Interview: ‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Stunt Coordinator Cory DeMeyers on his Emmy Nominated Work

Season three of The Righteous Gemstones is, by far, the most bombastic. It’s emotional, it’s hilarious, and, most of all, it’s action-packed. The impressive stunts and fights–including a ton with a beast of a monster truck–were coordinated with precision by veteran stuntman turned stunt coordinator Cory DeMeyers. For his amazing effort, he’s been nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming.

Awards Radar had the chance to speak to DeMeyers about planning stunts for television, working again with Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, and the positive shift in reputation for stunt coordination.

Awards Radar: First, I’d like to say: congrats on your Emmy nomination! How are you feeling about it?

Cory DeMeyers: Oh, thank you. Crazy. I feel kind of crazy, you know? I keep saying I don’t know if it’s really settled in yet. It didn’t feel real the day that the nominations happened. I was on set and I got a text from one of our art department friends, and she was like, “congrats!” and then another person I had worked with before texting me “congrats!” I was like “what’s going on”? They were like “Emmys, duh”. So that was how I found out.

Awards Radar: That’s a shocking way to find out you’re nominated for an Emmy. Like, how did you guys find out before I did?

Cory DeMeyers: Totally! I think I was just like head down, full steam ahead at work, you know?

AR: So you’ve previously worked with David Gordon Green and Danny McBride on Halloween Ends. Was it the entire Halloween requel trilogy?

CD: No, just Ends. There was a moment in time where I was up to come in on the second Halloween film in the franchise, but that didn’t pan out. So when Halloween Ends came around, my mentor Kevin Scott–who is an amazing second unit director and a brilliant stunt coordinator in his own right– got the film and then called me originally to ask me to come in and help choreograph the end fight between Lori and The Shape. I came in to do that in about a week or two into the choreography session. He offered me a co-coordinator spot and was like, “Hey, listen, I want you to step up and run everything on set”. He gave me that opportunity to really handle what was happening on set during Halloween Ends, and that’s how David and I became friends and colleagues. Thankfully, him and Danny invited me to The Righteous Gemstones.

AR: How was it working with them again for season three of Gemstones?

CD: Awesome. You know, honestly, one of the coolest things for me was that Halloween Ends went right into Gemstones. The level of collaboration that David Green and Danny and really the entire Roughhouse [Productions] team facilitates. They’re all consummate storytellers, they’re friends, they like to have fun. But at the end of the day, it’s best idea wins, right? So, especially when it comes to the action, if there’s something that you can do to enhance the action and to continue to drive that story forward or develop the characters, they’re all ears, you know? They really do foster such a great creative and collaborative environment. It’s the exact kind of team that I like to work with.

AR: What was the biggest change in working with them on a film or in like a television series?

CD: The thing is, with film, you generally get more prep time and more shoot time, right? You’re telling one story that’s an hour and 30 minutes, but you have four or five months sometimes to put those things together. So if you’re shooting for, let’s say, you have a 25 day shoot schedule, you’re probably going to have two months of prep, right? So in a film you might have, let’s say four or five action sequences that are real highlight moments that help develop the story and the characters. But you get two months to help build that, build your team to rig it, test it, rehearse it, show the director and get notes. 

When you’re working on television, you may be doing 9 or 10 episodes in five months, right? So now you’re doing 3 plus hours of television in almost the same amount of time that it takes to make a movie. Each of those episodes might have two pieces of action in them, so that the prep time is, you know, less. It’s a much faster pace between film and television. But what’s interesting with TV now and especially the TV that The Righteous Gemstones is that it’s feature level quality, right? So not just the action, but the image right? You look at the image quality of these television shows and it doesn’t look like what TV looked like 10 or 15 years ago. It looks like a feature film.

AR: So you said earlier that David Gordon Green and Danny McBride have a very heavy focus on cohesive narrative storytelling? What steps did you take to balance the kind of? Borderland, like Looney Tunes Esque absurdity of some of the action sequences and the very grounded nature of the series itself.

