It turns out you can teach the latest action hero new tricks. After a few years away from the action hero game, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns guns blazing in Netflix’s new action-comedy FUBAR, playing soon-to-retire CIA agent Luke Brunner, who discovers his daughter, Emma (Monica Barbaro), is also in the spy game. However, as befits modern production techniques, many of these weapons were made of rubber.
“We used imaginary guns when there were stunts involving people being hit by the gun or if we were far enough apart,” Schwarzenegger told Yahoo Entertainment. “We used the whole range of different weapons because with the close-ups you can tell right from wrong.”
Watch our interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the FUBAR stream on YouTube:
It’s a change from the action movies the Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor cut his teeth on in the 80s and 90s – from The Terminator For real lies – where the gunplay almost always involved practical weapons that fired blanks. In recent years, however, more and more productions are using rubber guns or Airsoft pellet guns with the express approval of directors like John WickIt is Chad Stahelski and stars like Dwayne Johnson.
According to Gabriel Luna – who plays Boro, the up-and-coming villain that both Luke and Emma must pursue – FUBAR also used rubber guns and Airsoft guns when production started. “But we quickly realized that it was giving the post-production team a hard time trying to keep up with the gunfights,” The last of us explains the star. “It has to be there for the reality of the scene. So we started with the most modern ways of doing things, but eventually came back to tried and true practices always using the highest levels of gun safety. “
And Luna says Schwarzenegger easily went back to his old-school ways once that change was made. “At the end of the shoot, he walks in with a shotgun after pulling it out of a bundle of roses and blowing it up. I watch him do that, and he doesn’t blink at all. I was just like, ‘This guy obviously done this before.'”
Barbaro also enjoyed the experience of fighting alongside his on-screen father, especially since it gave the escape Top Gun: Maverick star the chance to flex his action muscles outside of the cockpit. “We were in jets all along Superior gun, which wasn’t easy, but it came with the added challenge of learning something new every week,” the actress explains. “One week I was racing a car and the next I was crawling on it. a train! We also had an amazing stunt team and everyone was extremely safety conscious, which is part of the magic of actors doing their own stunts.”
Certainly, tragedies like the death of Brandon Lee while he was The crow and the death of Halyna Hutchins during the production of Rust have led to increased security measures on film sets, as well as new calls to stop using real firearms for feature films. For his part, Schwarzenegger bristles at some of today’s security precautions, insisting that security has always been an integral part of his vintage action films.
“It all makes no sense,” he says when asked about current safety regulations compared to how sets operated during the heyday of his action movie. “The thing is, there were always safety measures in place. But you can have all the laws and regulations in place, and if people don’t follow them, you have nothing. When you’re dealing at cars or with weapons, you can get killed if you make a mistake, if you do stunts, you have to be very careful and you have to repeat it and everyone has to follow the rules.
“That’s exactly what we did on real lies and we do the same on FUBAR“, continues Schwarzenegger. “Every day that we used weapons, they were shown to us. What is inside the barrel, what kind of ammunition was in it and what the magazine looked like. Again and again – it was absolutely like a school. And we didn’t come close to an accident or anything like that.”
FUBAR is currently streaming on Netflix.