Canadian stunt performers are a special breed. In a country where film work can easily pendulum between being plentiful and scarce, between big budget and low-budget, they have evolved careers where they’ve learned to perform any stunt that comes along and be incredibly ingenious in working out ways to make them work. We see them as risk-takers and daredevils, men and women willing to leap off of buildings and commit themselves to harrowing death traps, but both before and during the action they ignite into seat-of-their-pants scientists, making complex calculations in physics, mechanics, and geometry. They are suicidal geeks if you will, too smart to die.

Disney Interactive recently held a launch for their new racing video game Split/Second at the IFPDI training facilities, home to Canada’s best stunt team where more than forty years of ingenuity and ambition has earned the crew countless World Records and Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame Awards. At the heart of the team is one of the country’s most enduring partnerships. Shane Cardwell and Dwayne McLean can trace their careers back to the very beginning of Hollywood production in Canada, to a time where there were just three stuntmen in the whole country and all the tricks of the trade had yet to be invented. They were men you could call on for anything, but in particular were known as being the best for setting themselves on fire and performing precision driving stunts.

After Shane Cardwell took me out onto the track for a taste of their slides, broad swipes, and spins, (see video below) Dwayne McLean sat down with me to discuss the nature of being a stunt performer and what it’s like to risk your life for more than forty years.

Kris Abel - What makes a stuntman a stuntman? Is it fast reflexes, a willingness to kill yourself, bones that heal fast?

Dwayne McLean - I can’t tell you exactly, but I believe that there is an innate sense of timing in your brain that allows you to do the quick-thinking things you need to do. I did a stunt one time where everyone on the shoot, everyone on set, actually believed I was dead. To the point where I came out of the stunt and I was looking at a crewman who looked at me and said “We just killed a stuntman” and I said “no, I’m right here, man, I’m cool”. He said “We lost him, man, we lost him. We lost him” and he walked away from me. And I walked up to the first assistant director and said “Hey man, I’m okay. Just relax” and he looked at me and said “What the *&@! are you doing here?” They really believed I was dead.

The thing is with the sense of timing, I knew everything had gone wrong. I believe to this day that within three seconds I’d had an hour’s conversation with myself. I think you need to have that. The time thing just goes strange when you have to think fast. I don’t know how to really explain it, it’s just there. And I would say “well maybe I should do this. Yeah, that might be okay. And then maybe I should just lie down and let the thing run over me. Oh, well, let’s have a look” and I look back and the whole building’s coming down.

We had crushed the building with a Big Foot truck and I was stuck inside. It was a real building, so real lumber, real electricity, real everything. And I said to myself “well, maybe I’ll just slip over here” and I spun around and by then my back was up to the wall and on the other side the truck almost ran over my toes.

Is it a moment that you’re conscious of or are you sitting back and watching your body act out?

You’re chatting with yourself. When the truck hit the building in this particular stunt, he was supposed to hit the one wall, I had chopped the wall up with a chainsaw so that it’d be a nice, easy push through and I’m ready to dive by the window the minute he hits it, but what happened, he was over a foot too far and he actually hit the bearing wall where the window was that I was going to dive out through. So he drives the thing past me and knocked me back into the building. That’s when it takes over. Your first thing is “Well, maybe I should go the same way the wall and window went. Nah, I can’t see it.” Then I thought maybe I should get into the middle of the building and lie down because the Big Foot is so high.

So I felt I was in the middle of the building and I thought “I’ll have a look” and I all I saw was a wall of dirt and lumber, a hundred years of dust coming up off of this thing, this wall, and I said “That’s not gonna work” and I took a spin and ended up against a wall and I had this conversation, it just seemed like it took me forever to have it, but it all happened about two to three seconds. Beside me, it took the hat right off of my head. A four foot long fluorescent tube was standing in the rubble beside me unbroken.

I always refer to that when people ask me what is it that makes the cream of the crop, if I may refer to myself as that, but I always find the best of the best have that. Every time I sit down with them and talk about it, they say it happens to them all the time.

Below - 1987's Rolling Vengeance (Not suitable for young viewers).

At about the 4:30 mark you can see the truck hit the building off the mark, the wall with the window slides away, and Dwayne is trapped inside, his only escape taken away from him. Can you spot him in the rubble? 

Is it like a musical ability? Can it be something you practice and hone or do you have to be born with it?

Nope. I have to practice my skills as a driver and I have to practice my skills as a stuntman to make sure that I land properly on the concrete and I don’t bust my bones every time I come flying through the air. You still have to practice your craft. This whole thing happens in the middle of your creation. You create something and you say “Geez, guys, what’s going to happen? I’m pretty sure on what will happen up to this point….after that….we’ll see what happens (laughs)” and that’s when this takes over. It just does, it’s a really, really difficult thing to explain.

If you look at our tape you’ll see three or four cars come down and they all turn at once, into a parking spot, and then you see just one car. In actual fact what you saw was four cars come down, spun into a parking spot, the camera at the front can only see one car now, you don’t know that there are four of them there. Now there are four drivers. We all have to be in tune there somewhere or we can’t perform that stunt at precisely the same time. We can put it in precisely the same position, but that’s different and not difficult. You may have seen me out here come screaming up and put the car almost in the same spot in front of the door, but not when you have another entity, another three or four entities and you have to do it at precisely the same time.

