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Apocalypse Now Photograph: Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS

The best battle scenes ever shot from Apocalypse Now to Hacksaw Ridge

This article is more than 7 years old
Apocalypse Now Photograph: Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS

The people behind the cameras, stunts and special effects on six classic war movies explain their creation

Freshly blessed with six Oscar nominations, Mel Gibson’s new second world war film Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t just raise the bar for combat scenes. – it annihilates it. It may have a gun-shy pacifist as its main character, but the initial 15-minute re-creation of the assault on an Okinawan escarpment is a frenzy of cartwheeling bodies, Boy’s Own satchel charges, bunker demolition and a fetish for physical chastisement that is très Mel: the Passion of GI Joe.

Directors are frequently compared to generals, and war films are among the most logistically complex and demanding things to shoot. Here, key members of the film crew from Hacksaw and five combat classics explain how they stormed the barricades.

2016, HACKSAW RIDGE
ANDREW GARFIELD Character(s): Desmond T. Doss
Photograph: Allstar/LIONSGATE

Hacksaw Ridge: Mic Rodgers, second-unit director and stunt coordinator

The casualty rate at the Battle of Okinawa was 80%: Mel wanted to show that it was bloody, ferocious, gnarly. But we didn’t have much money: $20m, plus the Australian tax incentive. We recreated the battlefield on a dairy farm near Sydney. It was about 100 metres squared, with a road on the outside where smoke trucks ran, blocking out the farm and the pond and anything else that didn’t look like Okinawa. An offshore shell makes a certain size hole, so we would keep redigging that crater, sometimes over old ones, drop a log in it and say: “Ready for shooting.”

Mel was off doing his thing with the actors and the dialogue, while I shot everyone fighting for about 15 days. I was following his instructions, but making it up as I went along. I would take select moments, like a Japanese guy getting blown out of the fireball and flying towards the camera, and send it to him by cellphone. And he would say: “I love it! Do some more of that.” We had about 70 extras, and tiled them with CGI: we shot them six times in sections, so they looked like 250 guys. We didn’t need to train them that much because the level of training in the second world war was not like it is now.

We tried to use CGI as little as possible, especially with the stunts. For the flamethrower scenes, we used neoprene hoods with faces laser-printed on them. Once they’re moving and on fire, it looks like a guy screaming. The Australian special-effects guys also developed a soft bomb – one that doesn’t have a hard explosion. You could get pretty close to it. I’m an I’ll-go-first kinda guy; I doubled for Mel on his 80s films. So I did a test, standing between all these bombs, 3ft away. Afterwards, they said: “You got obliterated!” I said: “It’s not that bad if you keep your mouth open – and you’ve got ear plugs.”


1998, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS

Saving Private Ryan: Ian Bryce, producer

Steven [Spielberg, director] had been working on two other movies, and turned up on set just two days before we shot. Later, he told me why. “When those men and boys had the ramp go down on the landing craft and jumped out in the water, they didn’t know what they were doing.” He wanted to shoot the Omaha beach invasion in the same frame of mind. The graphic nature and detail of what transpired in war, and in particular that landing, had not really been done before. Film-makers previously hadn’t necessarily believed that people would, or could, with the ratings system, watch something that harsh.

You can’t shoot on the real Omaha beach in Normandy. There are also some power plants along that coast that we would have had to paint out with VFX in a lot of shots. After scouring pretty much the entire UK without any joy, we went to Ireland and found this beach in County Wexford that had a wide expanse of sand where the incoming tide didn’t fully engulf the beach, so there was room to work. From January 1997 until we shot in mid-June, we excavated and dressed the beach, as well as building the infrastructure to get the 750 Irish army reservists we used in the battle sequences housed, fed and watered. We called it the “sausage machine”: you got pushed in at one end and came out the other battle-trained, to some extent.

Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore and the others went to bootcamp for a week, too – out in the woods. It rained horribly during that whole period, and I was very concerned that they might get sick. They were in second world war tents, eating rations and everything. But it worked out great: they were weathered by the time they got back in. The shooting went very smoothly. It was one of those movies that just had a sense of something special going on. One veteran approached me later and all he said was: “I was there that day, and that’s how it was. I haven’t been able to talk to my family about it for 50 years, and now I can.” The door was open for film-makers to say: “A realistic portrayal has been done, so let’s do our own version.”

2008, THE HURT LOCKER
JEREMY RENNER Character(s): Staff Sergeant William James
Photograph: Allstar/FIRST LIGHT PRODUCTION

The Hurt Locker: Barry Ackroyd, cinematographer

The first thing was to go to a place as realistic as possible. We couldn’t go to Iraq, so we chose Jordan: the buildings and the minarets looked the same; the extras had the same basic bone structure – Middle Eastern, not North African. Kathryn [Bigelow, director] wanted the kind of verisimilitude I had provided on United 93. Long takes with more than one camera observing the characters. We don’t break it down into storyboards; you don’t second-guess where the honest angle would be, you let things happen. That naturalism comes from my background with Ken Loach. If you’re out of focus on a moment such as an explosion, it just makes it more real.

We had military advisers, but just about every American actor has played a soldier at some point. They all know the old “I’ve got your back” routine. Richard Stutsman, our explosives guy, was brilliant. He created these things so we could safely blow them up inside a city without spraying shrapnel everywhere, but they still looked powerful.

In the opening sequence with Guy Pearce, I didn’t know how to show the air shockwave – that release of energy is so strong it can liquefy the body inside the blast suits. We couldn’t afford to do it with CGI. But someone working in advertising in Lebanon had created something similar with a Phantom high-speed camera. So we got him in and shot the simplest things in super slow-motion. It was like putting gravel on a bit of plywood and having someone hit it with a sledgehammer in the foreground as Pearce was falling in the mid-ground, the explosion in the background. It lifted it from its documentary feel into something that heightened the film.