CD: Yeah. Well, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there. It’s like. I like to always come from a story driven coordination perspective, right? I love doing big crazy action if it helps drive the narrative. I think they should always complement each other. You shouldn’t do action that doesn’t drive the story or else there’s no purpose. Being a filmmaker myself, I wanted to make sure that everything we were doing was also grounded in reality from the stunt perspective. So we did some fantabulous stuff, right? But it was all based in reality, and most of the things we did were practical. 

You know, a lot of the VFX work on our show when it comes to the stunts is cleanup right. We’re not building full CG sequences. Our visual effects department is our amazing group of filmmakers themselves and they like enhancing practical effects. They understand the proper trick that’s played on the eye when you have practical effects enhanced opposed to doing everything, just the effects. So I think that’s where we really came from. It was like let’s do the Looney Tunes stuff, but let’s do it as practical as possible so that way it still can exist in this world and not feel inauthentic.

AR: As a filmmaker yourself and you said your mentor was also a second unit director. Do you think that having that kind of experience as a filmmaker or director informs how you coordinate your like stunt sequences?

CD: Yeah, absolutely. You know one thing that Kevin drove into me when we were working together a lot was that story is king. How cool this fight sequence is, that we’re trying to create, comes from a place of authenticity and that has to do news that the characters will actually be able to do. You can’t have your character randomly throw a backflip in the fight if there’s been no indication that they could do something like that right the entire time we’ve been watching the show or film. 

I think it very much informs the way I think about stunts and the storytelling in it, because stunts can be the non-verbal dialogue. In the show, you have all these deep traumatic sequences and we get to see the facial expressions of our actors, we get to hear the words. But, when they’re not talking and the action’s happening, how are we continuing that dialogue? I think about that a lot. As a performer, I had a friend very early on that told me if you understand the camera, you will be a better performer. So I think, in the same way, understanding what things look like on camera and where I need to be as a performer helps me be a better coordinator too. It works on both sides.

AR: Yeah, it’s all interconnected like one is informing the other. It’s very symbiotic.

CD: Oh, absolutely. Our craft has evolved so much over the years, right? It’s very athletic, it’s very mental. But it is an art and it is a science and we use math all the time and we use science all the time. To do these. Things and not only are we being athletes, we are also creating pre-visualization right? That informs some of these action sequences from time to time. Often our directors and producers, if they like the version that we shot, will use that as their storyboards right? So we’re helping by showing the way that some of these action sequences might look the most impactful. And we’re offering that to our leaders on the show so that way they can borrow pieces that they think works well, right. Then they can put their own spin on it. We sound design these sequences when we’re shooting pre-vis. We do the effects on these sequences. So it really has at the highest level of stunts become a filmmaking job, not just a job for jocks. It’s like a job for thinkers and athletes and filmmakers, so that evolution is pretty cool.

AR: So probably one of the most memorable stunts or stunt sequences in the series is all of the stuff with the Redeemer. Out of curiosity, is there a big difference between coordinating like normal car stunts and coordinating something that is involving something like that is the size of the Redeemer?

CD: I would say that number one, communication is key on a set for safety in a car sequence, but even more so with a 12,000 pound killing machine like the Redeemer. That thing is built for destruction. What happens is you communicate with everybody that’s in the sequence around the sequence. You let everybody know where they can be that is the safest position for the camera, for our actors, for our doubles. But you have to constantly remind them how dangerous the truck is because our driver was one of the best in the business. Ryan Disharoon and his father Rick helped design and build the Redeemer, which is why we brought Ryan out as our main stunt driver for the Redeemer, especially in that sequence when they escaped the farm from the militia. When everything works so well all the time, you forget how dangerous the vehicle is. 

