WORLD FIRST FOR OUR GUY
GOLD Coast stuntman Guy Norris has been invited to join ‘the Oscars’ club’ — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Norris, whose credits include Ghost in the Shell, Suicide Squad and Happy Feet 2, is the first member of the Australian stunt community to be invited to join the Academy.
“I started doing stunt work in Evel Knievel-like live shows when I was 18,” he told Inside Film.
“I did that with an older stuntman called Frank Lennon. He was one of the last stuntmen going around doing thrill shows. You’d crash cars, you’d run around on fire, you’d jump motorcycles.”
The award-winning Mad Max: Fury Road action director and stunt coordinator reactivated a call for stunts to be formally accepted as a category at the Oscars when the Oscarnominated film was released in 2016.
Norris and his Mad Max: Fury Road stunt team won big at the world stunt community’s top honours, the Taurus World Stunt Awards, claiming best fight sequence, best stunt rigging, best work with a vehicle and best specialty stunt. Norris also won the best stunt coordination award.
The Fury Road team also won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for outstanding action performance by a stunt ensemble in a motion picture.
Screen Queensland CEO Tracey Vieira said 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road was a “game changer” for the local stunt industry thanks to its awardwinning, largely Gold Coast team.
“It’s a combination of that and those big movies we’ve had back-to-back that have really given them the top credits in the world and also the studios have been really exposed to the quality of stunt performers we have here,” she said. Norris’s most recent projects include Triple Frontier and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, currently in postproduction and due for release next year.