John Baker

A&E: It's your job to supervise the weaponry on this film. Tell us how you go about doing that.
John Baker: The producer or director gives me a script. And he says, "There's a script, break it down and tell me what weapons you want." The script is pretty detailed to start with, anyway. What we have in there is things like hotshots and all the kind of daring-do kind of weaponry that they want. And my job is to find the weaponry and try to get it all here for a budget.

A&E: Where do you get the weaponry and how historically correct it is?
JB: Well, the cannons are historically accurate. We have 32 pounder naval cannons, and they belong to a chap named Martin Gibbons who runs Trafalgar Cannon Company. They are historically accurate in that they would have been used in this particular period. But these ones are made of glass fiber, and they've got special effects inside them to make them recoil. They're swivel cannons. That means they actually swivel around for reloading.

A&E: How do you make the cannonballs explode?
JB: Well, in this period, the cannonballs didn't explode. They were very large mass of cast iron. The actually exploding, the high explosive shells, really didn't come in until the very early sort of mid-18th century onwards.

A&E: What was it like to work with the actors? How have they reacted to you issuing them guns, and do they know how to shoot, or have you had to train them as well?
JB: All the main actors, I've worked with before, so they're all very good. They just needed a bit of refresher training. Some of the new ones, very good, no problem. They've all worked with guns before in various other pictures.

A&E: Can you tell us about the muskets?
JB: They're sort of period French types, around the 1790s. There's a bit of give and take within the budget, shall we say. We're using these both for the slave army, who were French trained, and also for the Spanish army. They will fire quite a heavy lead ball, and they will kill. So, these are real firearms we're dealing with here. However, because we're making a movie, we don't use lead balls.

A&E: How safe are they?
JB: Well, depending on where we're doing it and where the cameras are and where the actors and extras are, it can be quite dangerous. It can actually be lethal. So what we do is we actually download them—put a very small amount of powder in the end.

A&E: How long would it have taken a soldier to reload, in the heat of battle?
JB: In battle, I would guess between ten and fifteen seconds. I would say that a good musketeer or a good man with a musket could probably do four in a minute, between three or four in a minute, if he was really quick. They had set drills and set routines to do, so it depended on whether they were lined up as a line of marines or whatever they were doing. Sometimes it could be only two in a minute. But a good man could do it in four. A lot of this is an armorer's nightmare because it all gets edited out by the edit suite. Although we teach them to reload, it just gets edited out because they need to save time.

A&E: Have you had any accidents?
JB: No. An armorist's job is to make sure that doesn't happen. It can happen, and it has happened a lot of in the States, but in the U.K. it is very unusual because you have an armor with the guns, he's a licensed armor, he's an experienced chap. He or she goes out with the weapons and they choreograph all of the fight sequences. My job is to secure all the weapons, make sure they don't get lost or stolen, choreograph all of the fight sequences to make sure none of the actors or extras get hurt. And also to clean and maintain the weapons. Black powder is inherently dirty.

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