So I think that’s the hardest part about a vehicle stunt with something that size is when it continues to work well. People forget how dangerous it can be and you get comfortable and you start letting things slip and you think you can be closer and right. So it’s this constant battle of trying to remind hundreds of people on set how dangerous this thing really is and continuing to double and triple check your work and make sure nobody has crossed those lines right before you call action. As an added safety, I learned a lot about monster trucks. I have a lot of experience with vehicles. Monster trucks were new to me, but I knew they were in the world that I could handle. I dove in with those guys and asked them every question I could ask and learn as much about their process as possible so I can help lead the ship. One thing that we did have was a remote kill switch for that thing. So if anything went sideways, I could literally push the button on what looked like a walkie-talkie and it would shut that monster truck down in a second and we had. I had one and Rick, who is the leader of that team with the monster truck, had one and then they also had a fuel cutoff switch. As soon as you shut it down, you run up and turn the gas off on the truck and then we can make sure everything else is safe. So that was an added precaution that we had.

AR: I didn’t know you could kill switch a monster truck. That’s pretty sick.

CD: It’s pretty awesome. And we did. You know, like we always tell everybody on our shows “Listen, if you see something that you feel is unsafe, you tell us and we’ll shut it down”. At one point during the farm sequence, the rotor got red hot. It was glowing red because he was on the brakes nonstop and it was very safe, but it looked dangerous to the untrained eye and somebody called it. So we shut it down. Right. OK. No problem. Yep. Got it down. Let’s take a look. It was just the brakes, that’s what they do. It’s all good. Then we move on because we want everybody to not just remain safe but feel safe throughout that entire process.

AR: Yeah, that sounds like it’s something that’s super important. Actually, that ties into a different question that I have. Another pretty big set piece is the fight between BJ and Judy’s lover in episode 6. What is like coordinating a fight in which one of the participants is like nude? I’m assuming there’s some form of new challenge in that. Did you have to bring in an intimacy coordinator or something for that? What do you have to work around when you’re doing something like that?

CD: So when you’re doing a nude fight sequence or a nude stunt in general, you’re always going to have your stunt coordinator and you’re going to have an intimacy coordinator. The intimacy coordinator’s job is to make sure that the actors in the scene feel comfortable performing the actions that are being asked of them. They’re a barrier. The actors are allowed to talk to the coordinator and let them know their parameters so that way the coordinator can work it out with the rest of the team. It puts a buffer between production and the actor in that situation and you don’t ever feel pressured right into doing anything that you don’t want to do. Our intimacy coordinator was amazing, so she was there working with them to make sure they were comfortable.

The challenge for me is an added level of safety. We’re physically vulnerable because we have no clothes on and we’re doing a fight sequence that travels through a house, over a wall, downstairs, through play sets and then outside in the front lawn. So for Stephen [Schneider] the concern was one his comfort and then two, his physical safety, even though he wasn’t taking the big wrecks that that Tim [Baltz] was taking as BJ. There’s never anything that would compromise his safety now that he had, you know, no protection. Jonathan Watson, who was our director of that episode, who’s amazing, had the opportunity to work with him as a stunt double for Josh Hutcherson on Future Man. I was the fight coordinator and a covering stunt coordinator for season 2, so Jonathan and I had done a couple of nude fights/action sequences together in the past and he’s very good at directing those types of scenes. He keeps it fun, he keeps it light. He’s very good at catering to the actors and their concerns and making them look awesome in the process.

AR: Yeah, I mean, my folks and I love the show. They still bring up that fight like every so while so it’s.

CD: Intense.

AR: It’s wild. I mean, I don’t think anyone was expecting like more than 5 minutes of nude fighting.

CD: Yeah, I think the whole scene is probably over 5 minutes. I think you get like 3 minutes of really good action and fighting, right. But the build up of him sneaking and knocking on the door and sneaking in the house and hearing the music. The guys did great, they did everything. Stephen did everything except for breaking the picture on the wall himself, because you know, even though we use candy glass and sugar glass, it can still cut you. So we had the double break the glass. Outside of that, Stephen did his entire portion of the fight and. Tim did everything except for the big faults. You know, we threw his double down the stairs. But Tim threw all of his own punches. He took his own reactions, he got slammed up against the wall. Being able to use your actors in these action sequences as much as possible really brings an additional level of authenticity to what you’re doing. You don’t have to cut around them for a double. It was a very well written sequence, but the two actors we had on that really helped bring it to life and make it beautiful and sad and tragic and funny. 

