Prop Master and Historian Fact Check Weapons from 'Game of Thrones' to '300' | Vanity Fair

you're probably surprised to know that very little of this is historic I'm Larry zeniff lead armor and independent studio services the largest prop house in the world I'm Kellie DeFries professor of history at Loyola University of Maryland and honor a historical consultant for the Royal Armouries UK today we're going to review arms and armor from film and TV both from a prop makers perspective and a historians perspective Knights - so from a prop making perspective of course this is a very difficult scene right I mean we have real horses charging at each other we got real guys mounted on top of them if you look real good on these particular Lance's they are breakaway props and they've actually been stuffed with like a form of dry spaghetti so that when you it shatters you get that classic kind of splintering that occurs on camera anytime you can film something for real it's better than CGI and so that's one of the tricks we use to be able to film a real joust but without injuring anyone and still get that kind of spectacular explosion very dynamic and and it gives you the feel of how much force is behind the lance as it hits and shatters multiples upon multiples would have been created you know by the prop crew by the prop makers months and months and months before not that far off from what a medieval tournament would have correct every night would have shown up with multiple Lance is expecting to break them on non-contact and you are Ulrich von Lichtenstein from Gelderland all right from Liechtenstein Heath Ledger is a professional trimmer he goes from tournament to tournament to tournament well these guys that's how they made their living and so they had a term form they were called freelancers consequently the term is coming out freelancers somebody working but on contract for victory in the tournament in this case we have to remember the tournaments of games that's all they are there martial games nobody is supposed to die on these on the other hand you see the blow to the face [Music] the blow to the face is very interesting because when the Knights are jesting they would have a small shield on them called the Targ which was a target and the only points they could score is if they hit that or they hit the the face if you scored no points if you had a if he hit the torso if you hit the arm you sometimes lost points so this blow that he takes right into the face it's very accurate I wonder nowadays were so conscious about concussion protocol so I think how many of these diets get hit in the face oh you get points and the other guy is really in concussion protocol at that point Game of Thrones Game of Thrones is what we call medieval ISM it isn't set in the Middle Ages but it is using medieval weapons medieval armor a medieval tendencies John's brother is running right away from Ramsay Bolton who's going to shoot arrows at him big mistake he makes this runs in a straight line don't run in a straight line if you're being shot at with both the technique here is good the bow is weird how exactly this bow is made but it is a longbow of sorts and he is pulling it back as far as he can and he gets quite a great distance on it the sword themselves are pretty accurate these are hand and a half source which is the most common sword in the Middle Ages that's not their term that's ours but that meant that it could be used with one or two hands and we often see the sword being wielded by John or by anybody else with one or two hands the other thing I like about this is Ramsay has a dagger now it's not the way a medieval knight would have worn it he would have worn it down the left thigh but he does have a dagger and you can see how sharp and long it is because that's the death-dealing weapon in the Middle Ages a lot of scenes in medieval battles never show what is probably one of the worst things on the battlefield which is thirst medieval battles were often very short but if it went on for very long the aspect of thirst and fatigue took over so much we have scenes in medieval chronicles where the soldiers are sucking the hilts of their swords to get that a little bit of moisture out of the out of the leather in order to keep going in order to not to die of thirst there's the one famous problem that we have as Jon Snow's jumping up on through his horse and and he's got a floppy sword right there there's a lot of talk about this on the internet people were going oh look they forgot to put the sword into his scabbard but that's not true because if you look at the clip you can actually see the grip of the sword and the cross bar of the hilt at the top of the scabbard and yet the scabbard is flapping around like there's nothing in it there's a perfectly logical explanation for this the reason that it flops around like there's no blade inside is because there's no blade okay this would have been a stunt rig that has a handle as if there's a sword in the scabbard but there's no blade attached to that handle and there's several different reasons why that may have occurred later on in the scene his horse stumbles and he kind of does one of these hero moment somersaults right off of the horse that would have been a very difficult if not downright dangerous thing for the actor or stunt person to do and normally when you have big scenes like this the filmmaker will always want to do one or two what we call master shots where it's a big wide shot from start to finish and so there was no room to cut in between him hopping on the horse and him falling off the horse to change out that stunt blade so it's more a safety issue it's not an issue of neglect it wasn't like the prop crew forgot about putting you know I mean this is Jon Snow it Longclaw is his sword it's made a Valyrian steel it doesn't flop around like that but in this particular case the safety overruled what they were doing as far as the prop itself [Music] gladiator we're in the middle Arial period Roman history Maximus has been captured and sold as a slave in the gladiator arena that's Benny slaves were and we see