When you’re deciding whether to hit the cineplex for next weekend’s big sci-fi thriller, Surrogates, you’ll probably consider the star, action stalwart Bruce Willis, and maybe the director, T3‘s Jonathan Mostow. And maybe you’ll check out the action in the trailer to see if it looks cool (which it does). But before you make your decision, be sure to look a little further down the line — in fact, below the line, for the name Simon Crane.

Simon who? You probably don’t recognize the name, and I bet you couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, but Crane is no ordinary Joe — he’s Hollywood’s uncrowned king of stunts. If you haven’t seen his work, you must only go to chick flicks. He was Timothy Dalton’s stunt double in License to Kill, jumped from airplane to airplane (yes, the airplanes were actually flying) in Cliffhanger, and has contributed his imaginative stuntcraft to more than 50 action films since 1985.

I really don’t want to bore you with his credits, but it’s so hard not to list his films because they are just that impressive. He has been stunt coordinator and/or second unit director for a dizzying number of movies, including Cliffhanger, Braveheart, GoldenEye, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, The Mummy, The World Is Not Enough, Vertical Limit, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, T3: Rise of the Machines, Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life, Troy, Mr. & Mrs Smith, X-Men: The Last Stand, Jumper, Hancock, and the upcoming Surrogates and Salt. This dude’s hardcore. He’s a father of four (he’s got one-year-old twins) and, in his free time, is brushing up on his parachuting so he can take his teenage children sky-diving. Not your standard “Take Your Son or Daughter To Work” kind of dad.

I caught up with Simon while he was on holiday (he’s British) to talk about his work designing stunts for Bruce Willis in Surrogates and Angelina Jolie in Salt, as well as how he strives to push the action envelope with every film.

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30 NINJAS: Tell me a little bit about what you feel are the most exciting action sequences in Surrogates.

SIMON CRANE: On Surrogates I worked on one prolonged sequence where the main character, Bruce Willis, is chasing someone on a motorbike and he’s in a helicopter, and then this goes into — for lack of a better word — a Mad Max sort of world. We then do this really good foot chase, and in it, Bruce Willis is a robot and he has certain enhanced powers. So when we were devising how many powers he was going to have, we didn’t want to make it like he was superhuman but just sort of enhanced human. [For example,] the world’s longest long jump [is 29 feet 4 1/2 inches], and he can jump a bit longer than that. We gave him that sort of ability, creating rules for what his character can do. But I know they did some reshoots on it, and I think they did another action sequence — I think maybe they broke those rules, unfortunately. A lot of the sequences, Bruce Willis did it himself. You know, he’s on wires most of the time and very uncomfortable. But he was really good. We got on extremely well.

30 NINJAS: Is that the sequence in the trailer where he begins to sort of disintegrate and his arm comes off when he gets hit?

SIMON CRANE: Yeah.

30 NINJAS: Can you talk about Bruce Willis doing action as his robot self and then as his real self, and the difference between how he approaches the action sequences and his action movements for the two different characters? And how do you, as a second unit director and the choreographer, approach that?

SIMON CRANE: Well, that’s exactly how. The human, in fact, he’s probably quite weak, and he’s not used to doing things himself because he has his robot do it most of the time, [whereas] his robot is an enhanced human. He’s slightly stronger, he can bolt, and like I said, he can do a 30-foot-long jump, and he doesn’t get tired. You know, as humans we always get tired. Our endurance is limited, whereas the robot’s isn’t.

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30 NINJAS: Is this the first time you’ve worked with Bruce Willis?

SIMON CRANE: Yes, it was.

30 NINJAS: I’ll ask this about Bruce Willis, but if you have better examples for this with other actors, we can talk about that too. Willis is iconic, really, as an action star. What are his particular strengths as an action actor?

SIMON CRANE: Any of these action actors, like Bruce Willis, like Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, they’re all quite similar in that they’re very in tune with their bodies and they’re very keen to do more than you actually need them to do, because they know that they have a following in that action vein, and they want to make sure that they’re seen doing it. But sometimes you’ve got to say, “No this isn’t up to you, I don’t need to see you do this bit,” because you would have already established the character, and so this is where the stunt person can take a risk.

But nowadays, you know, we’re designing that action or designing that safety element so [thoroughly] that if that actor wants to, and if the insurance company will let us, we will have them do it.

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30 NINJAS: Creatively, do you then cater your action sequences to the specific ability of your actors?

SIMON CRANE: You’ll know the strengths of an actor. For instance, Angelina Jolie is fantastic with heights — absolutely fantastic, not fazed at all. So you know you can do anything like that with her, and you know she’ll really enjoy it. You know that Brad Pitt loves to do anything with motorbikes or cars, so again, you’d write something for that.

30 NINJAS: Did you write anything specific or do anything specific for Bruce Willis in Surrogates?

SIMON CRANE: As I didn’t know him well, we had an action sequence [written], I then designed it, and I asked Bruce what he was comfortable with, and then he said he was comfortable with everything, so we got some fantastic shots with him running and leaping here, there, and everywhere. I had a conversation with him quite early on, and he was very keen to be in on all of the action. I was out there working with [Director] Jonathan Mostow as well, but I primarily spent a lot of time talking to Bruce.

Pushing the Action Envelope

30 NINJAS: And Surrogates is the same team that you worked with on Terminator 3, is that correct?

SIMON CRANE: With the same director, yeah. Everyone else was different. With T3, I wrote the action sequence that was on a crane and was a big chase through the streets of Los Angeles.

30 NINJAS: And does it become easier to do your job with a director you’ve worked with before? Does your relationship evolve, film after film? Do you bring common elements to it, or do you end up taking leaps that are unexpected?

SIMON CRANE: Just working with a team that you’ve worked with before, you just have a common ground. You know sort of how people are thinking, and it sort of cuts out, to a degree, that fear element, so you can be more relaxed and suggest crazy ideas, and people aren’t going to think that, oh, you’re stupid.

Because nowadays, you really have to think outside the box, and lots of things have all been done before. But there’s always a different way of doing something, and you’ve got to reinvent the wheel. You have to come up with new ideas, and you have to come up with new sequences, and they won’t necessarily come when you’re scared for your job, so to speak.

30 NINJAS: Which goes back to what you’ve said about how you look for character-based action films, because in the action genre the envelope’s been pushed so far that if you look at the action in Crank or other really extreme — fabulous and fun, but almost absurd — action sequences, so much has been done already. Bigger can’t always be better: How do you make it so that yours is excellent, not just bigger? Does that come back to character-based action, and that it’s human and it’s surprising?

SIMON CRANE: You have to, you have to humanize the action in that if your main character, say, doesn’t appear scared when he’s on the side of a building or jumping from ledge to ledge, then as an audience member you’re not going to be scared.

So it’s very important to get all of those elements so that the actors, what they’re doing is good but also how they’re acting is good. Otherwise, you know you’ll end up definitely with a B-movie. And so, you know, it’s reading a script and designing the action around that character. There’s no point doing the greatest stunts ever in the world, if that’s totally out of character.

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