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Stunted development

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

There’s the berserk Uruk-hai who comes charging out of the besieging army, brandishing a torch and setting off a huge explosion. “From the minute you see him until he starts getting hit by arrows, he’s me.”
There are the poor victims of that explosion, catapulted every which way. “They’re all me, too. There’s one little fella who comes flying out a couple of hundred feet to land in the midst of the pikes of the Uruk-hai army — I like that one!”
Then there are the ladders. Or more precisely, the countless bodies scaling, hanging out of, falling off and getting crushed by those ladders. “Me!”
“Me” in all of these cases is not Jackie Chan. It is Peter Dillon, a schoolteacher until recently on sabbatical from Blackrock College in Dublin. Indeed, Dillon has been blown up as an Uruk-hai, “jerked backed” as an Orc, and impaled on army pikes, all in the name of moviemaking.
“I got blown up a lot,” the 37-year-old stunt performer said recently. “There are no fires or explosions, but that’s essentially what this job is about. Somebody said, ‘Isn’t that miserable, getting killed all of the time?’ Somebody else said, “It’s quite Jesus-like, you know, one man dying for many.’ “
By way of illustration, take the “jerk back” — a bread-and-butter stunt: “Basically you’re wearing a ‘jerk-vest’ which is attached to a rope. There are a couple of ways of doing it. You can run in one direction and have the rope anchored, so you go whooomph. It will just whip you back up in the air and slam you down, so it looks like you met into a very violent reaction. The force reads very well for the camera.”
It’s like he says: one man dying for many. And it’s certainly a far cry from Leaving Cert. German and geography, subjects Dillon, a native of Dublin, taught for eight years before embarking on an improvised tramp from Nepal to Thailand, Malaysia and, ultimately, the Land of the Long White Cloud.
“By the time I reached New Zealand the end of that year out was approaching and I wasn’t remotely ready to go back home,” Dillon said. “I flew into the South Island, a fantastic playground if you’re into adventure sports. Within a couple of hours of Christchurch you’ve got beaches, deserts, glaciers and rainforests. It’s just amazing.” By 1999, he had a residency permit and a job teaching religious education and social studies.
Tolkien’s appearance was auspicious. Searching for a fat book to read on the plane home one Christmas, Dillon picked up “Lord of the Rings.” A year later, his father and his martial arts master passed away within months of each other, and he found himself restless, “wondering,” he said, “what the hell I was doing here.”
Dillon took time off to teach scuba in Malaysia. He then moved from Christchurch to Wellington. But it was at Shaolin, a martial art he is qualified to instruct, that fate intervened.
“One of the guys training with the group turned out to be assistant sword master on the ‘Fellowship of the Ring,’ ” Dillon said, referring to the first film in the Tolkien trilogy, each of which was filmed in New Zealand. “He had watched me training earlier with traditional weapons — swords, spears and that kind of thing — so we got chatting.”
Dillon began work as an action extra on “Fellowship of the Ring.” “After that I got a phone call saying, ‘Do you want to be an Orc?’ ” he recalled. “I thought, why not? So I went in and did some stuff with Christopher Lee, which was quite cool. What a fantastic guy to meet, and an amazing character. I was basically a worker Orc in the caves of Isengard. It was a foot in the door, I guess.”
As anyone who has witnessed a production unit in full swing will attest, moviemaking supports some of nature’s most strictly delineated food chains. And as Hollywood-style blockbusters and special effects come increasingly to dominate our screens, stunt performers are no exception.