Matthew Modine / Full Metal Jacket 1987 directed by Stanley Kubrick
F4P9XK Matthew Modine / Full Metal Jacket 1987 directed by Stanley Kubrick
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Full Metal Jacket: Jan Harlan, producer

There was no need for Stanley [Kubrick, director] to research military form as he did for Barry Lyndon – the soldiers in Vietnam improvised. The abuse of young men was the key aspect that interested him. Even 2,500 years ago, the Spartan armies succeeded in turning boys into fighters. Unfortunately, Stanley couldn’t find seven good actors of the right age and had to compromise: he preferred slightly older good actors to having the “right” age group and less good actors. The abuse begins with cutting the hair of the young marines, which sets the tone for what follows. We hired real-life marine drill instructor Lee Ermey as technical advisor. He contributed greatly to this symphony of obscenities and ended up playing the part by playing himself.

Stanley didn’t want to shoot too far away from home, so the derelict Beckton Gasworks in east London were ideal. We took down the industrial towers and made the site look more like a bombed-out part of Huế city: adding French Indochinese shutters, Vietnamese billboards, fire and smoke, plastic shrubs and palm trees imported from Spain.

Firing blanks means nothing, but filming the moment of impact of bullets is a big deal: costly and very time-consuming, since the explosives are hidden in the wall behind “aged” plaster and wiring. Repeats take days of preparation. The big run against the buildings during the sniper scene, with many simulated hits, was done only once, carefully prepared over many days. Working at filthy Beckton was not fun, and Stanley did it as fast as he could. Speed was not his forte. Nor was it Vermeer’s. The sniper scene took several takes, the actors lying in the mud, but it’s all there to set up the moment when Joker responds to the sniper’s plea: “Kill me.” This is the moment of truth behind all the macho talk and joking; it needed to be dramatically prepared to rope the audience in.

1979, APOCALYPSE NOW
A still from the film Apocalypse Now (1979), directed By Francis Ford Coppola
Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MIRAMAX

Apocalypse Now: Doug Claybourne, production assistant (later first-unit AD)

The movie was a bit like a war. Every time someone would quit or get fired, I would get promoted. I had expected to be there [in the Philippines] for eight weeks, but ended up staying a year. I had been stationed in Vietnam, refuelling jets in Chu Lai, but I wanted to see more of the country so I volunteered to fly as a Huey door-gunner on my off-time. That’s why Francis [Ford Coppola] hired me as a “helicopter wrangler” for the famous Ride of the Valkyries sequence, which we filmed in April and May 1976.

It was a logistical nightmare. The helicopters that the Filipino government lent to us would land on a schoolfield at our base camp in Baler, about 150km north-east of Manila. The prop guys would come over and paint American insignia on them, because they were being used to fight a civil war the rest of the time. I would make sure they were fuelled, had M60 machine guns fitted with blanks, and we had extras sitting in the gunner spots. We would ask for 10 and often five would show up; I would radio the set, and they would do whatever scene they could with that amount.

Aerial coordinator Dick White, who had been one of the first Cobra gunship pilots in Vietnam, flew a small Loach helicopter, talking to the Filipino pilots; I was watching down below with an air-to-ground radio. Dick and I would be saying to the helicopters: lower, go left, go right! Trying to get them to stay in the frame, in a horizontal 2:35 format. As for the Wagner, it did seem true to life.

The scene where Willard shoots the Vietnamese girl on the boat gave me a deja vu experience. The actors had recently arrived as Vietnamese boat people, yet seven years earlier I had been in their country, supposedly killing them. Now I was making a movie about it. That juxtaposition was very strange for me.

2001, BLACK HAWK DOWN
U.S. TROOPS DROP ON MOGADISHU
Photograph: Allstar/SCOTT FREE

Black Hawk Down: Sławomir Idziak, cinematographer

The philosophy is very simple: the audience is sat in comfortable seats, and you have to attack them. The action must be dense, in terms of the framing and the amount of events. No emptiness. Emptiness is peaceful. You’re packing the audience with an enormous amount of information they can’t control. They get nervous, which is what we’re fishing for.

Sometimes that means cheating intelligently. For example, the helicopters often fly 25-30 metres overhead, which is never the case in battle – there’s too much risk of the pilot being killed. Or you never shoot at soldiers with RPGs – they’re for vehicles. Ridley [Scott, director] realised RPGs were visually attractive though, compared with AK fire, where you never see the bullets. For our advisers – we had real Army Rangers on set – watching rockets fly through the air on a line is absolute nonsense. They couldn’t believe their eyes.

Jerry Bruckheimer [producer] cut a deal with the US military. They supplied the Black Hawks, straight from the Afghan battlefield; the Night Stalkers unit, the best of the best. The Moroccan army lent us the twin-rotor Chinooks. Our guys – including me, because I operated a camera – also dressed in battle fatigues, and shot in and around the actors. Sometimes you can even see the cameras on screen, but it’s cut so quickly you don’t realise. You think they’re carrying a strange gun.

We originally shot a much more balanced picture, in line with Mark Bowden’s original book, that showed both the US and Somali sides. But due to 9/11, we couldn’t stick to this kind of approach. All of a sudden America was at war. To make a picture with pacifistic elements was absolutely impossible. So the finished film is much more from a cowboy point of view. It had to play to this national tragedy.

Hacksaw Ridge is released in the UK on 27 January

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