SURFING STUNTS
Icelandic Surf Adventure on Eastwood Movie Set

The stunt/surfing crew in iceland on location for the Clint Eastwood film Flags of Our Fathers

Much to the surprise of Ampah, and to the relief of Spielberg and Eastwood, Iceland fit the bill perfectly. Within an hour of Reykjavik they found a black, volcanic mountain that was almost a perfect double for Iwo Jima and at Sandvik they found a long beach fronted by cliffs that was a Doppelganger to the invasion beach at Iwo Jima.

The production headed there in August of 2005, with hundreds of containers loaded with enough guns, uniforms, equipment and material to care for a cast of over a thousand. Zuma Jay was one of the thousand: “I got the call because I was the only one licensed to transport the artillery who also had an A.T.F ‘3’ Gun Card and a 'One Card' which is an effects card that allows me to arm and operate the big artillery,” Jay said. “On this shoot they brought 15 full-sized guns - 75s, Paks, 105s and 155s. The lightest one weighed about a ton and could be disassembled and moved around on a Jeep. The biggest was an authentic Japanese 8-inch cannon they found in Brazil or Argentina. They shipped the whole thing over in a 40-foot container and had to move it around with a tank or a half track. Clint and Steven both wanted absolute realism in this movie, and they got it.”

Jay was responsible for that realism, for making sure the artillery pieces were assembled correctly and operated safely. Jay was one of a few people who had access to a giant store of black powder - tens of thousands of pounds of the explosive stuff shipped over in containers and stored in a vault in a pit with 24-hour security. The potential for an accident is always there, but Jay said the shoot was almost injury free, a miracle when you think of a thousand extras getting off boats in sometimes heavy surf, and novices firing giant guns that usually require months of training: "We had one accident that could have been a disaster," Jay said. "We used the Icelandic locals to fire some of these pieces and we trained them to fire once every 30 seconds or once a minute. But when the cameras rolled they wanted more intensity, so these beer-drinking, Icelandic good old boys got into it and fired this one gun every 12 seconds. The only projectile coming out of these guns was supposed to be water bottles, but that gun overheated and fired out a metal sleeve about four feet long, weighing about 150 pounds that was supposed to stay in the gun. It went 800 meters over the heads of the camera crew and landed near a transportation captain who was on a brief relief moment. The sleeve didn't hit anything, but it could have been bad."

Jay did not bring a surfboard with him but he did bring a full wetsuit, booties, gloves and a hood, and as it turned out, the beach where they shot the invasion scenes was also the main surfing beach in Iceland: "Sandvik was set up exactly like the invasion beach at Iwo Jima. The cliffs were in the right place at the right angle. It was perfect. At one end of the beach there was a right point and at another a left point and in the middle there were beachbreaks and there was a lot of swell."

Enough swell for Jay and some of the other surfers on the set, but almost too much for the production: "The swell came up during one of the invasion scenes until it was like double overhead," Jay said. "But they had a thousand extras suited up and ready and they had rented Navy ships from the Swedish or the Norwegians for $250,000 a day, so they were rolling. They had several authentic Higgins Boats imported for the show and those things handle medium surf pretty well, but they managed to wreck one of them when it collided with a transport. Those Higgins boats were made of wood and fiberglass, so when it was left overnight it was demolished by wave action."