BEARDSTOWN — When the shooting starts or the rough-and-tumble fight scenes fill the scene of the modern-day reboot of the classic film “The Magnificent Seven,” thank Cass County native Jonn Herzberger for some of the heart-pounded theatrical magic.
Herzberger is a special effects mechanical engineer who has worked on well-known films such as “Dragonheart,” “Gladiator,” “The Patriot” and others.
His start came as a general laborer on the film “Stargate” while working in Arizona.
“They decided I had a little skill and could do a few things,” Herzberger said. “[In the film industry], it’s kinda who you know, so I’ve worked for maybe five different special effects coordinators. I’ve worked in 14 countries and work from one to 10 months at a time.”
Herzberger grew up in Cass County around Bluff Springs and is a 1973 graduate of Beardstown High School. He attended college at Western Illinois University and Arizona State University before getting into the film industry in 1993.
Work as a special effects person isn’t something that can be easily described. Herzberger said that generally he and the crew go through the script and discuss ways to make certain scenes come to life.
Sometimes solutions are as simple. He describes on scene from “The Magnificent Seven” in which a woman is seen hanging clothes through the reflection in a washtub as horses approach off-camera. As the horses get closer, a ripple effect was needed to illustrate how close they were getting without actually showing the horses on camera.
“We don’t see them in the shot, so I’m down there off-camera with a rock, whacking on the side of this thing to make ripples,” he said. “They’re yelling ‘OK, more! More! All right, less now!”
He had yet to see the completed film last week, so he didn’t even know if it was in the final version.
Some scenes are more involved. In one, a horse needed to crash through a wall and the front door of a building. The horse was trained to crash through Styrofoam for several days. On the day of the shoot, Herzberger’s team created a wall from breakaway glass and balsa wood for the shot, which had to be done in one take because the horse wasn’t keen on crashing through a fake wall multiple times.
Another chaotic scene from the movie involves Herzberger spraying dust as other special effects artists spray smoke and handle explosions while one of the actors makes his way through the scene, horses dashing all the while.
“I’ve got a dust machine in my hand, it looks like a paint sprayer, and there’s horse guys all around me,” he said. “We had horses going everywhere and they couldn’t see and it was just a chaotic thing. I’ve got a safety guy behind me just in case a horse came by and he had to push me out of the way. It was kind of exciting.”
The team Herzberger was with designed plenty of pieces for the set, some of which were used and others that weren’t. To capture dialogue, for example, mechanical horses were engineered so riding scenes could be captured without horse sounds. For fire purposes, the entire set consisting of 35 separate buildings had to have a water supply set up.
A church had to be built with fire-retardant materials so it could be burned in a way necessary for certain scenes.
Herzberger often doesn’t know what the end product is going to look like. One movie on which he worked, “Jumper,” was a big budget film with a cast of A-list actors and he was sure it was going to be a hit. Then he watched it and overall was disappointed.
He was planning to see “The Magnificent Seven” this past weekend just like others — at the theater.
Having intimate knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes doesn’t ruin the movie magic for Herzberger, although he said he is more critical of the films on which he has worked.
“I think I can still enjoy the films the same,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t even think about it. … In a way, it kind of makes it better, because I understand how they do it. It intrigues me on how we do all these things.”
For those considering the special effects field, first it takes some mechanical knowledge and then traveling to where the films are being made. On top of working crazy hours — sometimes 15 to 16 hours a day every day of the week — it also takes a willingness to work up from the bottom.
“Be at a movie and get in the door,” he said. “And, boy, you have to be able to work hard and work long hours.”
The time commitment can wear someone down quickly, and Herzberger said at some point it will be time to move on.
“So I can have like a real life,” he said. “It’s given me some pretty cool opportunities, though.”
