You may think that you don’t know who Noon Orsatti is, but I can assure you that you do. He’s the guy responsible for that 30-car pile-up, the guy who helped arm Sly Stallone with 30 guns, the guy who discovered the 30 ways of achieving a parkour pratfall. He is the stuntman sensei of the film world and a true 30ninja.

Take a peak at Noon’s intimidating IMDB page and you’ll find that many of the films you grew up worshiping, and currently worship, have stunts and action sequences designed and coordinated by this third generation maestro of mayhem. Beetle Juice, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, True Romance, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, American History X, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Rambo, Speed Racer, Ninja Assassin, The Expendables and of course, Trespass.

During my investigation of set – an unfinished add-on to the house owned by Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman’s characters – I caught up with Noon to talk, stunts, action, and contained chaos.

Tracy E. Thomas (L), Noon Orsatti (Ctr) and Sam Hargrave (R) behind the scenes of Joel Schumacher’s Trespass.
Photo Credit: Alan Markfield
Copyright: (c) 2010 Millennium

The Path of a Third Generation Stuntman

Max Tedaldi: Could you describe what we are walking past right now to give our readers a sense of where we are?

Noon Orsatti: This is an add-on to the house that is not quite finished. A couple weeks ago, prior to this thing being completed or even thought of really, the writer [of Trespass] and myself got together and we started to put together ideas for this sequence which is the whole reason for this addition. After a couple days we came up with a pretty decent plan. We never really got to sell it to the director until the very end because he was busy but he’s been very comfortable with our ideas and we had a good mixture of writers, stunt coordinators and a storyboard artist who’s awesome, his name is Warren and he does all sorts of action beats in big films. So conceptually I’d love to take credit for it all but it’s a group effort. The director having seen the rough walkthrough of the scene loved it and added his own elements to it, so that’s where we are right now.

Max: Excellent. How did you get into the stunt biz. What was your path?

Noon: My path was that of a third generation stuntman.

Max: Wow

Noon: My father and my grandfather both worked in the business. My grandfather worked with Buster Keaton. My whole family has been doing it since silent film.

Max: Did you grow up on set?

Noon: Yup! Basically on set. I’ve been an SAG member since I don’t even want to say when. My dad had me on the set and had me stunting and falling and training and doing all sorts of things since I was a wee lad.

Max: What’s the process for you to get involved with a project? How did you find your way into working on Trespass?

Noon: Trespass came through Millennium films, and Millennium has been dealing with a company that I am a part of – in some loose way – but I am a part of it. The company is called 87eleven and our specialty is action design. We’ve done action design for a lot of the films that a lot of people are familiar with. The ones that we’ve done most recently are The Expendabeles, Rambo, Tron: Legacy, The Mechanic, there are so many from Millennium. One of my partners just got booked to do the newest Sherlock Holmes

Max: So this group is like the cream of the crop of action film stunt teams.

Noon: I’ve got to say that this is a really great group of guys and not to downplay any other groups, we’ve got a team that we’ve built from the ground up. From places like YouTube we’ve sniped the hottest kids and brought them to California to start training them and they’ve got all of the qualifications for body awareness. So slowly, but surely we work them into all aspects of the stunt work, and one year later you’ve got an amazing guy who can do things that amaze you. You never stop learning. I learn all the time from the newer generation.

Tom Waite (L), Sam Hargrave (Ctr) and Noon Orsatti (R) behind the scenes of Joel Schumacher’s Trespass.
Photo Credit: Alan Markfield
Copyright: (c) 2010 Millennium

The YouTube Generation and Finding Fault with the Fearless

Max: What are the YouTube videos that have blown you away?

Noon: Anything with freerunning. The whole parkour world has been amazing because so many gymnasts and acrobats emerge from the sport. Guys who have – I won’t say fearless because that’s not what we’re looking for – but, people that have a great sense of height and body awareness in the air. They’ve turned into anything from sword experts to you name it . . . driving cars. Because they have that timing, that natural body timing, they have all of the essential foundations.

Max: When you say that you are not looking for people who are fearless, what do you mean by that?

Noon: There are the daredevils, and you get a million of those guys. The world is full of them. We’re looking for people who have a respect for danger. The best parkour guys, I can run them through a set. For example on Ninja Assassin we had this huge warehouse to deal with, and while I had these delusions of grandeur: “Oh yeah, my guy can jump off of this and roll onto this from 20 ft.” Then I talked to the guys and they talked some sense into me and told me that the stunt was actually an ankle breaker, it was too death defying. By working together we can find a happy medium. They teach you while you push their limits. In terms of fearless, no, you don’t want that kind of guy. You want someone who can give you an educated evaluation of the risks because what good is a stuntman with a bunch of broken limbs.

Max: When you watch your team perform the stunts that you’ve imagined and something goes wrong can you tell immediately or do rely more heavily on feedback from your team?

Noon: That’s the other good part about the group of coordinators that I’m associated with in 87eleven. They have all been in similar situations, so we can guestimate the safety factors and whether things went off really clean. Things will go off and it’s either super clean or it’s sloppy and our eyes are trained to pick up on that kind of stuff pretty quickly.

