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Tuesday, October 30, 2007 |
| It's All About the Guns |
 
My Name is Dean Goodine and I am the Property Master on "Passchendaele". My job is to provide the weapons, Artillery, Webgear, and just about anything an actor touches in the film. To put it simply my job is to make the film come alive, in my opinion. My two major concerns with this movie were the artillery and the machine guns. For this film to be accurate we required Maxim Machine Guns. The Maxim Machine Gun was invented by American Hiram Maxim in 1884. In 1885 he demonstrated the machine gun for the British high command who unfortunately could not see the benefit of the Maxim Gun. Maxim's next stop was Germany. The Kaiser personally attended the trials and from that the Spandau Machinengewhr 08 was born. At the start of WW1 the Germans had twelve thousand machine guns; the allies had a few hundred. In one day in the battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916 the British had twenty-one thousand soldiers killed. It has been said that ninety percent of the deaths were at the hands of the Spandau Machinengewhr 08.
I worked on two other movies with MG-08's as an Assistant Property Master and the guns failed to work. I voiced my concerns to Tom Felcan, the great movie armourer from Vancouver, and he thought we could overcome the problems. Long before this movie had a green light, Tom purchased 2 MG-08 Machine guns. He also purchased 3 Lewis Guns. He then had his brilliant gunsmith Craig Myers work on the restoration. The show I was doing at the time was SCI-FI so when I would phone to order modern weapons, all Tom and Craig wanted to talk about were the Machine Guns. I would always say, "Tom I don't know if the show is going to go so don't spend your money". Tom and Craig ignored me. In hind sight I'm glad they didn't listen as I would not have had the Machine Guns ready on time. The first time Paul heard the MG-08 fire on the battlefield he said "how did they ever convince the guys to leave the trench after hearing that gun"? Thanks to Tom and Craig, the machine guns have been flawless, and in the opening scenes of the movie Craig Myers is the German machine gunner.
(Photographs by Chris Large) |
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| About the Blogger |
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The motion picture Passchendaele, an epic set amidst the horror of war, was shot in Alberta from August 20th to October 23rd 2007, directed and written by Paul Gross. The film is now in post production and will premiere in Theatres fall 2008, thus culminating a lifelong dream of Paul's, who learned of this extraordinary period in Canadian history from his Grandfather, Michael Joseph Dunne. The Battle of Passchendaele represents a story of determination, commitment and triumph, and this defining chapter in the forging of a nation shall never be forgotten. |
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