DIARY OF A CITY GUARD – PART 13
A series of irreverent tales from my experience as a Tolkien-nerd working as an extra on the first series of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television show.
I said last time that weapons training deserved its own entry. I fear I have set some unrealistic expectations here. We went through no weapons training whatsoever. We queued up at the armoury tent prior to going on set, where someone would say “hear you go bro” and pass you a spear, and then you were ready. Fully qualified. Sweet as bro.
Of course there was a reason we were given no training, and that is that nobody in their right mind is going to let a bunch of extras anywhere near a scene involving the actual using of weapons, thus there is no need to train them, anyway have you seen those City Guards, half of them find it a struggle to stand up again after sitting down. Get the stunties mate.
The stunties are – you won’t believe this – the stuntmen & stuntwomen. I suppose you could have thought I meant really short people, but that seems unlikely. The stunties have usually had lots of training, and thus can be trusted in situations involving the use of weapons – unlike people like me. I’ve chatted to a few over the years, and they’ve all been capable of using guns, swords, bows, axes, martial arts and more. I absolutely can’t be bothered to do the work necessary to achieve such proficiency – you’ve got to love your work if you’re going to be a stuntie. I’m just here for dressing up and trying to get my face on camera in a Tolkien adaptation.
Having said that, it did occur to me that if I was trained in some manner, I may well get many more opportunities to dress up and get my face on camera in a Tolkien adaptation. In pursuit of which I signed up for a sword fighting class – or rather a sword fighting for stage & screen class. Rather an important distinction now that I think about it. This class ran at a stunt school in Auckland each week, so for a couple of months I drove up to the big city every Thursday and spent the evening wielding a wooden katana against an unlikely array of miscellaneous wannabe actors and stunties.
It was good fun for the most part. We were shown how fights were choreographed with different moves being given a number and then your move depending on whether you were the attacker or the defender. Thus a stunt director could say to a pair of stunties that the fight is 6-2-3-3-6 and both of them would immediately know how the fight would go. Sadly a Covid lockdown of the Auckland area ended the course prematurely, and I never got to finish it. I could have done it at a later date, but <spoiler> Amazon’s decision to leave New Zealand after series one instead of filming the whole five series here as promised rather took the motivation away.
It takes a while to build up speed and the practice to turn the moves into instinct, rather than something you have to think about. It was always a bit too comfortable when you paired up with someone of similar ability, but more often than not I was paired with one of several experienced young women, half my age and weight, who would absolutely school me every time – but this was definitely the best way to learn. On one occasion I was paired with a young guy who had serious difficulties with left and right. He was absolutely untrainable, incapable of grasping a sequence of moves so he’d just make it up. This was the only time I feared I might actually get seriously hurt, and well illustrates the fact that film sword fights and real sword fights are only very distantly related!
Not trained up like stuntie, but still on a better pay rate than your humble extra is the Action Extra. Basically this is an extra who doesn’t mind being thrown around a bit, although quite often it might be a stuntie doing it who is happy to do a bit of easier work from time to time. You might for example see them fighting in the background of the main fight action.
But back to the main action, the City Guards. We’ve been given our spears and shields, but these are very much for ceremonial purposes only. Damn, I used that reference as a title already. Once we were actually on set for the first time, they realised that if the City Guard were the Queen Regent’s official guard then it might be wise to make us look halfway competent. After all, we might not be front line soldiers anymore, but we are the Royal guard of Númenor, the most powerful Men of all Arda. We are elite fighting men!
Someone was assigned to straighten us all out and lay down some guidelines. Guardelines. Spears straight up in the right hand. Hold in your fist with your elbow at ninety degrees. Base of the spear just to the side of your right boot. Shield in the left hand, held across the chest. Easy right? Then some wag decided that it would look better if instead of straight up, we hold them at an angle of about ten degrees, facing out. This was abandoned after a while when it was reluctantly accepted that this guard regiment contained many versions of just what “about ten degrees” actually constituted, ranging from one degree to forty-five degrees – leaving us looking more hedgehog than elite soldier. The idea didn’t die completely though, and every now and then one of the crew would start telling us to hold the spears out at a bit of an angle. We – the guard community as a whole – took the decision to just ignore them and they’ll forget us, a tactic that worked every single time. And having now watched the show, we definitely looked halfway competent. Even if we were functionally incompetent.
Much like Galadriel, that was much shorter than I was expecting, but I guess that’s always a danger when you are trying to write about something that didn’t happen. Join me for the next installment when I try my best to clumsily insert a Tolkien reference before I get to the end. Although, of course, the great tales never end.
Sorry.