Hal Needham Quotes

When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.

Car chases are as painstaking to make as they are fun to watch. They take a lot of time, and you have to keep the energy up.

The 'Agent X' set was never boring. During the first few days, I had to adjust to the loud noise on set, which included gun shots and explosions. After we finished filming the season, I realized I missed hearing all the noise and driving on empty freeways.

There's a lot of directing within the stunt coordinator's job.

I've shot a lot of places, and I've produced. I always thought, 'Gosh, when you shoot in a big city, it's so difficult.' And New York, I always think, 'Where are you going to park the trucks? How are you going to stop the traffic?'

The art of stunt-making is not about falling down; it's about getting the shot. Creating stunts is creating heroes.

You know, there was not much wire work for any of us actors to do because the extent of what they did was so huge. I mean, they wouldn't just throw you from this table to that wall.

It's an odd thing to go to New York to shoot a movie that is set in Indiana.

War is chaotic and when you start having a larger scale film and you have a lot of safety protocols and choreography, I would imagine it becomes more difficult.

When I was doing a movie called 'The Seeker,' I was fortunate enough to be able to do a lot of my own stunts.

I remember my first taste of American big movies was 'Ghost Rider.' I'm in two little scenes. But for those two little scenes they had 400 extras, upside-down stunt cars, and a fire brigade.

I used Malta as a location to shoot a lot of my action sequences, and that's because we don't have the kind of setup that Malta Film Studios does. They have a world-class facility.

To do a train wreck and make it look real on screen is tremendously skilful.

Frankly, you cannot match the action in a Bond or a Bourne film. Forget budgets, it needs an expertise which I probably lacked.

That James Bond movie? The one where Bond skis off a cliff, shucks his skis, and parachutes to the ground? That's for me. That's what I want to be. A stuntman in a Bond movie.

I'm not really attracted to action sequences, because my experience is that it's quite a slow process to shoot them, and often we're not involved as actors.

I'll make every movement as mine, and use stuntmen as less as possible.

I really like shooting in real locations.

The action scenes you'll see in 'Saaho' are all real - it's going to look fantastic.

I insist on doing all my own film stunts, although they are often worked out in advance by a stunt man who then advises me on the best and safest method of performing it.

I love doing films, action films, anything I can get into that is produced at a high level, really use my skills.

While I was filming 'Kong' - and I don't play a very capable Army Ranger in 'Kong'; I play a completely different character - but we had a lot of Army Rangers there, former Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs, who were working on the movie with us for the other characters, for the Army guys in the movie.

Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.

If a producer has 5 million bucks tied up in a picture, he's not about to let a guy like Burt Reynolds wreck a car when he can get a dummy like me to do it. But some stars would make good stuntmen. Reynolds is one of them. Bob Fuller and Doug McClure are strong, tough guys with plenty of courage, too.

I was into movies before my graduation results got out. In fact, I was on location of a movie when they came.