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I came up with the idea
of that zoom of that lens
changing as he gets closer and closer.
I used a piece of that heat vision
that looked like the reflection of an eye
and I put two frames in,
then I think a black frame.
Whatever I created was consistent
throughout the whole film.
Al Di Sarro on the film's weaponry:
The Mexico military had to keep the guns.
Our weapons specialist would load them
and, in fact, the military helped.
We had that big GE,
the Gatling gun that Jesse Ventura used.
That was quite a rig. It never worked.
They had nothing but problems with it,
nothing but problems with the guns.
The gun house, Stembridge, sent out
a guy by the name of Mike Papac.
We became, and still are to this day,
the best of friends.
He is now probably one of
Hollywood's top prop guys
and probably one of the biggest
owners of a large variety of weapons.
He set up a work station in
our special-effects trailer.
Not only is that where we spend
more time than we do in our homes,
but it's where all the creative
thoughts and decisions are made,
and mechanically and physically
put into effect.
He and I rebuilt the Gatling gun,
got it working.
There were a lot of old parts on the gun.
We had to fabricate some new pieces.
We had to retap, rethread some new holes,
we rewired the thing, we simplified it.
He tore the whole thing down.
He actually field-stripped that weapon,
which scared me
because it was in so many pieces
I didn't think it would ever go back together.
It was a real weapon,
but there's a lot that goes into
making a studio gun an efficient gun.
You don'tjust put a blank in
an automatic weapon and fire it.
The blank doesn't create enough gas
in the chamber to eject the shell.
What you have to do is drill
the barrel out and tap it,
and you put a plug in the end of the barrel
and in that plug you drill a hole.
What that does is restrict the gas.
The right-size hole creates enough pressure
in the barrel to eject the shell
and it creates a bigger muzzle flash.
Perhaps the movie's
most memorable sequence
is the one in which the commandos
unleash their fire power into the jungle.
(Di Sarro)
We called that the "mow-down" sequence.
And we actually were out in
thatjungle for two weeks, maybe more.
We had a crew out there doing
nothing but wiring explosives.
We just let the good times roll on
that one. It was awesome, wasn't it?
We had thousands of SD-100s,
from De La Mare Engineering,
which is about
the biggest charge you could set,
and hundreds of feet of 100-grain primer cord
which burns at a rate of
25,000 feet per second.
That's what was actually
cutting the trees in half.
That was one of Joel Silver's favourite things.
David Stone and Richard Anderson
on the sound of the Minigun:
(Stone) Whatever kind of blanks
or propane gas that it shot
to create the visual in production,
they were very proud
that it shot 400 rounds a minute.
That means it's a high-frequency event.
The higher the frequency, the less
alarming it sounds - it's just a buzz.
There's nothing on our planet
that comes as close to the sound of that gun
as a gas-powered leaf-blower.
The challenge was to make a gun that
sounded macho and bitching and scary,
that had enough low-end material
to be foreboding,
that would still appear
to fire off nearly that many rounds.
(Anderson) We used a US Army
50mm machine gun, mounted on a tank.
The problem is, they don't fire really fast.
(Stone) We had to find a way
to speed up their frequency
without losing their fearsomeness.
We tried cutting them close together,
but if we cut them too close,
we were back to sounding like the original.
We cut a number of these. 50 calibres
together, with sweeteners,
and then had to layer them
on tracks to multiply them.
(Anderson) So it was staggered: One would
go in the space between two others.
Then we added in the