Page 19 - AVN July 2023

“This one is a totally different scale’” - Ricky Greenwood
Let nobody say that the porn megaproduction is dead.
Arriving on location for Machine Gunner, the new blow-’em-up military extravaganza from Digital Playground, it’s abundantly clear that this is no typical micro-scale adult shoot—quite to the contrary, it is literally a sprawling operation, with scads of cast and crew members getting shuttled up and down a steep hillside atop which sits a lavish Spanish-style estate where the movie’s climactic firefight is set.
And when we say “firefight,” we are not talking any feigned playacting with toy guns that’ll have their bursts of ammo added in post—no, these bad boys are the real deal, loaded with live rounds (of blanks, natch), and they are not quiet.
When we’re about to witness our first actual take of machine guns blasting (“Stand by everyone, guns are hot!” director Ricky Greenwood bellows into a megaphone), we’re handed a pair of noise-cancelling headphones to don. We wonder bemusedly how necessary they really are, but then Greenwood calls action ... and full-on cacophony erupts.
The explosion of gunfire is so earth shattering, it feels as though a barrage of, well, military-grade fireworks are going off right in front of us.
For Greenwood—who has grown into a powerhouse director like few others over the past several years, taking home the now-retired AVN Award for Director of the Year in 2022 and following that up this year with the preeminent Grand Reel trophy—Machine Gunner is a high-stakes project for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s his first for DP, and a gauntlet-drop for the brand, in a sense, signaling the dawn of a newly revitalized effort to resurrect the kind of lavish blockbuster-tier pictures for which it was known in years past.
On a much more personal level, meanwhile, the movie also represents a posthumous tribute for Greenwood to his close friend and mentor Robby D., who passed away in the fall of 2021 due to what a number of those close to him reported was a severe bout with COVID-19.
“Every time I was having dinner with Robby or talking with Robby, he was always telling me his favorite Digital Playground movie that he made was Code of Honor,” Greenwood tells us after all the day’s booms and bangs have subsided, referring to the AVN Hall of Famer’s 2013 action epic that racked up nine AVN Award nominations including Best Drama and Best Director – Feature.
ON THE SET | 07.23 | AVN.COM 19