Max: Looking at some of the behind the scenes videos that has been shot, it seems like you had a lot of free reign to coordinate and do choreography the way that you wanted. How common is that on the set?

Noon: It’s 50-50. Here on the set with Joel it’s great but it all depends on the director. It depends on how much of a control freak he is and how much he trusts each department to do their job. I find that some of the older directors that are more familiar with how things work and they are much more giving and trusting in terms of giving you free reign. It’s not ultimate free reign because at some point they’re going to want to give you their feedback or put their personal stamp on it, but luckily Joel has done a bunch of scenes in this one where, luckily, it’s shot for shot. That makes you feel like you’ve done a good job and assembled a good team. So yeah, it’s really 50-50 and it’s all predicated upon whether the director feels threatened, and I hate to use that word but it’s true. You know this is our arena; we do this day in and day out almost 365 days a year.

Max: Have you ever pulled that speech out and told the director, “this is my domain and you need to trust me”?

Noon: I’ve heard other guys do it, but I personally can’t go down that road. I always want to maintain that open-mindedness.

Max: Watching the previz, right before you are going to bring the actors in, it looks like your role is that of a pre-director. You are directing these guys right before the actual shots. Is directing the path that you’d like to take?

Noon: Absolutely. All of this is similar to directing and a stunt coordinator’s dream is to second unit direct and then direct. Some people don’t want to direct, some people don’t want to take that bite. But second unit for sure, there you have a greater sense of creativity and a greater sense of flexibility.. Ultimately, we’ve all done it, at least guys from our team. They are mostly seasoned second unit directors and now becoming directors.

Max: Speaking of directing, I saw the short film that the stuntmen from your team, Sam and Mo [Sam Hargrave and Monique Ganderton] made, Seven Layer Dip, have you made any viral videos?

Noon: For sure. I don’t necessarily want to say what they are but, they are definitely out there. When Sam and Monique made Seven Layer Dip I was staying right next to them. I hear these grunts and moans coming from next door, and I immediately knew exactly what they were doing. But what’s great about something like that is that it circulated around the set. I played it for the director, I played it for the producers, I played it for just about everyone who they were too shy to play it for.

Max: You’ve got to shamelessly self promote!

Noon: Absolutely! In fairness to them, they were playing the humble stunt couple role, but having shown it to some of the more prominent people on the set, everyone really gets a sense that they are current and they’re still honing their craft. These guys are top notch and you can see from watching the video that they love it. We know we’re hiring the right guys. They had to shoot cut and edit the whole thing. It’s a bonus for me as a coordinator to bring the right guys to the set.

The Stuntman Highlight Reel

Max: What are the scenes or fights that you’ve done that you are particularly proud of?

Noon: You know there are so many that I’ve been proud of and so many that I have been disappointed in too. Sometimes you shoot something and you sit back and say, “I remember shooting that and in my mind it was so much better” or “wow that really turned out great!” It’d be so difficult for me to pick out a scene. It’s easier for me to pick out the great experiences, namely the ones where I got a lot of latitude. I would say that working on Rambo was amazing. To just go out and create mayhem and blow things up was just so fun. We shot in all of these different ways and Sylvester Stallone was cool with that. He expects nothing but 100% at all times and, I’ve got to say, working with him was an experience for certain, but a good one.

As a coordinator you always hope that they will invite you into the editing process.

Max: Is that like the Holy Grail of stunt work?

Noon: It really is. There are some shots that you don’t expect to live [in post-production] as long as they do, and you’d like to have some creative control over them. There are some companies that rely heavily on their in-house editors and with them it’s a rare moment that you get involved in the end and say, “I know we shot this it has to be on the cutting room floor somewhere.” Like the car chase in The Expendables that i worked on with Jet Li. All of the connective tissue of that scene was removed in the final cut and I was like, “(whimper) that was a really good idea!” There was this whole mind game that Jet was playing that they never showed and it ended up being a sort of Bourne Ultimatum super fast scene.

Max: How does working on a movie like Rambo, which is just all-out expletive action, a huge popcorn flick that is geared towards what the stunt team can create, differ from working on something like this that is a little bit more cerebral, where the stunts are not as all-out but just as important?

Noon: That’s apples and oranges. Right away you have to get a feeling for how the actors want to do things. On The Expendables I had a 100 stunt guys and it was all from our creative minds to go and create mayhem. Here we have to single out each character, and what they are capable of, and what the story requires. Nicolas Cage had an absolute way that he wanted to portray his character and we had to stay true to it. I think the difference is that you are constantly weighing in what you can do, as opposed to just diving in. So it’s more like brain surgery as opposed to fixing up a road rash.

Max: Where you going from here? What’s next?

Noon: Right now I go where the wind takes me. I heard Argentina is a possibility for a Katherine Bigelow movie. These guys have offered me their next film, it’s a smaller soccer dad kind of story, I don’t know exactly. It hasn’t been explained to me really. I’m expecting The Expendables 2.

Here’s the beauty of our group, we pull in the shows and then we divvy them up according to who’s best suited for it, and who’s available. It just so happens that the guy who is finishing up the Jason Statham movie is going to be able to go to England for Sherlock Holmes 2. That’s why I might go to Argentina because another partner has another flick he’s going to direct second unit on.

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