[The Museum of the Moving Image hosts the retrospective "Zoë Bell: From Stuntwoman to Star" from January 4th – 7th. Raze opens January 10 at IFC Center and will be available on demand; it will also show on January 5th at Videology as part of a double feature with David Lynch's The Straight Story, another film featuring a stunt performer turned actor.]
Raze is so refreshing because nobody really pauses to wink at you. It doesn't take much time to sentimentalize the characters' dilemma, or over-stress that you kick ass — but are a woman, too! Do you think that's true, that modern heroines are macho-types differentiated by their lady-parts?
In Raze, there was no novelty to the fact that it's women kicking ass. For us, it was just: "This is the situation: this group of people believes in worshipping female strength by putting women in hideous situations." So you're dealing with women that are just forced to either fight or lose their loved ones. I think that was key for us, to be able to go forward without pausing and saying, "Look, it's a woman doing a spinning backflip kick!"
The actresses in [Raze] all loved the opportunity to play these women. Very few women would voluntarily go into this tournament, where people are killing people, without justifying it. I don't know if most of my guy friends would go into this tournament just to say that they won, but it's a little more of a male-driven thing than female. It's the male need to dominate just as much as it's the female drive to protect. That's probably very animalistic, but if this were real, that's what would be required to get these women to participate.
You got your first major break stunt-doubling for Lucy Lawless in Xena. How do you think working on a show like that — and a show in general, one where you just sort of double the same woman for years — affects how you see the job offers you've subsequently gotten?
I was spoiled to work with an actress like Lucy, and I've since expected nothing from anyone else I was asked to double. [laughs] And I think it's also taught me not to baby the actresses I've worked with. By not doing that, you bring out the best in them. When I started working on the show, I was very green. You go to stunt school for a couple months, or a week. But being in a space where you get corrected for years . . . [laughs] It really gave me a great foundation in fight stuff, wire stuff — things to fall back on.
There's an etiquette, or rules, that come with the fraternity or sorority way of learning that was foreign to me. It was amazing to meet all the women here [in America]. Some of the old-school [stuntmen] here are amazing, but the women . . . in New Zealand, we weren't really allowed to do [stunts]. They really paved the way, and gave women like me the luxury of saying that working in a male-dominated world isn't that bad, really.
You have credits as a stunt double, stuntwoman, stunt coordinator. What kind of work went into each title? For example, what did coordinating stunts for Bitch Slap entail? Did you show the other actresses how to punch, how to fall, that kind of thing?
That was a very low-budget show; bigger-budget shows allow you to delegate, so you can get a fight choreographer, or head rigger. We didn't have the budget for that, so I taught the fight moves to the girls. So it was coaching the girls on how to throw a punch, so it hopefully looks like it's doing some damage. Being the head coordinator on a film like that was really special, in that I could relate to the extras. I'm not going to ask something of them that I don't think they're capable of. And when I say, "Look, you can do this," they trust me as a woman who's done it.
