Prop Master and Historian Fact Check Weapons from 'Kill Bill' to 'Troy' | Vanity Fair

why does Hollywood love fire they go ah like that and it looks like they got shot through the eye you're kind of scratching your head going what happened here hi I'm Larry Zanna we've armor at independent studios services I'm Kellie DeFries professor of history at Loyola University of Maryland today we're going to review arms and armor from film and TV both from a prop makers perspective and a historians perspective the last summer [Applause] so the era we're talking about here is the middle 19th century but the film is focused on this last group of holdouts that do not want to modernize in Japan the and they are the Last Samurai it's unfortunate on this on this attack that we don't see more of the bows because I thought I really liked that the guy getting up and moving the bow up above his head it was the Japanese style of bow of archery in order to get the fullness out of their long bows and they're using long bows very similar to the English which we'll see later they would raise them above the head and shoot him in this direction if we'd 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 I suppose at this time fun most inaccurate thing in this whole scene is the is the use of the ninjas nobody shows up a black costume at this time well it's a movie about Japanese samurais you got to have ninja you know you know where where can put them even if they weren't dressed in black even if they were foreign mercenaries that come the goal was to kill cut samoto don't you think they would have shown up with a modern bolt-action rifle that I've always found this this whole image of the ninja kind of fascinating because that image is the Hollywood image a guy dressed all in black he's this special forces guy and it's like that's not what they were that whole idea of them came dressed in black came from like Kabuki theater where the stagehands wear black and blend into the background like the blue Naraku puppets were the puppeteers stand there he kind of 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 filmmakers perspective you know 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 with The Last Samurai we did a lot of the manufacturing of the prop weapons and everything you 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 a some classic gags you know you got someone hiding an arrow or a shuriken you know in their hand and then they go like that and it looks like they got shot through the eye you know those are those are very old tricks but they work they still work really really well you know back in the movie Ron or so uh-huh in the movie Ron when the hero is up in the tower and he shoots down at one of the guys who's attacking his aide you can actually see the foam target under the clothing that was a real bow and arrow that they actually shot at someone's back nowadays you can't know Junior Seau what for realist over realism but nowadays through CGI special effects and kind of a combination of it all you can get these blood effects you know kind of spurting out of nowhere it's very very interesting Robin Hood historically this is the scene where Richard Lionheart died that's where history stops everything else in this is dreadful Robin Hood here is shooting along Beaumont earlier than they did in England I'm 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 in the arrow gave that much more ballistic force to the arrow and that much more distance and what do they doing the pose back to the chest well I have a longbow you're gonna have just a short bow when you can pull back to the chest it'll have the same effect crossbows the bows are defending this castle and that's not bad the bowmen are however aiming down and once you do that with a crossbow course the bolt could have fallen right now the crossbow bolt lies on top of the groove in the crossbow with the string behind it and it pushes it out if that crossbow is turned up or down or on the side that bolt is just to roll out and finally fire oh my why does Hollywood love fire we've got an arrow it's so long you put up incendiary at the end you light it and now you pull it back at the ball what's it doing in the meantime it's burning the bow it's burning the arrow it's burning through everything you stick a glob of flavorable stuff on there it changes the integrity of the arrow and the entire bowmen now has to deal with a different weight that he's not been trained on he's got to shoot it off before his boat catches on fire the trajectory of the attraction yeah yeah besides the fact they had no incendiaries in Europe at this time it would have worked at some point in someone's mind this seemed like a good idea it just it's one of those things that just didn't happen another 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 kind of scratching your head going what happened here Kill Bill so this is the final scene that Kill Bill one your instrument is quite impressive we don't have any you know historical context being we're not fighting back in the 19th century is the last right or in the ancient world here we get an example of the quality swords that were made throughout history Torii Hunter Steele who sought scale katana blades are made for slashing that you have a point on them they can be thrust there's no question and they're sharp enough for the thrust they're gonna go right so go right through but they'd they're made for slashing this film speaks to me personally also because I practice AI 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 you know 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 fighters blade and so you have a lot more a flat to flat on it when you're you know kind of crossed with put blades to actually hit edge to edge like that the blade could snap in half which it doesn't they and it seems preceded this of course yeah there's wonderful count of Spanish fighter he goes through this battle and he looks down on this sorting he describes it as a saw exactly it is become a saw because they are using edge to edge so orange 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 Shura saya that's why there's no hilt or Norns sword the the Japanese sword is a blade from tip to tang it's it's a blade everything else is