- Why does Hollywood love fire?
[dramatic music]
- They go [wails] like that,
[dramatic music]
and it looks like they got shot through the eye.
You're kinda scratching your head going
what happened here?
- Yeah.
- Quasimodo!
[sword scrapes]
[warriors chanting] [swords scraping]
[explosion]
- Hi, I'm Larry Zanoff, lead armorer
at Independent Studio Services.
- I'm Kelly Devries, professor of history
at Loyola University in Maryland.
Today, we're going to review arms
and armor from film and TV.
- Both from a prop maker's perspective.
- And a historian's perspective.
[television static]
- [Kelly] The Last Samurai
- Quasimodo!
[dramatic music]
[screams]
[arrow releasing]
[thud]
[swords clashing]
- So the era we're talking about here
is the middle of the 19th century.
But the film is focused on this last group of holdouts
that do not want to modernize in Japan
and they are the last Samurai.
It's unfortunate on this attack
that we don't see more of the bows
because I really like that, the guy getting up
and moving the bow up above his head.
[arrow releasing]
It was the Japanese style of bows, er, of archery.
In order to get the fullness out of their longbows,
they're using longbows very similar to the English,
which we'll see later,
they would raise them above the head
and shoot 'em in this direction.
If we had had more of that,
I would have loved that scene a little bit more.
I mean they bring in the crossbows and so forth,
at that point, you know, if you've got a crossbow
you've got a firearm.
Nobody's using crossbows at this time.
Probably the most inaccurate thing in this whole scene
is the use of the ninjas.
[swords clashing] [ninjas shouting]
Nobody shows up in black costume at this time.
- Well it's a movie about Japanese samurais,
you've gotta have ninjas in it, where can we put them?
Even if they weren't dressed in black,
even if they were foreign mercenaries,
the goal was to kill Katsumoto.
Don't you think they would have shown up
with a modern bolt action rifle
that they have in the film? - [laughs] Exactly.
- This, ladies and gentlemen, the 73 lever-action.
- I've always found this whole image of a ninja
kinda fascinating because that image is the Hollywood image.
A guy dressed all in black, he's the special forces guy
and it's like, that's not what they were.
That whole idea of them dressed in black
came from, like, Kabuki theater
where the stage hands wear black
and blend into the background like the Bunraku puppets
where the puppeteers stand there.
He kinda disappears into the black background
and that became kind of a version of invisibility
which the ninja, you know, was supposed to be able to be.
So from a filmmaker's perspective,
there's a lot going on in this.
There's different tricks we use in the prop world.
Rubber arrows, rubber swords.
You know Independent Studio Services,
where I work of course, we had a huge amount to do
with "The Last Samurai".
We did a lot of the manufacturing
of the prop weapons and everything.
I think we made over 600 rubber
and aluminum blades for that movie.
Some of them were half blades,
some of them are what we call a chest plate
where you actually have a metal plate under your clothing
and there's only half of a blade
and it sticks in there so it looks like you've been impaled.
Some of them were front and back chest plates
so it looked like the katana went all the way through.
You see some classic gags, you got someone hiding an arrow
or a shuriken in their hand and then they go
[wails] like that and it looks like
they got shot through the eye.
You know, those are very old tricks
but they still work really, really well.
You know, back in the movie Ran,
Kurosawa. - Yeah Kurosawa.
- In the movie Ran when the hero is up in the tower
and he shoots down at one of the guys
who's attacking his aid, you can actually see
the foam target under the clothing.
- On no! - That was a real bow
and arrow that they actually shot at someone's back.
Nowadays you can't do that.
- No, Kurosawa went for realism.
- So, he did go for realism but nowadays through CGI,
special effects and kind of a combination of it all
you can get these blood effects
kind of spurting out of nowhere.
- Yeah
- It's very, very interesting.
[chants]
- [Kelly] Robin Hood
Historically, this is the scene
where Richard the Lionheart dies.
- Let us put these French to bed!
- That's where history stops.
Everything else in this is dreadful.
Robin Hood here is shooting a longbow
much earlier than they did in England,
or in great numbers in England.
And the whole point of a longbow was
that it could be pulled back to the cheek.
That got four more inches of the arrow,
gave that much more ballistic force to the arrow
and that much more distance.
And what are they doing?
They're pulling it back to the chest.
Why have a longbow?
You can have just a shortbow
and you can pull it back to the chest
and it'll have the same effect.
The crossbows are defending this castle and that's not bad.
The bowmen are, however, aiming down
and once you do that with a crossbow, of course,
the bolt can fall right out.
The crossbow bolt lies on top of the groove in the crossbow
with a sting behind it and it pushes it out.
If that crossbow is turned up or down or on the side,
that bolt is just gonna roll out and finally, fire.
Oh my, why does Hollywood love fire?
You've got an arrow so long,
you put an incendiary at the end, you light it,
now you pull it back in a bow.
What's it doing in the meantime?
It's burning the bow.
Its' burning the arrow.
