Quotes from Hal Needham

My ego would be fed tremendously when I'd go on a set and get in a car and tear it to pieces. I'd get out and everyone on the set would applaud.

You've gotta be careful. People don't want to be reminded of Vietnam and Korea. We lost thousands of fine young men and didn't win either of those wars. Nobody wants to hear about them. 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Deerhunter' weren't box-office hits.There was too much violence and blood and gore.

You work a lot when you're hurt when you're a good stuntman, because you're going to be hurt quite a bit. And you can't let a sore leg or a bruise or something stop you, so you just take a Percodan and go to work.

When the 55 mph speed limit came in and the oil crisis caused fuel rationing, the truckers began to look like the last American cowboys.

My first job was as a treetopper, and I was so damn good at it they called me 'Squirrel.' And then I joined the military and became a paratrooper. And later on in life I raced motorcycles and cars.

The first movie I worked was called 'The Spirit of St. Louis.' It was the story of Charles Lindberg's life.

They started saying stuff like 'Should we cut the movie? Is it too this, too that?' It got drastic. It got heated. I said, 'Wait a minute, folks. I didn't make 'Smokey' for big-city audiences. I made it for the South, the Midwest and Northwest. Those are my people.'

I know one thing; I'll never win an Academy Award.

Coaching a football player is the same as directing an actor. The guy has to follow orders and be able to perform skillfully.

Stuntmen bring a lot to the film industry, especially in action films, but if you start trying to give an Oscar for a stuntman, say he doubled a star, I think that takes away from the star's value.

For 'Death Car' I had three vehicles for the leading lady, because you never know when something is going to go wrong. You can blow a tire or start spinning around and hit a lamppost.

Here's the thing that I think really pushed me, was my versatility. Because when I came in to the movie business, all the stunt men were specialists. If you did horse work, that's all you did. If you did cars and motorcycles, you did that. But when I came in, I taught myself how to do everything.

The $25,000 stunt was a demonstration of the automobile air bag system for an Allstate Insurance television commercial. I drove a car into a concrete obstacle at 25 m.p.h.

There's no such thing as a great stunt if there's no danger involved.

I'm the one that brought airbags into the stunt world.

I worked every day. I never turned down a stunt.

All stunt men and women are as competitive as I am. They're just not as talented.

I went to an acting class for 3 years. But then I figured out that, since there were already 26,000 actors in SAG (Screen Actors Guild), I could make a better living as a stunt man.

It's the little added bonus of realism that makes the difference between an adequately done stunt and a really convincing one.

I'd say most stuntmen are injured working with horses. They have a one-celled brain and change their minds right in the middle of a stunt no matter how many times they do it right in rehearsal.

Out of a year, a half-dozen stunts are pretty tough. The rest are kinda routine. To go out and slide cars around and lay a motorcycle down hell, you do that without even thinking. But on the tough things, you put an awful lot of planning into it.

There's a standard pay scale for stunts. The more difficult the stunt, the more money involved. But if I'm the only stuntman who can do a particular gag, there's usually a little more in it for me.

I've done stunts when I was hurting so bad I couldn't hardly breathe and yet I would go ahead and do it.

Stunts have to be meticulously arranged. Choreographed. You could take a fight scene and set it to music.