Vancouver stuntmen to be honoured with Oscar for fiery scientific innovation

Stuntmen Colin Decker and Dustin Brooks have bagged an Academy Award for their innovative flame-retardant gel. (Courtesy: Fire 4 Hire)

Anyone who is familiar with the Final Destination franchise will remember the gruesome demise of two tanning bed enthusiasts who succumb to flames after being trapped in two malfunctioning machines.

It is far-fetched and brutal in true Final Destination-style, but for Colin Decker, stuntman and one-half of the fire stunt specialists group Fire 4 Hire, it isn’t the absurdity of the event that makes the scene memorable.

Shot in Vancouver in 2005, the movie marked the first time Fire 4 Hire’s naked burn gel, created by Decker and co-founder Dustin Brooks, would be used for the screen. Ensuring actors could appear consumed by fire without noticeable protective clothing, it reinvented what was possible for fire stunts in cinema. Now, 20 years on, it is being acknowledged with the most prestigious form of industry recognition.

Both Decker and Brooks have been awarded an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, and will receive their glistening, gilded statuettes during the scientific awards ceremony in April.

“I’m so stoked,” says Decker on winning the iconic Oscar.

“For around 20 years now we’ve definitely changed the way fire stunts get done, and we built one heck of a reputation as being the professionals for fire stunts in this industry … I’m just happy to be recognized and so happy to get to do what I do.”

The award-winning gel is applied to skin underneath an accelerant, which is then set alight, giving the illusion that the bare skin is erupting in flames. The fire-retardant gel took around a month of careful testing to perfect, involving much trial and error and numerous occasions where blazing fingers had to be plunged into cold water, says Decker.

“Basically, we were standing over a garbage can filled with water, applying an accelerant to the gel, finding out what worked, what didn’t work, what accelerants were good, what accelerants were not, all sorts of different effects,” he says.

Decker, whose impressive stuntman resume has seen him portray motorcyclist, gymnastics coach and wrestling bartender, says he’s played with fire “a million times” and has been burned in the process, but, thankfully, never to a scale that would require a trip to the hospital.

So successful has the gel been that over the past two decades it has safely created fiery stunts in 76 television shows and 52 feature films.

Away from the screen, the innovative product ensured the safe ignition of fashion models during 2007’s Taurus World Stunt Awards Fire Fashion Show, and bagged Decker and Brooks a Guinness World Record in 2010 for the world’s longest full body burn. The death-defying feat saw a head-to-toe blaze linger for three minutes and 27 seconds.

For Decker and Brooks, a Guinness World Record and an abundance of unforgettable film scenes is only the beginning. While adamant that his current major projects must remain firmly under wraps, Decker says he can promise even more trailblazing stunts on the screen in the year to come.

“Last year, it was close to around one-hundred people I set on fire,” nonchalantly notes the award-winning stuntman.