Search for stunt training in English and you find American stunt schools, British registers and a great many career pages written by people who have never fallen down anything. The French system is barely described in English at all, which is a shame, because it runs on one unit of measurement that is worth understanding: the twelve-day course.
I did mine in August 2024, at Campus Univers Cascades, a year after discovering the trade there on a five-day summer camp. This is what it is.
Where it is
Campus Univers Cascades opened on 12 April 2009 in Bias, in the Lot-et-Garonne, and moved in June 2017 to Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Hauts-de-France, in the north of the country. It is a closed site with accommodation and catering for around eighty trainees, and it is regularly described as the largest stunt training centre in the world.
Sleeping on site is not an atmospheric detail. It changes the nature of the course. There is no commute, no parallel life, no evening that cuts the day in half. You are there for twelve days and you do nothing else.
The format, plainly
Two formats coexist and it is worth not confusing them.
- The discovery course: twelve days. You touch most of the disciplines, you find out what the intensity of the work really is, and you leave knowing whether you want to continue. It is the front door.
- The professional programme: ten twelve-day sessions across two years, five sessions a year, roughly four hundred hours. The sessions land about every two months.
Those figures are published by the school and they deserve reading twice before you apply, because what they describe is mainly a constraint. Twelve days away every two months for two years is compatible with neither full-time study nor most jobs.
What twelve days do to a body
A first course runs more or less the same way for everyone.
For the first three days you are enthusiastic and bad. The body absorbs it, you learn vocabulary, you think you are tired and you are not yet. From day four to day eight everything hurts at once, including places you did not know you had, and that is where the course happens: what you learn then is how to work cleanly with a body that has stopped cooperating. In the last days something reorganises and you perform better than at the start on much less energy.
That is exactly the point. On a shoot, the stunt never arrives when you are fresh. It arrives at the end of a twelve-hour day, after three cancellations and a schedule change. The twelve-day format reproduces that fatigue deliberately.
What you learn there that is not stunt work
Three things, and in my view they are the important ones.
Vocabulary. A set does not stop to explain what a landing, an axis or a test fall is. Twelve days is enough to speak the language.
Taking direction from a coordinator. When somebody says stop, you stop, mid-move, even if you felt fine. That is counter-intuitive for anyone arriving from competitive sport, and it is not negotiable.
Saying no. You learn to refuse clearly, early, and without ten minutes of justification. A stunt performer who cannot say no is a problem for the crew, not a good student.
What to bring
The list is shorter than people imagine, and two lines on it matter more than the rest.
- Training clothes, in quantity. Three sets is not enough. Everything is soaked every day and nothing dries in twelve days.
- Good shoes, two pairs, one of them holding the ankle.
- Something to repair a body with: compression bandage, ice pack, cream, and whatever painkiller you already know agrees with you. Nobody finishes a course undamaged and everybody finishes the course.
- A notebook. This is the line I would defend against all the others. In twelve days you are handed more vocabulary, more reference points and more instructions than you can retain, and the body forgets more slowly than the memory does.
- Nothing to prove. The trainee who arrives with a point to make gets hurt on day three.
The selection
I went back to the Campus in 2024 for the selection course for the two-year programme. Six candidates were taken out of twenty.
What I think I understood about what they are looking at: not raw performance. They watch repeatability, meaning whether your move is identical on the tenth take, and they watch behaviour, meaning whether you are someone a crew can work with at seven in the morning. The most athletic person in the room is not necessarily the one who gets in.
What the course does not give you
It does not give you work. It does not give you a licence to practise, because the job is not gated by one. It does not hand you a contact book either.
What it gives you is a technical level attested by people the industry knows, and a cohort. In my case, the stunt jobs I have had did not come from the school. They came, every one of them, from people I met at the school. That distinction matters, and it changes how you spend the twelve days.
What happens between the sessions
A course every two months leaves a great deal of empty time, and that time is the real subject.
I started taekwondo in December 2023, in a club, between sessions. Three months later I walked onto the mat at the national competition and walked off with two gold medals, as a white belt. I mention it without any particular pride: what it actually says is that conditioning and the habit of reading an opponent transfer quickly from one discipline to another, and that the months between courses count as much as the courses.
If you are hesitating
Do the discovery course before you imagine the programme. Twelve days costs less than a two-year mistake, and it answers honestly the only question that matters: do you like that kind of tired.
Sources: Campus Univers Cascades, stunt training · Campus Univers Cascades on Wikipedia