it as first gladitoria bout the movie is gladiator and there's a lot of props in it but what's the main proper going to be Claudius it's gonna be the Gladius exactly I mean gladiators are called letters because they used the cloudy exactly they made them in an industrial fashion with a low-carbon iron for the blade not particularly sharp and a wooden Hill that was not particularly varied Roman soldiers show up here's your Gladius almost like a GI might get a gun or whatever the roman empire was built on the Gladius short thrusting sword and yet here he is but these big wide are Sonny slashing and cutting and it just wasn't designed for that it would have been used behind a shield shield protecting the soldier soldiering using the sharp point to kill his opponent that wound is appointment look forward this is not the way he would have used it unfortunately we can't use real swords in our version of the fight so we do things like we told them the edges that allows an actor to have the real weight of the sword gives them the feeling of really being in a sword fight we'll also make an aluminum version so you can actually do stage combat contact with the blades and then we'll probably do a rubber or maybe even a retractable so you can like stab someone and pull out without actually injuring the actors and if you watch the scene itself you know there's that classic Hollywood you can almost see where the swords are going right under the armpit of the guy on the far side of the camera and he kind of traps her anxious slashes a couple of times which is real and then he does exactly what you were trying to do which is to thrust with those swords you can see is actually stabbing something there's a little bit of movement in the blades but that could actually be from what they were stuck in chances are these were actually stuck into a mannequin and so they're just hanging there in the mannequin wobbling and of course if I stabbed you right now with the Gladius it would probably just watch them just a bit you know this is as close as you can get in filmmaking to actually stabbing someone in the arena and seeing what that would be like is very well done in this film yeah it's almost disappointing afterwards then to see the decapitation because that does look bad the decapitation scene for me is is really bad first of all like we said the Gladius was probably not sharp enough to actually be able to do that even if roman Gladius is were it's not a slashing weapon it's a stabbing or thrusting weapon and then lastly is he's taking the two swords and he's cutting inward your body is limiting your slash so you're robbing yourself of energy if anything an outward cut would have been the way maybe giving him a little bit of an edge he would be able to get this done but yeah that that Tunisia spent that one step too far I again remember his name would be yours Oh time the most famous battle in the ancient world and we see Leonidas with his 300 Spartans in the hot gates which is what's muffler was called and you can still see him today gladiator the main weapon is the Claudius the sword in ancient Greek warfare it was the hoplite was the main soldier and he carried hoplon driving his name from the shield the very important armor they protected him and all of his conflicts these are all pretty men in this film and and I'm not saying the Spartans themselves were pretty but clearly Hollywood is is wanting to show the chest muscles no self-respecting Spartan ever would have gone into a battle without having to Arsenal armor on I like the fact that the that the Unitas has put his troops in this kind of modified filings your father should have told you how a failings if Alex was a triangular formation where the lead man would have his shield overlap the the one behind him and the one behind him and that would be filled so that wasn't hollow but it was a full group of men formed in that triangular manner and they would hit another phalanx or hit another unit and push them into their direction while using their spears behind the shield's in order to to mow down the front ring it's kind of a movable field fortification yeah with the shields and correct me if I'm wrong but the the strength of the Phalanx was it wasn't just the front row with the spirit the spears were long enough that you had three or four ranks reaching through and so you're you're attacking this giant porcupine of Spears it's not something the enemy would really want to run up against it it would be be tough to defeat them in battle so Spears they use that's our main offensive weapon it's wooden shaft with a metal tip as we can see those are the ones you can only see on screen and they they're pretty good what is less known is that there's also a typically end and this goes into the ground so the hoplite can actually use this coming out and use the pressure of the ground as well as his own thrusting to reinforce the reinforce it and also to help stop the the fellings from being pushed back too far one good example of the moviemaking process slipping in is the shields some of them were sourced as leftovers from the movie Troy yes because it's expensive just like back then it was expensive to make shields it's sure so they make them now but to give away for me as far as it being a prop really is the uniformity every one of them has that great lambda oh yeah which wasn't even necessarily historically correct for that period if you had you know every shield individualized like they probably did back then it would become very expensive for the prop makers the Spears of course we see some of them shattering those would have had to have been breakaways purposely made props that are pre scored in some way to shatter at a specific point because we can't just have it shatter we have to have a cheddar the same things over and over and over again because we do take toothpicks 8:45 you know it's just an immense amount of effort gets poured into making the props and then you kind of jump 30 percent more to give yourself a cushion because there's always that unknown that could happen out on the set we have a saying in the