Fuze, which arrives in UK cinemas this weekend, stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as an Afghanistan veteran and bomb disposal expert who is urgently called in to assist when an unexploded WWII bomb is discovered on a busy construction site in the centre of London. From there, the film takes all sorts of twists and turns – incorporating a heist element – with other key cast members including Theo James and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
"I said, 'You tell me what you want, and I'll give you options that reflect your requirement,'" he recalls in an exclusive interview with Radio Times. "Ranging from completely plausible and viable to Hollywood fantasy.
Orr's role from that point onwards included both checking over the script and consulting on set while filming was ongoing, ensuring that nothing shown on screen would be straying too far from the reality.
"He said, 'What do you want to do with them?' [And] I said, 'As safely as you can I want to scare them. I want them to understand what explosives do and what that means."
"We blew up a pig's head from a butcher’s to show what explosives do to flesh," he says. "It's grim, but it's true. It's factual. And it gives them something to base their response on."
Of course, with Mackenzie having made clear he was looking for as realistic a depiction of explosives and bomb disposal as possible, there were certain traps it was vital not to fall into. It was paramount, Orr explains, to avoid the kind of "Hollywood, John Woo-style" explosions where "there's great big balls of fire everywhere."
"And then you see a great big detonation, and the guys are flying across car parks. And it doesn't [do that]. Think of throwing a watermelon in front of a high speed train. That's what it does to humans. It's not really comparable to the screen. The only film I've seen really getting it right was Saving Private Ryan."
"Actors don't carry weight in their body armour or in their bones," he says. "Whereas [when I was a] soldier, I was carrying 50/60, kilos on my back and maybe 20 kilos on my chest. Water, ammunition, explosives. That changes the way your body moves. It changes the way you interact with the ground. It changes the way you can stand.
"You can't hold a pose, holding a conversation in a kneeling position for five minutes when you're carrying that weight. So when Aaron's doing the scenes in Afghanistan [in Fuze], his kit is fully loaded. He's got ballistic plates on, he's got water bottles. Obviously he doesn't have bullets in there, but he's got supplementary weight in there, so that you can see that the weight is hanging off him, and when he's moving, it's holding him down. And that shows."
"I was an instructor of IED and EOD bomb disposal at both the UK schools, and I've seen many, many people come through," he says. "I've seen the absolute wizards of the world, British Army officers, coming through and overthinking it. Then you get a very, very young, pragmatic sergeant who just does what he's told and gets on with it.
"And for every device, for every item, from a grenade to a nuclear bomb, there is what we call an appropriate response. If you don't understand what that is at that point in the task, then you're going to hurt someone or hurt yourself. I think Aaron carried it very well. I was very impressed, because the way he comes across as Will Tranter is not what he's like... He's quite a jovial guy!"
He adds: "It deals with a couple of IEDs from Afghanistan, and then it deals with a German World War Two bomb. And the technology there is well known and well documented. It's all open source. So there was nothing I felt uncomfortable about revealing."
View Green Video on the source websiteHe was very much aware that "time is money" on set, however, and kept his interventions to a minimum while things were being shot. "There's only a couple of shots where I went, 'We need to look at that again. That's not an appropriate response," he says.
Apart from anything else, he explains, he didn't want to cross any boundaries and abuse his position as an adviser to exert too much authority over the artistic vision of Mackenzie. This is something he reckons a few people in his line of work may have a little more trouble dealing with, which means he has to be careful about which of his peers to bring on board for this kind of work in the future.
"So I don't want someone with the strength of character of my peer group going, 'Nope. You can't do that.’ They’d be kicked off set and I'd be embarrassed. I've got to really choose who I take with me!"
So would he do anything different next time around?
"I've had some really good gigs and some some troubling gigs [in my career]," he adds. "I enjoy bomb disposal, but I gotta say... I prefer movies now!"
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