News of the World
25 February, 2001
By Ivor Davis

These harrowing pictures may look like a newsflash from war-torn Chechnya... but it's a sneak preview from the set of Jude Law's latest movie.

In Enemy At The Gates, Jude plays Vasily Zaitsev, a young Russian sent to fight in the historic battle of Stalingrad.

In these amazing scenes he has survived the bloodshed, and crawls out from under a huge mound of bodies, grabs his gun and shoots six Nazi soldiers... His bravery is witnessed by Joseph Fiennes, who plays Danilov, a Russian propaganda officer. He spreads the word about Vasily's heroic efforts, and the young man becomes a Russian national hero.

"Those battle scenes were terrifying," admits Jude. "There were dynamite explosions going on all the time. In one scene a lump of shrapnel flew into my head. "There were stories saying I'd been seriously wounded, but it was just a scratch. A little blood is part and parcel of the experience. "But I'm not playing down how scary it was filming those scenes. My adrenalin was rushing with all the sounds of real explosions, people running around and bodies littered everywhere. The set was massive, and the city was ruined.

"Before the film I trained using a rifle, along with Rachel Weisz, pictured right with Jude. The weapons were real and very heavy. They weighed down on you. By the time we were ready to shoot, poor Rachel's shoulders ached. "I spent four weeks at an SAS training camp. I lost a ton of weight and I was quite a good shot! I shot 300 rounds and I hit 217 times. I'd never fired a gun before and what scared me most was how easy it was. You quickly realise guns have been designed to make using them easy - you pick them up, point them, pull the trigger and hopefully kill something. I mean, that’s how scary they are, really. "But the aspect I enjoyed most was camouflage. I worked with a guy who was an expert and talked to others who had been in combat, where they had to lay in waiting, sometimes just 2ft from the enemy, not being able to move."

Jude wasn't exactly wild about war before he started to make the film and the experience was an eye-opener. "I've certainly learnt more," Jude muses. "In a way I shied away from studying war because it was something that sort of scared me. "I'm not a great fan of warfare or fighting. I suppose, even though I can't presume to know what it must have been like to be in real conflict or to actually kill people, or to be surrounded by carnage or death, what I did experience really upset me. It reminded me that it's such a terrible waste of life, especially in this particular battle. "It was basically a huge game of chess played by two crazy dictators, who were using real men and women as their pawns. The carnage was awful."

Jude's son Rafferty came to see him on set and was fascinated by the action. "He knew his dad wasn't really a soldier," says Jude, "but he kept asking me if I killed people."

One of the most touching moments is Jude's scene with Rachel Weisz, who plays Russian sniper Tania Chernova. The two make love, even though there’s no privacy. He recalls: "The scene was almost desperate and driven by the reality that tomorrow may be your last day. "Rachel is a friend of mine and that makes it more comfortable because you can laugh at it which breaks the ice."

For Joseph Fiennes, the battle scenes were so harrowing, he threw up. "We got as close as possible without actually going to war or being killed," he says with a grimace. "Explosions were going off all over the place and the bodies around us had been rigged with squibs, so they'd suddenly quiver and jump. We were crawling around in thick mud and with the corpses it gave me such a horrible feeling I ended up throwing up. "The director, Jean Jacques Annaud, was so excited by my natural reaction that he filmed me vomiting and said 'we must keep that in the picture - it's so real'. "It gave me a glimpse of how abhorrent those conditions were. They covered us in mud every morning and it stayed all day until we took a shower at night."

Rachel Weisz was smeared with mud by the director. "For the battle scenes he'd pick up a dollop of mud and rub it into my face and arms," she laughs. "After a few weeks we got into being dirty. I'd have been offended if the director had asked me to put make-up on! I called the make-up trailer the make-down trailer because it rubbed dirt all over me, accentuated the bags under my eyes and my lines on my face." Ballsy Rachel refused offers of a double in some of the more harrowing war scenes. "I was not doubled for a single scene," she boasts. "That won't surprise anyone who knew me as a child - I was a real tomboy."