must be married in another timeline.
But the movie is a blast because of its blasts. The action scenes have more innovation than the past 10 Guy Ritchie movies combined, with someone driving a boat like nobody ever has on film, and “The Fall Guy” uses stunt explosions in ways that are funnier than seems possible. The movie also features a Guinness World Record — Gosling’s stunt driver, Logan Holladay, became the first person to ever roll a car 8½ times in a scene.
The fight scenes are definitely movie fight scenes. But they’re from Leitch’s prototypical post-UFC playbook, and though Gosling didn’t take all of the kicks and punches, his reaction shots from taking bumps are an A-plus. His oofs and ughs have just enough Ken sauce sprinkled on top to make them land with a thud and a laugh. Blunt is a former camera operator who has made the difficult leap to directing an action movie, so “The Fall Guy” is cooking with lots of ingredients from the real life of David Leitch.
Leitch and McCormick have a fun life outside of their day jobs. But they also don’t say the whole, “Once we punch out for the day, we don’t discuss work” thing. When Leitch cooks dinner, or they’re at the gym together, or on a long walk with their dogs, they love talking about their jobs.
And they often end up marveling at the narrative arc of Leitch’s life. A stuntman making a movie about stunt people? “It is a full circle moment in my career when I can celebrate both aspects of my filmmaking community,” Leitch says. “Obviously, in the stunt world where I came from, we’re always in the shadows and for now this character to be the hero and be celebrated and see all the cool s— we’re doing and be the star of the movie, means a lot to me. In the essence of this movie, there are pieces of me all over it.”
If you know the narrative arc of David Leitch, it’s impossible to not be moved by extra footage that plays alongside the credits at the end of the movie. Leitch included a fascinating two minutes of footage from cameras that were behind the cameras on stunts, recording how the crew recorded everything. It’s very cool, for sure, but it’s also quite Easter Egg-y from the origin story of Leitch. There’s martial arts, a submission hold or two, falls, explosions. There are even a few shots of Leitch throughout, celebrating multiple successful stunt sequences like he just won the Super Bowl.
And if you look really close, about a minute into the post-credits scene, you’ll catch a split-second glimpse of one fight scene featuring a pivotal part of Leitch lore: a trampoline. Just without the tarp this time.