Three-grade structure
The Stunt Guild of New Zealand operates a three-grade structure, wherein members maintain a logbook and advance as time and experience accumulate. Three years and 36 identifiable stunts (“fire burns, near explosions, car rolls, T-bone crashes”) bring on Level 2. Two more years bring Level 3, and the green light to work as stunt coordinator.
“They’re quite specific within the industry as to what counts as stunts,” Dillon said. “You can go home, throw yourself off the roof of a building and land on a mat, but it doesn’t count as a stunt. It’s not until you’ve done it under contract and on camera that you become a stunt performer.”
The applicant’s background is crucial. Working some basic stunts on the “Fellowship” pickups, Dillon bolstered an already impressive CV: 18 years of Shaolin, a PADI Speciality Diving Instructor qualification, horse-riding and swimming skills, excellent physical fitness, and, of course, a willful dollop of madness. Why else would someone crash vehicles, fall off horses and set himself on fire for a living?
Dillon’s application was accepted. After securing an apartment in Wellington, pickups started on “The Two Towers.” Playing numerous, unceremoniously immolated Uruk-hai, Peter became familiar with “motion capture,” a technique digitizing human movement and applying it to computer-generated characters.
He also got blown up again, rather spectacularly. “Another way of doing it is to stand static,” he said. “The rope will be attached at whatever angle they want you to go flying back at, and then a couple of burly people at the other end go: ‘three, two, one,’ yank! Every single time it’s startling. But the main thing is that you don’t look like you’re prepping for it. You have to seem ignorant of what’s about to happen.”
Hence the emergence of “stunt performer” from the chrysalis of “stuntman.” It’s not all about political correctness. Said Dillon: “Is there acting involved? There’s definitely an element of performance, in that you have to be in character. Whether you’re an Orc or a Gondorian, each has their own physical quirks and way of moving. But I think acting is another skill and I really admire those who are able to do it.”
“Lord of the Rings” certainly showcases the craft. From Sir Ian McKellan to Cate Blanchett, Elijah Wood to Orlando Bloom, the cast reads like a celebrity roll call.
“I’ve met a few people,” Dillon conceded, bashfully. “I think it was my first day on set, and it was lunchtime. I was chatting to some girl and went back to sit down with the lads. ‘Liv Tyler’s gorgeous, isn?t she?’ one of them said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’ve never met her.’ And he said, ‘You were just talking to her.’
“I’ve done that a number of times, just chatted away without knowing who they are. I met Viggo Mortensen and he’s a really cool guy. He’s been backpacking in Ireland a fair bit and he enjoyed it immensely.”
In reality, though, there is little time to be starstruck. “You have to put in a huge amount of time in rehearsals, because if it’s going to look good it has to be really slick on the day,” Dillon said. “Once it goes to set, everything you’ve done in rehearsals has to become real, and that’s where the director begins to put the pieces together, which is an amazing process as well.”

Risk minimized
Safety is key. To an audience, it may seem spontaneous for James Bond to bungie jump off the 700-foot Verzasca Dam, or Indiana Jones to chase along the top of a train, but in reality such stunts are meticulously choreographed. Risk is minimized as a rule and considerable time is devoted to sequencing. The stunt coordinator’s seniority is well-earned.
“Your main resource is your body,” Dillon said. “If that gets injured, then you can’t do it the next time. But that’s all very well looked after on the production. It’s a combination of the stunt performer’s skill, good riggers and good safety systems. People can really trust themselves to the process and go with it.”
And essentially, that’s what Peter Dillon has done. In order to rehearse and shoot pick-ups for “The Return of the King?” the final installment of the trilogy, he turned down a permanent job at St. Patrick’s College in Wellington. The explanation is simple. “I like doing things that require a mental and a physical intensity,” he said. Teaching provides that, teaching scuba even more so. But stunts are something else.
“I’ve been pretty lucky in that I came in at the tail end of something huge,” he continued. “How the hell somebody, 5 years ago, envisaged and put together this end product I have no idea. It’s just been fantastic. ‘Lord of the Rings’ has allowed me to express within a working environment all that I love doing. As kids we used to do this stuff for free.”
Explosions and horse fights aside, future memories will center on the bonds and friendships forged in an intense working environment. Take, for instance, the time a bored bunch of Orcs and Gondorians started a kick about.
“I remember stopping at one point and wondering, how surreal is this?” he said. “But my sweetest memory is of the ball going into a big rubbish skip at the end of the car park. Stooping down was an Orc and standing on his back reaching in to get the ball was a Gondorian.” Suffice to say, not something one would see in Middle Earth.
Unfortunately, that’s where the details dry up. Newline Cinemas take secrecy seriously, and all participants on the movies are signatories to strict confidentiality agreements. Indeed, it was only by email, and after clarifying his position with Newline’s publicist, that Dillon could talk about the Helm’s Deep sequence.
“It’s not all special effects,” he said of a venture that continues to stoke the economy and pride of a country whose population just recently topped 4 million.
“More people are coming to New Zealand, and in large part that’s due to the intrigue and fascination of watching this movie and wanting to be where it was made,” Dillon said. “And once they get here and start going out and getting to know the people, they will see how rich the culture is and how much more there is on offer.”

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