Hal Needham

“It's true I don't play by the rules all the time.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“I have never agreed that stuntmen should have an award. Never.”

“I was usually asked to do less than I was capable of by directors who had lost control of their movie.”

“I was doing stunts for money, not for fame.”

“I could jump out of this window feet first, which would be the safe way. But the way I'd do it would be to use a ramp, get a running start, dive through head first and maybe throw in a little roll at the end. Doing it that way makes it more spectacular.”

“Hell, if I didn't do stunts, I'd have had to be a bartender, or something else that didn't pay well.”

“A man can abuse his body a lot more than a woman can. And that's a fact.”

“I love horses, and when the SPCA tells me off I get real mad because I know more about horses than they do. They say you can't rear a horse up backwards, but I do it so they fall into foam rubber and don't get hurt at all.”

“I thought, 'Wow. Look at all of the money I made. I think I will change jobs.' And that's how I decided to be a stuntman instead of a tree-topper.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was always pushing the limits, going as far as I could. I would do all kinds of crazy things.”

“I hate sequels.”

“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.”

“I don't think I've had a better friend than Burt Reynolds. I could ask him for almost anything, and he would have said O.K.”

“The song 'Eastbound and Down' by Jerry Reed is, of course, a personal favorite.”

“Out in Hollywood I'm getting to be regarded as the 'redneck adviser.'”