Stunts on The Pacific
To evoke the harrowing realities of war for the three main
characters and their fellow Marines, it was essential that the
production team of The Pacific create as realistic a
setting as possible, especially in the battle scenes.
To achieve this without endangering the actors was the
responsibility of stunt coordinators Charlie Croughwell and Mitch
Deans, special effects supervisor Joss Williams and visual effects
supervisor John Sullivan.
Croughwell and Deans worked closely with the directors on the
staging of battle scenes, keeping safety the top priority. "The
stunts and the actors and special ability extras [extras who
attended boot camp with the principal cast] are coordinated to make
sure that everything looks as visually pleasing as possible, and is
as safe as possible", says Deans. "That's my key role here."
What on screen appears to be a chaotic battle scene is in reality a
well-choreographed performance, with actors nimbly hitting their
marks between explosions.
Croughwell adds, "In many films you use a stunt double for a lot of
this. With this one, we wanted to try to utilise the actors as much
as possible, which is great, because they were all young and in
great shape and they were all willing to do it."
The stunt coordinators also collaborated with special effects
supervisor Joss Williams, whose team was in charge of rigging the
squibs, the small charges that cause the bullet holes in costumes
and sets. The team took special pains to ensure that the scale of
the stunt and explosion was an authentic reaction to the specific
artillery used.
The actual rigging and detonation of the myriad explosions were
Williams' domain, which also required sophisticated planning to
ensure the safety of the cast while creating a sense of
peril.
Many of Williams' crew were veterans of the 2001 HBO miniseries
Band of Brothers and had worked on various other projects
together.
Williams gives an example of one set-up, explaining, "We're doing
15 explosions in the background alone. Then, through the mid-ground
and into the foreground, we'd have something in the region of 50 to
60 explosions, including our water banks, all going off in one
take. That needs a huge amount of choreography."
Among numerous other effects, visual effects supervisor Sullivan
multiplied the number of troops disembarking from landing craft to
attack the beach through the use of computer-generated imagery,
creating a force ten times its actual size.
Barges were enlarged to look like landing ship tanks (LSTs), which
would carry sizeable quantities of vehicles, cargo and troops to
shore.
Sullivan explains that the barges were filmed with working period
"amtracs [amphibious tractors] which would have troops and guns on
them disembarking to attack the beach. I used both
computer-generated imagery and also cloned what I shot to create
the appearance of a fleet and a background with many, many LSTs
discharging amtracs for the attack."
The goal of Sullivan's work was to "lend a tremendous sense of
reality to what we're doing, to make something that is accurate to
what the true war in the Pacific was."
