Another Cinema-related piece from Terry...The World War II film “Flags of Our Fathers”(2006), was directed by Clint Eastwood, and told the story of the American marines landing on the island of Iwo Jima, under heavy gunfire, to capture it from the Japanese. To film the beach landing required several hundred “extras” who needed to be meticulously choreographed. As well as using several cameras set at strategic points, Eastwood decided that he needed ‘cutaway’ shots that looked like the film shot by wartime news cameramen.
So! How did he do it?? He asked one of the extras to carry with him an ammunition
box as he ran up the beach among the others, some of whom were ‘playing dead’. But what he didn’t tell him was that the ammunition box was, in fact a camera. So, the shaky shots taken as he ran up the beach looked exactly like wartime footage. Clint Eastwood was asked, “Why didn’t you tell the extra that it was a camera he’d be carrying?” “Because’, Eastwood said,
‘if he had known, he would have ended up trying to film it for me!!'
Once more, Necessity is the mother of invention.
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