Page 23 - AVN July 2023

“It’s fun in all aspects of it...” - Ricky Greenwood
On the specific challenges of orchestrating all that gunplay, he reveals, “It’s not my first experience with guns, but it’s my first experience with that much guns. I used to do some short film action movies when I was living in Montreal, so I had some—like, one gun firing or a shotgun or something like that—but I never had like ... at some point during one of the scenes, we have like six guns firing at the same time. So it’s a lot of firepower, it’s a lot of noise, it’s impressive.”
He’s sure to note, though, that “we have someone who professionally does all the staging and explains to us what to do and makes sure that everybody is safe and is doing it safely, but it’s still impressive. And I never fired a gun in my life. So I didn’t even know it was that noisy.”
For all of its pyrotechnics and elaborate set accoutrements—including big army rovers trundling about—Machine Gunner is not meant to be anything more than a giant popcorn ball of over-the-top fun, Greenwood contends. With a script by the razor-witted Shawn Alff, it aims to capture the campy spirit of absurdly gratuitous action classics like Commando and the Rambo films.
“I’m a huge fan of action ’80s movies,” Greenwood says. “I would say Code of Honor was like very ’90s action, and this one is really ’80s action—all the kills are super brutal, everybody looks like they get shot with a huge machine gun and stuff, and the girls are shooting with two guns and stuff like that.”
He goes on to expound, “’80s movies have one-liners, the characters are funny, they’re not really taking themselves seriously. So it has that. We have a lot of serious parts at night, and stunts and action sequence[s], but we don’t take the movie seriously. It’s not a really military, like, we didn’t have them do an intense training of how they hold the gun and they walk in the woods and, like, clearing a room and stuff like that, we just have them shooting guns and that’s it. It’s fun. It’s fun in all the aspects of it.
“We just want to give the viewers something that, you know like when you watch a movie and you say, ‘Oh, I wish she would shoot with two guns’—well now you don’t have to wish, we have her shooting with two guns.”
Episode 1 of Machine Gunner debuted June 12 on DigitalPlayground.com, and there are three more episodes slated to roll out at two-week intervals through July 24.
ON THE SET | 07.23 | AVN.COM 23