AR: Yeah, I think the fact that they were able to do pretty much everything that could not pose a big risk because I feel like it did really make it feel a lot more visceral. This was a fight that I was watching on, like, I don’t know, someone posted on YouTube.

Is there a stunt in the season that was more involved than anticipated? Like something that’s deceptively simple, but really it took, way longer than you expected to set up.

CD: I guess when Judy gets kidnapped. That scene was an entire night. I think on the outside it looks simple, right monster: truck drives up behind her, pressures the trunk, car lifts up. But that was a combination of the stunt department, art department, special effects department, camera department. There was a real collaboration and weeks out we were trying to figure out how you get a monster truck to crush it. We used a hydraulic lift that was built under the car and bolted into the street. So, as the monster truck drove up behind it with precision, we could actually physically lift that car up. So what we did is we had the monster truck drive up with a stunt double in it in case we went a little too deep. Then once we got the shot of the monster truck getting as close as possible with our double, then we were able to park the monster truck and put Edi [Patterson] back in the car. Then we did the hydraulic lift with Edi in the vehicle so we could see her face and get her reactions. And then obviously use her stunt double for ripping her out of the vehicle and dropping her to the ground. But I think that one took a while behind the scenes to set up and was literally an entire night of shooting. We shot that for an entire night to get that to work. And it’s the cold open, right? I think it’s like 30 seconds in, like the open, you know, or like a minute in. The opening of that episode, yeah. So that one was more involved than. It probably looks.

AR: Yeah, now that you’ve explained, like all of the moving parts, I couldn’t imagine that it would take an entire night to shoot at minimum.

CD: Yeah, it was insane. It was insane, you know? But it looks amazing. You know, you take the time and you do it right. You keep everyone safe and then it looks beautiful when you get it in the can.

AR: Yeah. And then my final question is what was your favorite stunt to coordinate in this season?

CD: Oh, that’s good. I think it was the car chase. I’ve done car work, I’ve been in sequences, I’ve slid cars myself. But, I originally grew up as a martial artist in Michigan and moved to California to build and drive race cars. Then I somehow ended up as a professional parkour athlete and won the Red Bull World Championships. So when I got into this business I got into the business as a parkour athlete and I was very much pigeonholed into that. I still love the sport to death, but I have such an affinity for cars and car sequences and chase sequences. Getting to lead the team for a massive car chase was a highlight for me of the season. Jodie Hill, who was directing that episode, and Paul Daley, who is the DP. They didn’t just trust me with the action, but when we were jumping the cars and when we were wrecking the truck into the dump truck, they allowed me to set the camera. 

I got to work with Jody and Paul and our camera vehicle and our camera bikes to set the cameras for that sequence to help them capture it in a very dynamic and impactful way, but also to keep the entire team safe who was shooting it. I’ll tell you, I sat there at the end of the day when we were placing cameras and I probably moved each camera 7 times. You know, you look at it, you look at the trajectory of the vehicles. You’ve done the math. Just say yeah, we’re gonna move in another 4 inches, right. You move it and then you go okay, let’s see that one. Can it be there? I think it’s gotta go back a foot. And you do that for half an hour straight, right. Then you put your AC team where they can pull focus and they have, you know, they still have line of sight, but they stay safe and at the end of the day. In that sequence, both of our drivers walked away unscathed. Everybody was very happy with the shots. We didn’t wreck a camera, nobody got hurt. So it was a very proud moment for me that they trusted me enough to handle the action. They let me place the cameras and everybody walked away safe and I feel like we got some really, really crazy footage out of it too.

AR: I’d like to say congrats again for your Emmy nomination and. Thank you for taking your time to do this.

CD: Thank you very much. Yeah, it was awesome chatting with you.