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THE MAKING OF JUDGE DREDD
“Lawgiver! Awesome" gasps Twist the Rezzie as Dredd pulls his gun on him.
The Lawgiver in Judge Dredd is the ultimate hero prop. So much about Dredd’s world is symbolized in this object. It is the gun that allows a Judge to act as police, jury and executioner in the name of the Law. Its importance in the plot also means it is one of the highest-profile objects in the film.
The concept has changed very little from its comic origins. The Lawgiver was always able to fire different sort of bullets and operate through voice control.
The one big addition was the DMA coding which allows only Judges to use the weapons and registers which Judge has fired it. Director Danny Cannon had seen a drawing done in Los Angeles during preproduction and was keen for this to form the basis of the design. It was then passed to Julian Caldow in Britain who had been chosen for the job because of his extensive work with guns on other films. It was decided early on that weapons that fired beams of laser light in the tradition of Star Wars didn’t fit in this hard future.
“This was one aspect of the film for which it was decided we should go for a real feel,” says Julian. “The one in the comic is far more like a ray-gun, a fìfties ray-gun. Apparently Stallone really liked that one, but they wanted a hard Robocop-type thing. And when you see this thing, it’s huge in the hand and with the flames coming out of the front it really looks evil.”
There are two main ways to get the impression of firing real bullets. The first is to use a gas-powered gun. Gas has the advantage that it’s safer, but it was ultimately rejected because gas lines coming out of the back of the weapon makes it less versatile. The other option is to use a commercially available gun and put a futuristic casing over the top, which is what was used in Judge Dredd. In the case of the Lawgiver, the weapon chosen was a Beretta.
“We had in mind a Beretta pistol that fires like a machine gun,” explains Julian. “But they no longer make those. So we had to alter the guns to try and make them fire like a machine gun. And when the gun fires the whole clip is completely emptied in about three seconds - less. But you get a huge great flash coming out of the front which is about a foot long. It looks great!”
The casing, made of metal and fiberglass, was screwed to the actual gun. This made the Lawgiver larger than the contemporary weapon, which was fine in terms of making it chunky and impressive, but no so brilliant when it comes down to the practicalities.
“That was the difficult thing on the Lawgiver, particularly, making the thing not too big,” says Julian, ‘You can’t cut into the real gun, all you’re doing is adding. So that was a difficult juggling act to make it small enough to be believable.
“They were very thin around the handle. The designs of a handle of any pistol, or of any automatic - because the bullets are going up through it - the size of that is determined very much by the size of the bullet inside. So they have precision engineering just to get them comfortable in the hand so you can hold it and get as many bullets as possible in the magazine. Because you’ve got those two different equations fighting each other all the time, when you’re adding even more dressing onto a real gun, it’s got to be e tiny amount. In fact when you’re holding the Lawgiver your fingers don’t meet around the other side.”
All the weapons were built by the Special Effects Department under the supervision of Joss Williams.
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He put his hand up during early production meetings on the Lawgiver and said, “Oh, I can make some of those for you” and then suddenly found he had landed himself with a lot of work that doesn’t traditionally belong to his department! He had volunteered to be in charge not only of the Lawgiver, but of the whole armory of guns as well. “The guns were a real pain in the backside for me to begin with,” he admits.
The Lawgiver proved to be the biggest headache. As was the case with the motorbikes, the production team had already fallen in love with the design. Joss was the therefore with the task al turning a piece of artwork into a functional prop. “It’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing,” he says. “The Lawgiver itself had been designed before the gun that was going to go inside it had been decided upon. It was the wrong way round and we had a major problem trying to fit the electronics in the firing guns as well as the practical gun. It was a bit of a squeeze to say the least!
The delicate electronics that light up when a Judge uses the weapon caused the biggest problem for the Special Effects Department. “I was worried that the electronics we had to put in the firing guns would be affected by the mechanism of the actual gun firing,” says Joss. “As the Beretta fires, the top part of the Beretta slides back and allows a new shell to come in. When you’re firing that quickly that’s a hell of a shock going on inside this poor little fiberglass case with these electronics that we put in there to work the lights. So I was stuck in a way. I had to go all the way down the line until I could find out the problems. Luckily - touch wood - it worked out okay.”
Although it’s possible to see lots of Lawgivers on the screen, few of them were working props. Another set al dummy guns, almost indistinguishable from the real thing, were produced without the Berettas and electronic flashing lights inside. These were used by extras and the main cast when they weren’t being fired. And then a third set was made entirely out of molded rubber. These were worn by the stunt artists, who could then safely leap into the air without worrying about landing on the hard, unwieldy piece of equipment on their thigh; and for fight sequences, when it’s far safer to hit someone over the head with a rubber gun than one made of heavy fiberglass and metal.
Joss Williams declares that the Lawgivers turned out lo be one of the biggest successes on the film for him. “The guys that worked on them did a terrific job,” he says. “I was very proud of them because they came out al my department and everybody that saw them thought they were terrifìc at the end of the day. But before we got there it was a pain in the ass.”
We turn now from the concerns of the Judges and Mega-City to the man who poses a real threat - Rico.
In the original 2000 AD Rico story, he was locked up in a facility built on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It became Aspen Prison in the William Wisher screenplay because having people flying into outer space did nothing for the plot. Plus, keeping it on Earth helps develop the believability the film was striving for.
William Wisher put Aspen Prison on the Cursed Earth in the devastated wasteland of North America. There were many discussions about what type of a prison it would be. The original version on Titan required people to have their bodies adapted to survive the heavy doses of radiation that bombard the globe. Again, this just got in the way of the story. There was talk of it being a mining colony for carbon 4, a substance so dangerous that only convicted. |
