Grant has more than 55 years in the film industry and 200 productions under his belt including performing and coordinating stunts in Mad Max films, coordinating stunts for Jackie Chan and starring in television show Danger Freaks and film Death Cheaters.

Crashing cars, being set on fire, flying from clifftops, performing at eye-watering speeds and heights, Grant said his most foolish stunt involved fighting with an leopard in Africa while filming Danger Freaks in the 1970s.

“I was only supposed to fight the leopard for a few minutes but it took more than three hours to get it back into its cage,” Grant said.

“I threw the cat away but it came back at me through the air just as fast.”

Grant ended up with several scratches and a badly chewed suit. The leopard was unscathed.

“I had a brand new denim suit and it chewed the shoulder pads right out of it,” he said.

Grant has completed thousands death-defying acts he said are perfectly safe.

“When I lectured at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Arts) I would start by saying stunt people are normal, everyone else is underdeveloped,” Grant said.

“Performing acts of a physical nature is in our DNA and has been throughout human evolution. When put in a life-threatening situation, our body still has that fight-or-flight instinct but we have lost the ability to act on it. We no longer know what to do to keep ourselves safe and come out alive from those kinds of situations.”

Grant said he conquered most of his fears as a child, as many people did in years gone by, on play equipment, climbing trees and being allowed to take risks. Children today, he said, aren’t allowed to learn from their mistakes because they are generally protected from making them in the first place.

“People give the excuse, ‘they might fall’ or ‘they might hurt themselves’. But if children aren’t allowed to experience and learn from these situations when their bodies are young, when they get into adulthood and they face similar risky situations they’re at an increased risk of dying.”

Most children’s ‘stunts’ in the backyard or playground result in scrapes and bruises when they go wrong, or a broken bone.

“The risks adults take every day are huge,” Grant said.

“Like driving a car. If you don’t have the instinct to react correctly in a situation that requires you to make a split second decision, you’ll die. Driving a car without having that physical instinct you need is so much more risky than anything I’ve done.”

To overcome this, Grant’s next career move, at age 78, is to establish an adventure farm for the unadventurous in Kendall. He bought a patch of forest on the banks of the Camden Haven River in 1988 and it has remained protected, used as a nature getaway and fun with family and friends.

Grant now lives in Dunbogan and is working with a professor from the Australian National University on the concept of teaching people to overcome fear, using his background in stunts, to create a safe adventure facility on the Kendall property.

“For example, I could have you jumping off a four-storey building. We would start small and build and build. This will demystify your fear of heights; it would be easy,” Grant said.

“I want to pass on what I’ve learned about reasonable risk, safety and physics to help people overcome their fears.”

Grant has worked with actors during his career, helping them deal with fear in order to perform the stunts he coordinates and said he enjoys teaching people.

There is no immediate timeline for the establishment of the adventure farm for the unadventurous, but Grant hopes in the near future to develop the plans.

“It’s got to happen that way, so it’s done right,” Grant said.

Stunt work is ongoing for Grant. The most recent film he worked on was the 2016 release The Gods of Egypt starring Gerard Butler.

“I’ve only ever broken one bone and that was when I was riding my motorbike to the set of Mad Max and a truck hit me,” he said.

Grant’s passion for good stuntwork remains strong, but he does have a few thoughts on modern filmmaking and, in particular, the rampant use of CGI (computer generated imagery).

“You can’t get a computer to replicate the natural movements of a human body and it’s reaction to inertia,” he said. 

“When it’s on the screen and it’s real, audiences react to the feeling of falling, or flying through the air; they push back in their chairs, grip the armrest and get a feeling in their gut. CGI loses that gut feeling. The moment a movement is exaggerated beyond the point of reality, because it’s essentially a cartoon, it doesn’t feel right and the audience doesn’t get that reaction.

“Stunts have to feel real and they can all be done with real people. When I’m lecturing [at NIDA or AFTRS – Australian Film Television and Radio School] I make a point on CGI, that films shouldn’t follow the US idea that to be ‘better’ they have to be ‘bigger’. It’s wrong. Films need to be more real to be better.”