You have the ability to have the same sense of timing as the people you’re working with so that it just seems to happen together. If you watch you’ll see that in some cases one of the cars maybe a little ahead, but by the time they start to turn, absolute synchronization. To me, it is the best stunt we ever did. We can go flying through the friggin’ air, blow cars up… remember this, what we’re doing here is precision driving. The cameramen really like precision driving (laughs, they don’t like to be run over). When you see these big scenes, those are the true stunts, but what they require of you most the time is to go fast and hit the ramp, then shut your eyes and let it happen.

Is there a kind of stunt you’re particularly known for?

When I started, when most of the boys here started, you couldn’t make a living specializing. I can remember when their might be three or four pictures the whole year in Toronto, two of them didn’t have stunts, so you had to be able to do everything. Anything you could do, from riding a motorcycle to riding horses or to being a trampolinist or anything to your advantage you should get out there and working on. You had to do a little bit of everything.

Shane and I at one time were the fire people in the country. We would set ourselves on fire, have fire everywhere, and we were dressed just like this. We did not have special gear on. Do you remember in the old days you had guys walking around like apes, they had so much gear on? We moved that from this ape suit with an air tank and stuff inside to actually having bare hands, bare face.

I did a picture called “City On Fire” and I learned the trick from an Australian guy and he was so impressed with the way we worked with him he said “I’ll give you the secret, guys” and we ended up being the guys who did fire. We never really got seriously injured, a couple of little nasty burns, but y’know the system worked well and it allowed me to look like a normal human being while I was on fire. You ever see the movie Class of 84? There is a classic fire gag in that movie, Shane did it as a matter of fact.

Below - A classic fire gag from Class of 1984 (Not suitable for young viewers, Spoiler Warning - This is the ending)

Shane Cardwell ignites himself on fire without the assistance of a special suit, hands and face bare.  

Fire we didn’t find particularly difficult. If you did the right things that you had to do, the likelihood of you getting seriously injured was pretty poor. The picture was quite incredible, “Wow, look at this, the guy’s on fire, flames going over his head” so they paid me big bucks for that, but the effort wasn’t all that great. Now on the other hand if I’m driving around the corner at twenty miles per hour and the door opens and they pull me out onto the concrete… that has no big visual, so I don’t get any money for that and I nearly kill myself. So you learn very quickly to charge for the big visual, because you’re not going to get the money if it isn’t. Ah, it’s an occupation.

What’s the most dangerous stunt you’ve ever attempted?

I always say my most dangerous stunt I probably wasn’t aware of. I may have come within a fraction of an inch of driving a spike through my head. I didn’t know it, it didn’t matter.

It’s like those big falls, they’re never easy. You see those cars that go up in the air, turn over, and just come down, folding up into pieces? There’s a man in there! Those are never easy, you can never pay me for it, y’know what I’m sayin’? You want me to do that?

How much preparation do you have? Do they tell you weeks in advance what you’re going to be doing?

Well, sometimes yes, sometimes, no. If you’re running the show as a coordinator, you’re doing script breakdown and you have all that production time, you pretty much know what’s coming, but I might get a phone call asking “What are you doing tomorrow?”What do you want me to do? “Well, just get here.”

In the old days we were constantly inventing ways to do things, you didn’t have traditional methods because there were only two or three stunt guys available, so we’d say ‘Jesus, how are we going to do this?’ So we’d figure out a way to do it and hope that it worked well. So if you got a lot of clapping going on after the stunt and everybody’s happy, we’d look at each other and say, ‘Well, we fooled them again.’

There was a CBC show and they wanted me to do some stunts. “Do you ride a motorcycle?” they ask me. I said yeah. I didn’t. The show was all motorcycles. I had two weeks to learn. I went out and bought a motorcycle for $125 and practiced on it. The bikes on the set were different though, BMWs. I had to have a friend, Brent Myers from Kitchener, come down to the set just to show me how to start them.

Basically I chased myself down the street, blew myself up with a grenade. One guy was chasing another down the street. I played both. I’m on one bike with one wardrobe and I race along down the street. Then I get on another bike with another wardrobe and chase after him. The first guy throws a German-type of grenade because he was part of a Nazi gang. He throws this over his shoulder and rides off. I did that. Then, I get on another motorcycle and there is a ramp, about four feet high with a big blast pot underneath it. As soon as my front wheel hit that, it triggered the blast. I just rode it out, as it went up I went with it, fire and stuff going everywhere.

Now I’m thankful that my ability to drive showed up over the years because it’s easy for me, at my age if you wish, to jump into the seat of a car and drive. I don’t really have to do the car hits, you’ve seen those where the car comes, the guy hits the hood, smashes the windshield, and flips over. I don’t do those anymore. They hurt every time, doesn’t matter.

What are the best stunts to do?

Oh, driving. I do, I like driving. Well you know, in truth, we have egos. If you can do something that really makes people’s eyes pop out, those are the ones we like to do. We like to brush our ego a little bit. Then we have something to lie about years later as the biggest stunt ever.

Do you compare scars?

Well I can’t, I’ve got a couple of broken bones, some things, but nothing that ever kept me from working. I’ve never broken a leg, an arm or something that says I can’t go to work.

I tell my doctor that my neck burns here, my vertebrae right here, it burns really hot, sometimes really, really bad. He says “I have no sympathy for you, y’know. They’re work related. You chose to do that to yourself.”

He finds a lot of things. He found something in my breastbone and says “What the hell is that?” and he realizes it’s something that had been ripped out of there and I had probably never done anything about it, so it’s a blockage, some bone or something that’s just there and I don’t even know it’s there. Ah, those make it all worthwhile.