January 17, 2002
Empire Online
Pictures from Empire Online & AP
(click on thumbnails for larger pic)
A Few Good Men
While glittery blockbuster premieres are synonymous with beautifully tailored gowns and dazzling jewellery, last night’s Black Hawk Down premiere (17 January) was surprisingly easy on the lip gloss. The film’s exclusively male cast – having thankfully shed the film’s army-issue haircuts – were all charm and smiles as they gathered at London’s Empire Leicester Square cinema to open Ridley Scott’s latest masterpiece.
Based on the gruelling battle that followed a military operation in Somalia back in 1993, the film depicts the longest sustained ground battle since the Vietnam War. When two US Black Hawk helicopters are shot down, the US Rangers - true to their motto to ‘leave no man behind’ - go head to head with thousands of Somali troops in a bid to bring home their fallen comrades. The film features some of the most visceral and horrifically realistic warfare ever depicted on screen and, for the first time since the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, gives viewers a real look at what actual war must be like.
“I think it’s the most accurate depiction of modern-day warfare there’s been,” Ewan McGregor told Empire Online. “I don’t think there’s been any other film that touches it on this kind of level. I mean Three Kings was brilliant but it was behind the lines, this is a story about the battle, that’s all it’s about. You get about twenty minutes of finding out who people are and then the war kicks off and the end of the film is when it finishes.”
McGregor plays a desk clerk who gets his first real taste of action when he’s dropped into the melting pot and must fight for his life in the warzone of downtown Mogadishu. “It was very intense shooting the film. They had long takes and so many cameras out there, they just stuck them all over the place. They’d call ‘Action!’ and you’d manage to run from this street round to the next street with all this blowing up around you. It was quite full-on.”
Joining McGregor were co-stars Josh Hartnett, Jason Isaacs, Ewan Bremner, Matthew Marsden and others, including Lord of The Rings’ elven hero, Orlando Bloom, who was also keen to point out that the shoot was no walk in the park. “It was pretty gruelling and I didn’t do as much of the running around as a lot of the boys ‘cause I’m the first man down. The film was more reacting than acting, you didn’t even have to act like you were getting shot because you were often getting paintballs fired all around you. But it was fantastic, I used to run around with toy machine guns, wearing all that combat gear and suddenly I’m being paid for it.”
Director Ridley Scott himself was also in attendance accompanied by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose latest war film is a long way from the sappy sentiment of Pearl Harbor. “When you read the battle in the book this film was based on, you get such a sense of the desperation, the power and the terror and I think that comes across in the film. It’s an event that many people don’t know about, It’s something that many people died for and people should know about it.”
