Quote:
Originally Posted by MoviePropMaster2008
 Its' called 'being argumentative' with a dose of Asperger Syndrome. I hate to say this, but if you were on a movie set and continued to press this issue to the extent that you have on the forum, Mazryonh, you would have been kicked off the set long ago. |
I beg your pardon if I was being argumentative earlier.
It's just that I've seen productions with wildly differing budgets have wildly differing gun techniques. I used to believe that a more highly budgeted production would have better gun technique, but as I've seen on the wiki, that's obviously far from a sure bet.
I recently bought two DVD movies featuring lots of gun action, Passchendaele and Universal Soldier: Regeneration. The two were made with $20 million and $14 million respectively, chump change amongst the Hollywood crowd. I was thinking that with such a relatively low budget for the two of them, there would be bad gun technique. Remarkably, there wasn't.
While Passchendaele's battle sequences were brief compared to the total length of the film, the "behind the scenes" featurette actually showed that they went to some effort to train the actors (background and otherwise) in the use of the WWI-style firearms, even including the basics behind the bayonet drill and even how to whack someone's brain's out with the butt of your rifle convincingly (and safely). Unlike
Saving Private Ryan, no one holds a rifle one-handed. There are no noticeable gaffes with the firearms, and the hand-to-hand combat all feels convincing--while it lasts.
As for US:R's case, all the gun-firing actors seemed to check out just fine, even the MMA fighters hired for this movie who aren't likely to have extensive firearms experience. No one I noticed in my repeated viewings holds a gun by the magwell (then again only one actor uses a gun with a foregrip in that movie, and yes, he uses the foregrip), everyone appears to be using proper stance, no one "looks like an actor handling a firearm for the first time," etc. All this for 14 million.
Now that you've told me differently, I can see once again how much sway directors can have over the production--though I'm not entirely certain just how much "respect" armourers get compared to all the famous egocentric escapades certain directors like James Cameron and Stanley Kubrick got away with. Whatever happened to treating your team like valuable assets with useful specialist knowledge to be given a modicum of respect and listened to when possible?
gunguy001,
About Canadian gun-related news, I hear the security for Canada's capital build in Ottawa are finally getting MP5s to supplement their sidearms. Are they going to use versions with foregrips and flashlights to make it easier? The 9mm version or the .40 S&W version?