It's burning through everything.
You stick a glob of flammable stuff on there,
it changes the integrity of the arrow
and the entire bowman now has to deal
with a different weight that he's not been trained on.
He's gotta shoot it off before his bow catches on fire.
- It changes the trajectory of the arrow as well
- It changes the trajectory of the arrow, yeah.
Besides the fact they had no incendiaries
at this time that would have worked.
- At some point, in someone's mind,
this seemed like a good idea.
- These pricks will smash through in the morning,
take all the credit.
[chuckles]
- It just, it's one of those things
that just didn't happen the way, you know,
that they wanted it to.
And sometimes, you know, in filmmaking that happens.
Maybe the materials that were promised to you
to be available there, weren't available there.
It's understandable sometimes to see,
like, as you said Ridley Scott, you know,
how can you have perfect success, perfect success,
perfect historical accuracy and then you make this
and you're kinda scratching your head going
what happened here?
- [Kelly] Yeah.
[dramatic music]
- [Robin] It'll make a fine pin cushion!
[doors sliding]
- [Kelly] "Kill Bill"
- So this is the final scene that "Kill Bill 1".
- [O-Ren] Your instrument is quite impressive.
- We don't have any historical context
meaning we're not fighting back in the 19th century
as "The Last Samurai" or in the ancient world.
Here we get an example of the quality swords
that were made throughout history.
- [O-Ren] This is Hattori Hanzo steel
[speaking in foreign language]
[blade whooshes]
- Katana blades are made for slashing.
They do have a point on them, they can be thrust
there's no question and they're sharp enough
that the thrust can go right through.
But they're made for slashing.
- This film speaks to me personally also
because I practice iai, which is Japanese samurai sword.
So a lot of the elements that I see in here,
you know, ring true to me.
It's more Hollywood but we've seen this
in all of the sword films that we've been looking at.
Swords, especially like the katana,
you don't fight edge to edge.
- [Kelly] No.
- [Larry] You would ruin the edge.
The katana especially is a unique sword
in that it can be used as a shield
to deflect the other fighter's blade
and so you have a lot more flat to flat on it
when you're in a kind of cross with blades.
To actually hit edge to edge like that
the blade could snap in half.
- Which it does in the scenes proceeding this.
- [Larry] Of course
- There's a wonderful account of a Spanish fighter.
He goes through this battle, then he looks down at his sword
and he describes it as a saw.
- [Larry] Exactly.
- It has become a saw because they are using it--
- Edge to edge
- [Kelly] Edge to edge
- So O-Ren's sword, of course, looks a little bit different
than the bride's sword or actually different
from any other sword in the film
and that's because it's in what we call shirasaya.
That's why there's no hilt on O-Ren's sword.
The Japanese sword is a blade
from tip to tang it's a blade.
Everything else is just accoutrements.
So you could change handles,
you could change hilts on these.
You knock out a central peg and you could disassemble
or fieldstrip your sword.
And in order to store the sword
and make it preserve for many years they had wood scabbards
and without the hilt on it
you could actually seal the blade in wood.
That's one of the reasons we have many more samurai blades
still in existence than western blades
because they rotted away in a scabbard of leather
in some damp climate but not so in Japan.
And so here maybe she's like,
she's not expecting to use the sword, she's got her crazy 88
they defend her, she's got her bodyguards.
- The sword is symbol at that point.
- Absolutely, of course the bride shows up
and things kinda go downhill from there
but the much more decorative effect, even on the scabbard
you can see you the chrysanthemums
and the lacquer work in O-Ren's blade.
I think it shows that symbol, that status
that you were talking about.
- And with the bride having a sword
that she is expecting to use,
of course she's got a cross guard of that.
Even in the west we forget sometimes
that those aren't there
to stop blades coming down on the hands,
those are there to stop the hand slipping up on the blade.
And on the Katana that's very, very important,
on the western sword it's a little less important
but it is still, it puts your hand at risk,
it puts everything at risk.
I think the fact that O-Ren Ishii does not have that
gives credence to your point
about that she doesn't expect to use it.
[water dripping]
- [Kelly] Troy
[shouting]
- We're dealing with a period of Greece and Hittite history,
the epic Battle of Troy which may or may not have existed.
I think the archeology is now suggesting
that Troy was attacked.
When he appears here, Brad Pitt is wearing this helmet
that's anachronistic, I'm not sure
that I've ever seen anything like this.
Kinda like a pseudo-Corinthian helmet
with your plume put on top of it from 300.
And then he's wearing this form-fitting bronze
which doesn't protect anything except for his chest.
It doesn't protect his neck, it doesn't protect his arms.
He's got a shield which he promptly throws away.
So he's running down there and he has no defense
except for this mini skirt on.
- [Larry] Well he's Brad Pitt.
- [Kelly] But he is Brad Pitt
And he makes this odd jump
and remember he's making the comment about,
oh well this jump has to be inaccurate,
well what he's trying to do is cut over the shield
and still cut a vital organ.