just the crew Tremont's so you could change handles you could change on these you knock out a central pig and you could disassemble or field-strip your sword and in order to store the sword and make it preserved 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 you know in some damn 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 sort of symbol at that point absolutely of course the bride shows up and and things kind of go downhill from there but the much more decorative effect even on the scabbard you can see the chrysanthemums and the lacquer work in orange blade I think it shows that 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 fast car I love 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 hats going slipping up on the play on the katana that's very very important Westridge 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 that or Anish yet does not have that give credence to your point about the this she doesn't expect to use it Troy or deal with period of greece and the hittite history the the epic battle of troy which may or may not have existed I think the archaeology is now suggesting that Troy was attacked when he appears here Brad Pitt is wearing this helmet it's anachronistic I'm not sure that I've ever seen anything like this kind of like a pseudo Corinthian helmet with a 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 doesn't protect his neck it does 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 miniskirt on his bread pit but he is president yeah and he makes the sod jump and everybody is making this comment up oh well that jump has to be inaccurate well what he's trying to do is cut over the shield and still cut a vinyl organ now I could have got my helmet either right he's got no I'm not sure a big boy has many brains but if he cuts down into the arm the sword will go in too and cut all those others and enter the heart and so it's immediate death and it was a very difficult maneuver in warfare you couldn't do with old line of people though these individual combats that I found to be quite stunning but also very accurate and our big boy there isn't really wearing any kind of armor so like you said he could have gone for the head I don't know that he needed to do that in later time periods you even when you were wearing armor there's articulated joints there there seems that's where the term 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 into the shoulder because basically that's the front door going right down through your rib cage so obviously you know Brad didn't really stab that guy right but I mean in the scene it looks like you know it swallows the entire blade obviously that 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 and of course again we do this in layers he's got to come running with a real sword right up so before he stabs him and we're gonna do the aftereffect 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 blades back in his end again and it's got a full full blade but that that's the magic of the filmmaking our town days with what computers have allowed us to do in the past you 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 your bag of tricks to use for that specific scene because if you overdo it it starts looking bad [Music] King Arthur [Applause] 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 wherever I go on this wretched Island I hear your name and yet there's a question about whether an arthur existed we've got more different legends in the Middle Ages of Arthur we have very different legends coming out of the Middle Ages of Arthur this is Antoine Fuqua version of Arthur he's having a lot of fun with it doesn't it match anything any meal Arthur probably not but we're having fun and that's the idea of the film the arm star mer you know they're all around I'm sure the barbarians used all sorts of different weapons the Saxon armies always use different weapons the trayvis shades though I love them they are just really really well-made yeah the one thing that you wouldn't use it in a trebuchet is a flaming ball because you you're putting this flaming ball in a leather 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 slings burned a fire fireball is now burning your trebuchet so nobody in the right mind would do that they would have shot stones and the reason for a trebuchet is not against people either I mean stone hits somebody that would be nice but it's only in one and the seeds are gonna sweep the 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 tribute Shea's throne big fireballs we've got horses you know what horses don't like fire and and we've got live horses on the set running in amongst the fire fire work is very dangerous and very technical you got to 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 you're using flaming gags in a film it's 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 is a true skill there's different dampeners that you can put ahead of the flame to kind of cut down the airflow blades you know swords that have to be flaming swords will build gagged swords that are actually hollow on the inside and have a bladder of some kind of flammable material in there and then maybe will puncture the edge of the sword and it'll drip out in a controlled manner to keep the sword on fire anytime 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 them standing there holding a flaming sword let's film that you know as long as it can be done safely films TV are always going to mix history and entertainment some do 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's what turns out to be a good movie and one that it's like yeah that was okay but I'm not gonna go see it again

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: battle scenes, kill bill, troy, battle scene fact check, vanity fair reviews, prop master, historian, experts fact check, historian fact check, fact check weapons, king arthur, the last samurai, robin hood, expert reviews, experts review, vanity fair review, film expert, movie props, history movies, fact check movies, fact check battle scenes, larry zanoff, kelly devries, weapons, war movies, fight scene, prop master and historian, battle scene, vanity fair

Id: -neRaBGL8Ts

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019