Questions relating to Zulu Dawn-my part in the making a great movie

The opportunity to "nick" stuff was wide open to anyone on the set - and many "extras" absconded with large amounts of kit. We were frequently reminded by the production crews that if we were caught leaving the precinct (to go home, basically) with any property, they would unhesitatingly have us arrested for theft and be prosecuted.

But a lot of stuff got pinched, and we were very tempted to take home some mementos ourselves. When we did finally depart, we asked the production director if we could keep the little "Egypt" collar badges and a few shells of spent cartridges and the white shoulder bags. We were given a note permitting us to do so.

Spot searches became quite frequent, and departing buses were searched quite thoroughly. Some guys took to burying stuff in the ground, intending to return at some later date to retrieve it. We didn't care to take chances here, so other than the few trinkets we were told we could have, everything else was returned.

The "guns" were made of a cheap rigid foam plastic and hastilly "painted". If you scratched their surface, the foam would come away as a gritty sort of dust. Real guns were very carefully issued and controlled, with production assistants keeping a very close eye on what was happening with them during any given shoot.

On the days when the main battle scenes were being filmed, large numbers of us were issued with genuine Martini Henrys many of which could actually have been used in the Anglo-Zulu campaign a century earlier. I believe these guns were flown in from a wealthy collector from California, who accompanied his precious cargo for the duration of their use in the movie.

For 99% of the time, the guns we held were the rubbishy foam replicas, and as the bayonnette was part of the plastic casting, and the guns were so flimsy, a simple knock would break them. The first casualty was usually the bayonnette - hence many guns being seen without them. During the course of many weeks' filming, the condition of these flimsy foam guns deteriorated rapidly - some were not even recognisable as guns in the latter stages of production.

Because genuine Martini Henry's were not easily available, and neither were suitable real bayonnettes, some of us used 303 guns (can't remember the make or model). These were normally kept for distance shots, where stuff like cartridge smoke needed to be seen coming out of a barrel, but the distance was such that identifying the weapon was not possible.

A lot of the "extras" were very dumb and stupid people, and on many occasions would have forgotten to attach bayonettes before a scene was being shot. With such large numbers of stupid extras needing to be controlled and directed in some very complex scenes, I imagine the production crews just gave up trying to ensure they were properly kitted up, because having to re-shoot some of these scenes would have taken far too long and cost far too much.

The scenes showing the climax of the battle, took about a month to plan and film. Some takes - lasting 20 to 30 seconds - took an entire day to configure, with literally thousands of people being involved. This was long before the age of "CGI" and Chroma-Screen, so what you see is exactly what the cameras captured.

Setting up some scenes was massively complicated - with up to ten Panaflex cameras being run at the same time, across an area of several thousand square metres, or more. For one scene, one of the cameras was positioned about 2 miles from the set!

Given the relatively few number of production "bloops" in the final movie, I think the crews did a pretty good job of trying to ensure accuracy - but as I say - 9 out of 10 of the extras was a buffoon...

Of course, for purists and enthusiasts like us, absolute historical accuracy is an important feature. Because we know the finer details, when we see a production that ignores or omits these details, we tend to condemn the film. But the general public doesn't have the slightest concern if the soldier is using a gun issued 20 years after the battle he's representing, or if the badge on his beret is the wrong colour.

Most of the buffoons that were acting as extras did not even know what branch of army they were supposed to be in, or even what war they were fighting, or even when it happened. They were given a redcoat uniform and just told to wear it all day long. Their biggest concern was getting paid a few bucks on Friday afternoons, giving them the means to indulge in plenty of cheap alcohol. A lot of these guys turned up on set pissed out of their minds almost every day, but no matter... all they had to do was represent a red coat, sitting on a rock, somewhere in the background. If they twitched a bit, then the audience would see that they were a live person, wearing a soldier's uniform. No more was expected of them.

This film employed nearly 30 thousand people on some days - when the battle scenes were being shot, particularly, so whether any given "soldier" had his bayonette fixed in any given panoramic scene, where several thousand others were involved, was so trivial to the film's producers. As long as the general action was realistic, and as long as the overall historical context was maintained. Such attention to these very fine details - while being something the film makers were keen to achieve - did not matter much in the great scheme of things.