Now he could have gone for the head I suppose.
- He's got no helmet either.
- Yeah and he's got no helmet.
Not sure the big boy has many brains
but if he cuts down into the arm,
the sword will go into and cut all his arteries
and enter the heart and so it's immediate death
and it was a very difficult manoeuvre in warfare
you couldn't do it with a whole line of people
but these individual combats,
that I found to be quite stunning but also very accurate.
[metal clashes]
- And our big boy there
isn't really wearing any kind of armor
so, like you said, he could of gone for the head.
I don't know that he needed to do that.
In later time periods, even when you were wearing armor,
there's articulated joints, there's seams,
that's where the term chink in my armor comes from, right?
And that's what you would aim for.
Those were those weak spots under the armpit,
down into the shoulder.
'Cause basically that's the front door
going right down through your rib cage.
So obviously, Brad didn't really stab that guy, right?
But I mean, - Hope not.
- In the scene it looks like, you know,
it swallows the entire blade.
Obviously that had to be CGI, computer generated.
In fact, he probably didn't even have a sword in his hand
for most of those scenes, he may have just had the handle
and then through green screen processes
they would edit that in there
so it looked like he had a sword.
[sword whooshes]
And of course, again we do this in layers.
He's gonna come running with a real sword
right up til before he stabs him.
Then we're gonna do the after effects,
then we're gonna do that multiple, multiple times.
So at some point the blade went away
and then, through the use of computer-generated imagery,
miraculously, the blade's back in his hand again
and it's got a full, full blade.
But that's the magic of the filmmaking art nowadays,
what computers have allowed us to do.
In the past, you wouldn't have been able
to do a scene like that.
That's where you see some of these bad
catching a blade under the armpit.
It just becomes one more trick in you bag of tricks to use
for that specific scene 'cause if you overdo it
it starts looking bad.
- Is there no one else?
- [Kelly] King Arthur
[chanting]
[arrows whistling through the air]
[indistinct shouting]
Arthur is probably the biggest hero in the middle ages.
Probably the biggest hero, maybe one of the biggest heroes
that ever comes out of literature.
- Arthur, wherever I go
on this wretched island, I hear your name.
- And yet there's a question about whether Arthur existed.
We've got more different legends
in the middle ages of Arthur, we have very different legends
coming out if the middle ages of Arthur.
This is Antoine Fuqua's version of Arthur.
He's having a lot of fun with it.
Does it match anything, any real Arthur?
- [Larry] Not really.
- Probably not but we're having fun.
- And that's the idea of the film.
- The arms and armor, you know, they're all around,
I'm sure the barbarians used all sorts of different weapons.
The Saxon armies always used different weapons.
The trebuchets, though, I love that.
They are just really, really well made.
Yeah, the one thing that you wouldn't use in a trebuchet
is a flaming ball.
- [Larry] For sure.
- 'Cause you're putting this flaming ball in a leather pouch
that you're using as a sling and then you're winding up
and pulling down and that's letting that go.
By that time the whole leather sling's burned
and your fireball is now burning your trebuchet.
So nobody in their right mind would do that.
[explosions]
[wailing]
They would have shot stones and the reason for a trebuchet
is not against people either, I mean, a stone hit somebody
that would be nice but it's only hitting one.
In a siege they're gonna sweep the men off the top
and then they're also going to throw into the town,
terrorize the people in town.
- You know, from a filmmaking point of view
in this scene there's a lot of stuff going on.
We've got fire arrows, we've got trebuchets
throwing big fire balls, we've got horses.
You know what, horses don't like fire
and we've got live horses on set
running in amongst the fire.
Fire work is very dangerous and very technical.
You've gotta be careful about that.
You'll notice when you have these big trenches of flame
going through the scenes, the guys in the background,
they're quite a distance from the fire.
That's for safety reasons obviously.
Any time your using flaming gags in a film
it's very, very tricky.
It's very difficult to just create a flaming arrow.
To shoot an arrow in the air and have it go through the air
and not extinguish itself is a true skill.
There's different dampeners
that you can put ahead of the flame
to kinda cut down the air flow.
Blades, you know, swords that have to be flaming swords
we'll build gag swords
that are actually hollow on the inside
and have a bladder of some kind of flammable material
in there and then maybe we'll puncture the edge of the sword
and it'll drip out in a controlled manner
to keep the sword on fire.
Any time you can, in the filmmaking process,
you can film something for real,
rather than having to add it in in CGI,
it's better to do it for real.
So if I can have him standing there holding a flaming sword,
let's film that as long as it can be done safely.
[explosions]
[shouting]
- Films and T.V. are always going
to mix history and entertainment.
Some do it very well and some not at all.
- Props are probably one of the most,
if not the most important thing in a film.
The actor interacting with the different props,
you know, having to actually pull the string back
on a bow and arrow.
That one little bit of realism, the weight of a shield.
That's the difference between what turns out
to be a good movie and one that it's like,
that was okay, but I'm not gonna go see it again.