Neither the name nor the face might be familiar to most movie goers, but some of today's most popular movies wouldn't be the same without the hard work of stunt master Garrett Warren. His stunt career spans over 15 years, and he's worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. His past projects include
Transformers 1 & 2,
Mission Impossible III,
Sin City and
Crank.
Garrett recently sat down with Yvonne Villarreal of the Los Angeles Times to talk about his initial encounter with James Cameron and his post-Avatar agenda:
How did you get involved in "Avatar"? It’s a pretty huge deal, right?
"You have no idea. Where do I start? I remember I met Jim [Cameron] on 'Beowulf' back in 2005, when he was starting this whole idea. After 'Beowulf' was finished, I had a chance to pitch some ideas to him. I got a whole bunch of stunt guys together, and I rented a sound stage and a whole lot of equipment, and I pretty much just threw a whole bunch of ideas at him. Even though I hadn’t had a chance to read the whole script, I had a chance to find out some ideas of the movie. I threw my best guess out there, let’s say, of some of the things that were going on. He’d look at it and say, 'Yeah, this is good. This is good. This is no good. This is no good.' But in the end, he finally said, 'This is good stuff. It’d be great to have you on board.' That’s how I got on the project."
Talk about your experience working on the film.
"When you read the script, you’re dumbfounded. I thought it was incredible. I didn’t know exactly where to start. So I figured I’d start from Page 1 [laughs]. He left it up to me to try and design a new way to shoot zero-G weightlessness in outer space — which is how the movie starts. We wound up getting an apparatus which is called a spinning ring, and we wound up using it with different kinds of rigging techniques — sometimes flying it by wires, sometimes sticking it on the end of a metal arm like a yolk and a parallelogram — so that we were able to really create what would look like weightlessness in outer space. It's somewhat of a difficult process to go through to actually get on that Vomit Comet. We first ended up doing that zero-G plane that flies out of Burbank. Also, you only have a certain amount of time where you can film it, and you only have a certain amount of space. Jim didn’t want to be limited with his space because in the movie you see there are hundreds of people on this huge space shuttle, and you want to be able to have as realistic of a set as possible and have all these people floating weightless on your set so … it’s the first time it’s ever been done and performed this way. That’s why it was so groundbreaking. We had this ring that someone could move 360 degrees in all directions. We could fly them up, down and around — that’s what helped give us that feel of what weightlessness in outer space looks like."
For the entire interview with Garrett, including information on his other projects including
Alice in Wonderland and
A Christmas Carol, click on his photo below:
Many thanks to the LA Times for a great behind the scenes look into some of our most anticipated projects!