prop world if you have one you have none Monty Python and the Holy Grail you're probably surprised to know that very little of this is historical this scene is is is made for the ridiculous things we can learn you'll notice the sorts of course they're both doing this is a sword duel and then the swords are going to be preposterous Lee Sharpe they're too long that we should say off the bat but the interesting thing is how if you wanted to kill somebody on a battlefield in the Middle Ages how did you do it you and had a dagger and very few people killed with the sword if you've got your opponent immobilized and they're on the ground or whatever bring out your dagger go into the crowded artery go into the drama into the heart go up the groin and into the femoral artery or always a good choice the knife in the eye the reality of medieval warfare not many people died and the reason they didn't dies there was worth money the better your Armour was the better your weapons were was a sign that you could pay for yourself being captured and therefore not die there there's actually a name derived from this which is called blackmail in a tournament the victor won the armor of the opponent and he could sell it back to in fact he didn't want an extra peasant pair of armor around so he would sell it back to the opponent and this became known as black man the reason why is because the man who who were seated in these tournaments usually wore black male because they didn't polish their own armor and thus we get Bell black male clearly we're not cutting arms and limbs off of an actor but we've faked it very effectively I think in in some way we got the Geiser blood pumping out that's obviously either a hose that's connected off-camera to a special effects apparatus that's pumping the blood or within the wardrobe they could have hidden different blood packs and the guy has kind of a little hand pump and he's squirting that out we get down to the scenes where he's got no legs the actor obviously they dug a hole and he's standing down in the hole and it looks like he's standing on the stumps of his you know of his legs we're coming to drool Maximillian [Music] [Music] when I first saw this scene I was just blown away it's just very very impressive a number one thing that jumps out at me about this scene is it's raining that's not real rain that's a rain effect we can control this rain it can be raining all day long on that set that means that the stunt people the crew that are surrounding them all the background active they're all getting drenched there might have been some protective clothing underneath the armored electric battery warming socks and things like that to keep maybe even a wetsuit to try to keep the actors dry because it is very fatiguing to to work under those conditions also the props themselves don't always stand up very well in those rainy conditions metal of course rusts rubber swords that are painted the paint would start bubbling up and everything and then not not the least of which is continuity wise you know puddles on the ground are gonna be getting bigger and smaller depending upon the stage of the battle and when you go back to do take 2 take 3 take 4 you always want to start out at the same continuity point so there's a lot of stuff going on in this scene and it's done very very well if all the scenes we've seen this is by far the most accurate I'd say this maybe most doctors seeing I've seen in any Hollywood production or any movie production of Middle Ages who ever has gone out and acquired the armor you can see the way that it holds over the body and how fluid it is now much it works how protective it is how many different ridges there are all of this shows great research and great ability to understand what a medieval combat like this was here you will see that they they are wearing armor ompletely on the body and that's because this isn't the regulated game being played by the two opponents of the Knight's Tale in this case they really are fighting and they're fighting to show manliness to do so they could hit anywhere and they are so they have to be protected swords a little long they wouldn't have been used in battle but the armor here could have gone right onto the battlefield from this tournament here's the perfect example or we can see that that helmets were purchased by medieval soldiers based on a number of different reasons visibility is essential of course but he has very small visibility both helmets have very small visibility because they are in a dual situation where they might get hit in the face but what's better is we've got the perspective out of his eye you can see how limited now the eye sight is the protection of the eyes was the most essential thing combats were supposed to be over quickly and so breathing becomes an issue but not if they're over at the time they're supposed to be this is the Fox Jude in the helmet to keep them alive I wouldn't notice though not just the armor that it's in the in this sequence but those two guards are armored exactly like this should be the cattle Helms and that's what they call kennel helmets are perfect their armor is perfect that's downgraded this is just a marvelous scene from beginning to end [Music] films TV are always going to mix history and entertainment some pill very well and sometimes all but it's important to remember what we're doing and what we're doing is telling a story even if it's not a hundred percent historically accurate Hollywood is still very successful in getting the message across

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: prop master, historian, experts fact check, historian fact check, expert fact check, fact check weapons, game of thrones, expert reviews, experts review, 300, gladiator, monthy python, a knights tale, vanity fair review, vanity fair fact checks, film expert, movie props, history movies, battle scenes, game of thrones battle, game of thrones review, larry zanoff, kelly devries, jousting, fight scene, war movies, fact check movies, weapons, vanity fair

Id: awioL9P8RPw

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019